Innovation Incubators - from Egyptian Egg Ovens to Artificial Intelligence

Humans have been incubating chickens’ eggs for over 2,400 years, which I was - quite honestly - astounded to learn. Egypt constructed incubating ovens capable of hatching over 80,000 eggs at a time based on their observations of hens’ technique. The technology would go on to preserve the lives of newborns in hospitals and the biological samples needed to develop countless medicines. Like many truly foundational innovations: the incubator serves as an ideal abstract model. In this case, for protecting an entity in its vulnerable developmental state, allowing it to grow into self-sustainability safely. Incubators receive nascent ideas from a selection process, solidify them into actionable concepts, and develop a plan for transforming that concept into a usable tool. 

Our last blog on modular innovation described a suite of interchangeable structural elements for customizing an idea-to-operations pipeline that supports each project’s particular needs. When the project in question arrives as a basic idea, the Incubator is the best place to start. It’s an environment to perform quick ideation iterations that produce use cases, tooling ideas, and business plans. It can also support teams as they translate these planning elements into a proof of concept - the most basic form of the proposed tool that allows others to see its potential.

These outcomes are achieved by a project team that drives their idea forward, and a suite of innovation professionals who support their work.

• Project Team (supported by the incubator)

  • The most fundamental element of innovation incubators is also where they stray from my beloved metaphors: no one invites the hen to the egg oven, but the original innovators are critical to incubating technologies. Beyond resources, expertise, and top-cover, innovation thrives on creativity and willpower. Those ingredients are added by the project team and their Big Idea. Across agencies, we frequently hear the refrain, "innovation comes from the field.” This isn’t a cliche, in countless contexts in and out of government the best solutions spark in the minds of people who face the problem every day, who know it intimately as part of their lives. However, the hierarchical, distributed structures of many organizations (especially federal environmental agencies) make it difficult for field-based innovators to access the resources they need to advance their work. To break down those hurdles, the best incubators:

    • Make entry simple. Submission portals and processes should be obvious, accessible, and minimally burdensome. Weeding out teams with unnecessarily demanding applications creates a false efficiency, trust your colleagues and your selection process.

    • Put your project team at the center. Build operational structures that give teams decision-making power and flexibility.

    • Supplement skillsets, don’t crowd them out. For example, if a project team already has a data scientist, let that person decide what they need from your internal experts. This maxim empowers innovators, and allows incubators to take on more projects by intelligently allocating their own workforce.

• Innovation Team (supporting the project team)

• Brokers - Communications experts and relationship maestros who can advocate for the ideas the incubator develops and the strategic criticality of the incubator itself. These teammates should:

• Collaborate with the incubator’s leadership to advocate for continued development and adoption of successful projects with stakeholder agencies and organizations. 

• Connect with field offices and agents to collaborate on concept development, scout future project teams, learn about problems, and encourage feedback.

• Engage with the other teams to understand what’s being built, what’s needed, and what’s next.

• Shepherds - Innovation and technology experts whose sole mission is to transform ideas into proofs of concept for game-changing tools in collaboration with the project teams. They should:

• Participate in the selection process.

• Manage the daily operations of the incubator’s innovation process.

• Supplement project teams’ skills.

• Advise project teams on the process, possibilities, and pitfalls inherent to innovative development.

• Leaders - Dedicated experts with significant experience delivering on their mission. They are known and trusted members of the organization with first-hand experience (ideally) in both the field and the board room. They should:

• Insulate and protect the innovations being developed where possible, and advocate with executive leadership where necessary.

• Participate in the selection process.

• Oversee the evaluation of project progress and lead continuing funding determinations.

• Ensure the sustainability of the incubator’s operations.

Fuel to Stimulate Growth

Incubators help fuel innovation and stimulate the growth of an idea into a product by providing:

• Cover

  • We’ll discuss the Shepherds in detail shortly, but to maximize the impact of their work requires the Brokers and Leaders to provide critical top-cover that protects fledgling processes. Input, oversight, and pressure testing are all important for the development of a new idea into an impactful tool. Too much of these ingredients too soon can stunt, warp, or stop the idea’s opportunistic growth. Mindfully metering the amount of external influence during incubation is critical. Leaders who leverage their reputations and organizational expertise to create sufficient space for the idea to grow into its best form. Brokers who filter and manage the flow of information across the incubator’s membrane spur new growth internally and build trust externally. Together, these elements of top-cover help the idea breathe, finding the rhythm it will need to thrive over the course of its growth.

