Q&A: How Should you Budget for the Launch of Your Innovation Program?

We’re trying something new  — a way to get your questions answered by others in the Innovation Leader community, or let you help out someone else. Every few weeks, we’ll send out a newsletter with a member-submitted question and ask you for your advice/experience/input. (If you’re not getting our newsletter, you can sign up here.)

Last week, we asked:

How have you budgeted for the launch of your innovation program? Was it based on a percent of revenue? What were the key “buckets”of spend? How did staffing evolve?

Below, we’ve summarized a few of the top answers from the community.

• • •Zero-based, activity-based — Aerospace industry respondent
“Year 1 was zero-based budgeting for the scale required to start the activities we proposed to begin in year 1. Year 2 is a combination of activity-based zero-based budgeting for the team, and ROM business cases for the long term business outcomes (opportunity size) given near-term learning value (replacement for revenue/earnings) and current year spend requirement for activities (cost) to deliver the learning value.”

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