Governance & Responsibilities

🎯 Who is this for: Managers, innovation leads, organization admins 📌 What this page addresses: Rules, responsibilities, and boundaries for innovation projects
👉 What you can do after reading: Maintain governance while supporting innovation

This page describes the ground rules, responsibility boundaries, and frequently asked questions from managers about the Innovation Playbook.

The goal is not to stifle innovation, but to make it sustainable, repeatable, and scalable.

🎯 What Are the Governance Goals of the Innovation Playbook?

The governance goals of the Innovation Playbook are:

• ✅ Provide employees with a safe space to innovate
• ✅ Ensure ideas are documented and can be learned from
• ✅ Prevent innovation projects from going off track or becoming unowned
• ✅ Enable smooth transition into formal product or business systems when a project matures

👥 Roles & Responsibilities

👤 Project Owner

Typically:

• The person who proposed the idea
• The person who created the project repo

Responsibilities include:

• Maintaining the project README
• Clearly indicating the current project status (idea / prototype / active)
• Driving initial experimentation and learning

👥 Contributors

Can be:

• Colleagues
• Hackathon teammates
• Ad-hoc support staff

Responsibilities include:

• Assisting with design, development, or validation
• Documenting learnings and conclusions
• Following the project’s basic conventions

🧭 Innovation Org Admin (Org Admin / Garage / Innovation Lead)

Responsibilities include:

• Maintaining the Innovation Playbook
• Providing templates and guidance
• Helping projects connect with resources
• Deciding whether a project enters the Graduation process

📂 What Can Projects Do? What Should They Avoid?

✅ Allowed

• Document and explore ideas
• Build PoCs / Demos
• Use open-source tools and platform capabilities
• Trial and validate on a small scale

🚫 Not Allowed

• ❌ Making official product commitments externally
• ❌ Using real customer or production data (unless approved)
• ❌ Bypassing organizational security or compliance requirements
• ❌ Advancing unauthorized formal projects under the banner of “innovation”

🔄 What Is Graduation?

Graduation means:

An innovation project has moved beyond “exploration” and meets the criteria to enter a formal delivery or product system.

This typically includes:

• Clear business value
• Stable usage scenarios
• A clearly identified owner
• A need for long-term maintenance

👉 After Graduation, a project will usually:

• Migrate its repo or codebase
• Join a formal team or product line
• Follow standard governance processes

(See: Project Lifecycle)

❓ Frequently Asked Questions for Managers

Q1: Can anyone create an innovation project?

✅ Yes.
But every project should have a clearly identified Owner.

Q2: What if a project stalls?

✅ That’s okay.

Innovation projects can be:

• Paused
• Archived
• Retained as a learning case

Stalling ≠ Failure.

Q3: How do we avoid “too many low-quality projects”?

Recommended approaches:

• Clear README templates
• Regular Demo / Show & Tell sessions
• Encourage retrospectives and learning summaries

👉 Quality comes from guidance, not restriction.

Q4: Do innovation projects have KPIs?

🚫 There are no universal KPIs.

The value of innovation is reflected in:

• Speed of learning
• Cross-team collaboration
• Discovery of new opportunities

✅ Summary

The governance principles of the Innovation Playbook are:

Provide space, set boundaries, foster learning, enable scaling

If you’re unsure whether a situation is appropriate, default to:

• Communication
• Transparency
• Documentation