Managing Innovation Projects; A Different Breed?

I've been reading an excellent book by Tom Kelley, of IDEO (the award-winning industrial design firm). It's called The Ten Faces of Innovation, and from reading it, I'd say there's more than meets the eye that's applicable to project management in general. I'll be posting on that shortly.

Meanwhile, from Innovation Tools comes a good article that talks about the nuances of managing projects that are specifically for the purposes of innovation (i.e. research and experimental projects, etc.).

For example, according to the article:

• Innovation projects tend to start with loosely defined, sometimes even ambiguous objectives that become clearer as the project proceeds. The processes used are more experimental and exploratory and seldom follow strict linear guidelines.
• Teams need to be more diverse and have a higher level of trust as they explore new territory where failure is a possibility.
• With failure as a built-in possibility, innovation teams are more actively involved with risk management and need to learn to fail fast and fail smart in order to move on to more attractive options.
• Also, innovation projects generally need to be sold to project sponsors and funding committees, a responsibility usually not required from normal project teams.

Although I think many of these apply to a good portion of IT projects in general to a certain degree, they are good points nonetheless. For the full article, read on...

Innovation Weblog - Project management vs. managing innovation projects