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:

There has been an issue with one of your suppliers that may cause a delay in the delivery of your merchandise. Simultaneously, a door opens that, if investigated and funded, may eventually provide a whole new class of goods. To whom do you provide your answer first? Your first instinct is undoubtedly to don your firefighter's cap and put out the temporary crisis. And that's the crux of the matter. Leaders and organizations are under greater pressure than ever to achieve two things at once: meet today's urgent obligations by fixing and improving systems, and discover and finance tomorrow's innovation potential. An important but sometimes ignored concern is how your company deals with the pressure of distributing limited resources. The human tendency is to deal with whatever is right in front of you at the moment (like the never-ending stream of emails). The issue is that this gut reaction leaves little room for creative, long-term planning. Many groups have shared their predicament with us. A member of one group said, "We're playing 'Whac-A-Mole' here around the clock." Unfortunate platitude at another workplace: "The urgent drives out the important." Our research has shown, however, that many successful businesses are able to overcome this prejudice and instead invest heavily in the technologies that will reap benefits in the future. We zeroed down on the following two fundamental concerns to understand their strategy: How much does your company invest on new ideas? In your opinion, how much money should it be spending?

Despite its seeming simplicity, many individuals either don't have the exact answer or haven't ever considered it. A CEO we recently questioned on these topics estimated that his company was investing 5 percent of its budget on innovation (new goods and services) at the time but felt the number should be closer to 10 to 15 percent. He continued by saying that the constant demands of current operations were preventing his company from making long-term investments. We considered this and the larger context we've seen in our work, and came up with four broad categories to allocate funds and other assets: 1. Routine tasks. All that matters here is following a tried-and-true operational framework. Developing a better method gradually. This encompasses the vast majority of the many Lean and Six Sigma continuous improvement programs that aim to boost productivity inside an already-established management and organizational framework. Keeping New Ideas Alive, 3. In this case, revolutionary transformation is brought about by shifting the underlying business model or going beyond traditional organizational limits. An exceptional management structure, like a program office, value stream manager, or process owner, is needed to propel such an investment, but the existing value network is used to continue serving the same clientele. Fourth, a revolutionary new idea. This game-changing improvement to the business's core processes and value chain paves the way for expansion into a previously untapped market and threatens the status quo incumbents. To do so successfully, a new enterprise is often incubated and guarded inside a separate entity. When seen in this light, expenditure results in measurable consequences and gains that can be weighted and shifted between the here-and-now and the future. At a recent conference (and in an online poll), we posed this identical question to managers from a wide range of sectors, but we also asked them to elaborate on the specifics of their resource allocation across these four buckets. Their typical current expenditures are as follows: Eighty-five percent went toward maintaining business as usual; five percent went toward incremental improvements that yielded quicker, cheaper, and better sameness; five percent went toward tiny sustaining innovations; and five percent went toward large, transformative breakthroughs. We polled managers to find out what they thought the optimal allocation should be, and their responses broke down as follows: 75% on day-to-day operations; 5% on incremental improvements; 10% on sustaining innovations; 10% on huge, disruptive breakthroughs. Our preliminary analysis suggests, maybe not surprisingly, that today is winning the war against future. However, the research also shows that businesses have a natural inclination to think they should be allocating more resources to innovation. It's easier to say than to really pull off, but it's not impossible. There are three things that every company that wants to prioritize investments in future value creation must undertake. Set aside a certain sum of money for research and development. Spending across the four buckets has to be tracked, and improvement and innovation money must be set aside with discipline. Without this distinct separation, the chaos of daily activities will eat up most of the available resources. If you do the arithmetic, you'll see that more than 90% of your present allocation goes toward just keeping the lights on. As a result, many industry heavyweights in information technology divide their budgets into three distinct sections: operations, maintenance, and innovation. They are making strong efforts to reduce O&M costs from 90% to 60% of total expenses. Calm the waves down. This requires a methodical, long-term approach to tackling the underlying causes of operational instability on a daily basis. Few yet potent guidelines exist to calm the storm of daily operations: Take on less. A lot less. Put out fewer efforts. Measure fewer things. Improve your ability to kill "zombie" projectsthose that have failed but nobody wants to admit it. Sloan Valve's chief information officer Tom Coleman told us that the company only launches a few of important projects year so that they can devote more resources to each one and ensure a smoother integration. Don't let the urgent get in the way of what's really essential. Spend your resources wisely. Establish transparent guidelines for initiating new initiatives, and hold project backers responsible for results. Organizations often act as though their resources are limitless and free. Both of those things are false. Don't rush into putting on a fireman's helmet. Investing more effort at the outset into identifying the source of an issue may save costs associated with treating its symptoms. This strategy was described by one commander as "slow trigger, fast bullet." If your vendor never seems to have any issues, why should you? Maybe it's time to switch suppliers. Make new structures and set up new checks to encourage creative thinking. Both sustaining and disruptive innovations need different organizational structures and controls, and it is up to you to create them. While a command and control hierarchy may work for today's operations and incremental improvements, it won't be effective for the sustaining innovations and large, disruptive innovations of the future. Innovation initiatives and teams that are not (yet) contributing to the top line are vulnerable to being siphoned off by revenue-generating sections of the organization. Until then, they must be shielded by being given their own budgets, resources, and leadership. As they go on into uncharted terrain, innovations need metrics and controls that reflect their exploratory learning method. Market momentum (such as the number of new targeted customers or partners, the magnitude of deals, and the amount of PR buzz) is a good indicator of performance. Unless the company makes a deliberate, strategic decision to provide a hand to the future, the present will always triumph. The first step is to compare costs to the aforementioned four alternatives. Do you approve of this? If you don't, are you going to do something about it? Keep in mind that this is a pivotal moment for your business.