The bulk of any operating budget is devoted to sustaining the status quo. That's what generates most sales and virtually all profits. It's also where your company gets most entangled in commitments, incurs the majority of its liabilities, and is most exposed to competitive threats, particularly from commoditizing offerings.

We call this zone "context," as opposed to core, because it does little for competitive differentiation. However, it's mission-critical—because failure to perform here can easily put customer relationships, partner commitments, and company valuation at risk.

The best way to fund a bold innovation strategy without breaking your budget is to extract extraneous contextual resources—coins in the couch, as it were—and repurpose them to the core. To do this, apply the following six levers:

1. Centralize. Put a single authority in charge of all legacy-process resources. That authority should approach various stakeholders and hammer out agreements that honor the spirit of prior commitments while streamlining for efficiency.

2. Standardize. Rationalize commitments into a standard set to reduce management overhead and duplicated effort while improving quality.

3. Modularize. Prepare to reengineer the single, standard set of commitments. Break it up into processes and subprocesses, then document fixed interfaces between modules.

4. Optimize. Eliminate, consolidate, automate, and redesign inefficient processes.

5. Instrument. Develop tools that monitor and control the reengineered mission-critical processes.

6. Outsource. Leveraging the instrumentation in place, establish service-level standards and metrics so you can negotiate an outsourcing relationship that provides ongoing visibility and control over mission-critical processes.

These levers are implemented in pairs: centralize and standardize, modularize and optimize, and instrument and outsource. To be fair, not all processes require all six steps—go only as far as you need to in order to free up the resources necessary for the next round of innovation. But if you decide to go all the way to outsourcing, don't skip any of the prior steps or you'll run into trouble.

One final caveat: Don't start this exercise before identifying the core, determining your spending targets, and winning top management's buy-in. Otherwise, you'll find your CFO is a coin magnet bent on absconding with all your hard-won gains in order to meet this quarter's profit commitment. Then you'll enter the next quarter with no funded innovation—and fewer coins in the couch.