The Continuous Innovation Board (CIB) is responsible for the prioritization of the backlog of innovations based on the corporate best interest. The CIB sets priorities by weighing the potential business value and cost of delay against the projected costs of development and business risk. The CIB guides priorities by acknowledging the strategic themes of the organization, driven by corporate strategic goals, technology drivers and/or business model disruptions.
Details
The CIB consists of 5-7 members of senior management within the organization. The members of the CIB together represent the best interest of the organization, without specific bias towards individual departments or responsibilities. Through its members, the CIB has the mandate to assign budget from a dedicated innovation fund and to assign resources from the line organization to the development of innovations in the portfolio.
Responsibilities
Budget
The CIB manages a dedicated innovation budget that can be spent on the validation of ideas and development of innovations. There is no annual budgeting process, the CIB provides budget to ideas through a Lean-Agile ‘rolling budget’ mechanism.
Resource allocation
When, at any stage of the innovation funnel, resources are required to further develop an innovation, CIB is responsible to find and allocate these. These resources may come from external providers, in which case budget from the innovation fund will be automatically provided, or from corporate teams. In this last case, the CIB has the mandate to assign priority to the innovation in the existing line organization backlogs, respecting their current iteration planning and safeguarding the corporate best interest.
It is pivotal that the CIB consists of management senior enough in rank to perform this prioritization.
Prioritization
The CIB convenes every six weeks. During this meeting the CIB reviews all innovations that are in the Experimentation Phase and plans the following:
- Start of new experiments
- Continuation of running experiments
- Prolongation to Scaling Up Phase
- Stopping of innovations
- Allocation of budget and resources