• Funding

  • Improperly funded incubators endanger innovation across the organization. Think of funding like heat in the Egyptians’ original egg ovens. Whether it’s too high or too low: it kills what it’s meant to help. Overfunding makes the incubator inefficient, too little benefit is returned from too much investment. Underfunding leaves ideas to wither inside the incubator. Either outcome can easily lead to blame placed on the idea, the people, or the very concept of innovation as being risky and wasteful.

    Properly funding innovation (extending our heat metaphor: the Goldilocks’ Zone) is more about timing than quantity. Incubation needs money, but it doesn’t need your entire innovation budget. Employ tactics like seed and round funding. Seed the project when it enters the incubator, while holding some allocated budget in reserve. Incubator managers should set intermediary goals for their project teams and attach an investment to each. This defines a clear process and manages risk by dynamically controlling budgets and time. Ideas in the incubator have a long way to go, modules later in the process need money too, so space it out.  

• Expertise

  • Did you know chickens turn their eggs to prevent the yolks from sticking to the shells and causing growth deformations? Egyptian incubation innovators did and took their feathered expertise into account when training human egg-minders. Incubators are an investment in the belief that good ideas, and the will to act on them, can come from anywhere. Part of that investment is supplementing the creativity, dedication, and domain expertise of internal and external innovators with the managerial and technical expertise necessary to shepherd an idea through the many steps towards fruition. Staffing the incubator with Shepherds who bring a mix of strengths takes pressure off of the project team. This way, even if the airplane needs to be built a bit while being flown, at least the engineer isn’t also the pilot and the navigator. 

The following are key roles that project teams, shepherds, and others need to play to ensure the idea hatches:

Turning to techniques and tactics

The ultimate goal of innovation processes is to transform ideas from the abstract and notional into the practical and impactful. Without defined tactics, innovation processes become what researchers call “magic concepts”: highly abstract, positively perceived, expected to solve complex dilemmas, and - in the final estimation - essentially worthless. Of all the modules, incubators are the most susceptible to this shortcoming. Below are a few (among many possible) practical methods that fit under an incubator.

Hackathons - Events focused on gathering a community to creatively brainstorm, whiteboard, and (sometimes) hack together potential solutions for a shared challenge or problem statement. Incubators can use these to forge connections between new teammates, jumpstart development, and delineate their shared skills. A subcategory of hackathons called Scopeathons can be used to understand the environmental problem you are working on and how technological solutions do and don’t help address it.

Design Sprints - User-centered design sprints bring future users into the early stages of technology development to rapidly collect and analyze their needs and challenges in a structured process. Integrating user perspectives early in the process reduces the amount of guesswork and focuses innovation on what really matters: delivering better results. If you are incubating a non-technological innovation (process, policy, etc) consider the closely related methodologies in human-centered design.

Wireframing - I’m going to overload this term a little bit. As the link shows: wireframing is a user experience process for drafting the design and flow of a website or app. It’s extremely useful for design planning and challenge identification to understand what you’re building towards and where the sticking points may lie. So useful in fact, that I recommend adapting this process to your modular innovation project planning as well. Run a version of this with the project team as the “user”, the innovation team as the “designer” and map the project’s needed supports and proposed developmental processes. This shouldn’t be held to strictly, but it can help reveal which modules will be most important to the development of each specific project. 

Incubators increase the chances of success

The efficiency of Egyptian egg incubation empowered merchants to sell chickens by volume rather than count. This principle of efficiency is reflected in technology incubators. Proper incubation in the idea phase can vastly lower costs at later stages of development through prudent planning, strategic alignment, and distillation down to the elements that deliver the greatest value. Ideas are fragile, liable to break under harsh realities or deform due to overly creative enthusiasm. Not every idea that comes into the incubator is a winner, frankly, not even every good idea that comes into the incubator is destined to be a good tool down the line. But by examining and culturing them in a safe space, the most innovative and effective ones will hatch and learn to fly.

Next up in our series on modular innovation we’re going to dive into the experimental environment of Labs and what lessons we can draw from the alchemists’ quest to transmute metals into gold.