After reading the below Article answer the following questions with Two pages Journal

• What did the Harvard Business Review article surprise you with?
• Which stage of the innovation process (front end or back end) may require more resources?

The Article:

In today's competitive business landscape, organizations face the challenge of balancing their current commitments to deliver on pressing commitments and invest in innovation opportunities that will create tomorrow's success. The natural bias is to respond immediately to what is in front of them, which crowds out longer-term, innovative thinking. To overcome this issue, many leading organizations can divert significant resources away from today's requirements to fund the innovations that will deliver tomorrow's value.

To find out how they do this, the authors focus on the two key questions underlying the challenge: How much is your organization spending on innovation? And how much do you think it should be spending?

The authors created four high-level buckets into which resources and money can be poured: Daily Operations, Incremental Improvement, Sustaining Innovation, and Disruptive Innovation. These categories are essential for allocating resources and money effectively. On average, managers from various industries estimated they were currently spending 85% of their resources on day-to-day operations, 5% on incremental improvements, 5% on small sustaining innovations, and 5% on big, disruptive innovations. When asked about the better proportion might be, the managers estimated they were spending 75% on day-to-day operations, 5% on incremental improvements, 10% on sustaining innovations, and 10% on big, disruptive innovations.

The diagnostic confirms that the battle between today and tomorrow rages on, and that tomorrow is losing. However, the exercise also reveals that organizations instinctively feel they should be spending more on innovation. To shift the weight of their spending toward investments in creating future value, the authors recommend three things: segregate funds for improvement and innovation, manage the turbulence by measuring spending across the four categories, and allow the important to triumph over the urgent. They suggest taking time before reaching for the fireman's helmet to find the root cause of a problem, as more time spent early on can save money in symptom management later.

Create new organizations and controls for innovation. Today's operations and incremental improvements can be managed within the traditional management structure, a command-and-control hierarchy. Tomorrow's sustaining innovations and big, disruptive innovations need new organizational structures and controls. Revenue-producing parts of the business can easily poach resources from innovation projects and teams that are not contributing to the top line. Innovations need measures and controls reflecting their experimental approach to learning as they chart new territory with unpredictable outcomes. Performance should be measured by market momentum, such as new targeted customers or partners, deal size, and PR buzz.

In the battle between today and tomorrow, today will win every time unless the organization consciously, strategically decides to extend a helping hand to tomorrow. The first step is to measure spending against the four choices above. Do you like what you see? Are you willing to do something about it if you don't? Remember, you're making a crucial choice about your company's future.