From HBR.org......

Companies and government agencies often make the mistake of viewing innovation as a set of unconstrained activities with no discipline. In reality, for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed as a process from start to deployment.

When organizations lack a formal innovation pipeline process, project approvals tend to be based on who has the best demo or slides, or who lobbies the hardest. There is no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment. And they count on well-intentioned, smart people sitting in a committee to decide which ideas are worth pursuing.

Instead, what organizations need is a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they need a process that operates with speed and urgency, and that helps innovators and other stakeholders to curate and prioritize problems, ideas, and technologies.

This prioritization process has to start before any new idea reaches engineering. This way, the innovations that do reach engineering will already have substantial evidence — about validated customer needs, processes, legal security, and integration issues. Most importantly, minimal viable products and working prototypes will have been tested.

A canonical Lean Innovation process inside a company or government agency would look something like this:

Innovation sourcing: Over a period of days, a group generates a list of problems, ideas, and technologies that might be worth investing in.

Curation: For a few days or even a week, innovators get out of their own offices and talk to colleagues and customers. As the head of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, one of us built a curation process to help technology solutions to be deployed rapidly. It included both an internal and an external survey, the goal of which was to find other places in the business where a given problem might exist in a slightly different form, to identify related internal projects already in existence, and to find commercially available solutions to problems. It also sought to identify legal issues, security issues, and support issues.

See the full article at HBR https://hbr.org/2017/09/what-your-innovation-process-should-look-like