If a technological advance is to play a significant role in an innovation, there is a tendency to create a project to develop the technological component and then to fit people in around it. This can lead to loss of focus on the stakeholder’s objectives and inappropriate use of people and technology.
Where local innovative improvement is concerned, the team may find it best to get the new process working first with only the absolutely essential technology support and then gradually add in further bits of automation where technology can be seen to provide a significant benefit. Some new processes may need to be developed with embedded technology to be able to work at all. Even if this is the case, the human / technological process needs to be designed, by the team that will use it, or their representatives, before the automated process components are designed and integrated. This ensures that the best use is made of both the technology and the people.
Where innovation has a much wider scope than a specific organization’s process, the innovation context may be, for example a complex real world system, involving many different organisations and many connections to the world-wide environmental context. The first question is then, how will the changed system need to operate to deliver to the needs of its stakeholders. Answering this question can help identify fractal process components for projects to develop. The second question is what types of organization will be required when the innovation is in place and how will the system be managed to ensure its longer term viability. This second question will help identify the sorts of market, governmental and public initiatives required for the innovation to be delivered. Only when this thinking is in place, is it appropriate to think about how the innovation can be initiated and start to emerge, through a number of projects which deliver both changed processes and technological components.
Though technological prototyping projects are very useful, they need to be seen as support for innovation, not its main driver.