Innovation Management: 4 key elements to unlocking success
Innovation management has been part of the business lexicon for quite some time now, yet you’d be mistaken to think that it’s just another buzzword.
When we talk about innovation management, simply put, we’re referring to a systematic approach to creating, prioritising, testing and implementing new ideas that help to solve problems and create opportunities to improve business in the long-term.
The phrase has a tendency to conjure up a whole spectrum of initiatives you’ve most likely experienced in some shape or form in your business — from idea boxes to hackathons and sprints. Yet despite best efforts, most businesses are still struggling to achieve success.
Why is it important?
Done well, innovation management can unlock new value for your business and your customers, drive new revenue streams, engage employees, increase productivity and reduce inefficiencies. All great things for any organisation!
On the flip side however, companies that fail to consistently grow and innovate will soon see themselves fall behind the competition and struggle to keep up with a rapidly changing economy.
Although there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to innovation management, we believe that there are a few essential elements that can help most businesses on the road to innovation success:
- Embed a culture of innovation
As a business, your people are your most valuable asset! Although great leaders make smart decisions — they can’t (and shouldn’t) do it alone. Your employees should be excited and inspired to make positive changes, and empowered with the right information and tools to do so — all the way from idea to implementation.
The right culture relies on an openness to share ideas freely, and a positive attitude towards experimentation. Most importantly, there should be an understanding that it’s ok to fail! Although nobody sets out to do so, failing is very much part of the process, and is a valuable tool for future improvement.
2. Prioritise ideas
Often in large organisations, ideas are not the problem! Most companies have an abundance of ideas, but very little understanding of how to prioritise them. This means that all too often great ideas are surfaced but never manifest into anything more. Or even worse, huge amounts of time and resources are spent on taking the wrong ideas forward.
If only idea management was as easy as choosing the ideas that are simplest to implement, or knowing which will make the most money! In reality, prioritisation of ideas is about setting clear innovation objectives and criteria, and maintaining focus on these during the reviewing process. These objectives should be clearly aligned to the overall business strategy. Think about what type of value you want to drive from your innovation programmes and use that as your foundation.
Once the most relevant ideas have been shortlisted, it’s time to test and experiment!
3. Apply the Lean Start-Up method
The Lean Start-up Methodology provides a solution to traditionally long production processes — so that businesses can assess and validate customer demand and build a market-ready product as quickly as possible in an environment of uncertainty.
The methodology is defined by a dynamic approach to validating value propositions and core assumptions quickly in a series of iterative feedback loops:
Build a cheap, simple product that will either validate or invalidate your assumption. This is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Measure the response to validate or disprove assumptions. Learn from them, draw up new assumptions. Repeat. Or quite simply: Build, measure, learn, repeat.
This process is best suited to innovative products or services where you’re introducing a solution to a problem, rather than attempting to replace or adapt a pre-existing solution.
4. Enable Ongoing Collaboration
Innovation depends on challenging the status quo, and it takes a diverse set of backgrounds and skill sets coming together to achieve it. There’s no such thing as lone geniuses or eureka moments — successful ideas generally come over time from a collective of many people, with many different areas of expertise.
Greater levels of collaboration mean that businesses get a higher volume and diversity of ideas and feedback. Without being challenged from outside influences, it’s easy to fall into the same repetitive processes or thinking — which makes generating truly innovative ideas very difficult. Within businesses, cross-functional collaboration should be a minimum requirement, but highly innovative businesses may even choose to collaborate externally, too. Think customers, partners, governments — even competitors.
Innovation Systems
Innovation management is much more than just an ideas box! It should be orderly, systematic and measurable in order to achieve success. Platform based innovation systems have been rising in popularity as they help to address most (but not all)of the challenges of implementing sustainable innovation. Although functionality varies between providers, a good innovation system should enable all of the above elements through a variety of tools: from idea submissions, to review & tracking and managing your innovation portfolio.
At Pollen8, we combine our consultancy expertise with a tried-and-tested innovation framework, and our own powerful platform to help you sustainably create new products, find efficiencies and embed a culture of innovation. We offer solutions for the most common challenges innovation leaders and managers face on a day to day basis. Ready to see where innovation can take your organisation? Get in touch with one of our innovation experts.
