TL; DR

Innovation governance, especially for transformational work, must always happen with a system-level mindset.

But doing so is frustratingly tricky because innovation governance comes with unique demands. It does not follow the best methods with which executives may be familiar from leading work in other functions.

Here, Nesta's history of the energy in Britain offers five lessons in system-level governance for innovation leaders:

  1. Innovation takes momentum, not just resources
  2. Innovation takes system-level thinking, not a straight, "simple, inevitable path"
  3. Innovation jumps use cases
  4. Innovation systems shift the geography of power
  5. Available resources must be used. But having too many available resources is bad too