Everyone has ideas, but innovation management is what turns them into growth
Today’s businesses face mounting pressure to keep innovating in order to grow and outpace the competition. Innovation management is crucial to ensure that the great minds within your organisation bring forth their ideas, the viable ones are identified, and the ones put to practice are in line with your strategy.
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Everything you see around you was once a thought, an idea, in someone’s head. With the world changing and competition accelerating, continuous innovation is becoming crucial for businesses to stay ahead. But identifying the best ideas and turning them into commercial success is hard. With innovation management, organisations can harness the creativity of their people in a systematic way.
Let’s imagine ourselves inside the mind of a painter who sells her works for a living. She’s looking out the window, deep in thought, considering what to paint next. Dozens of possibilities fly through her mind. She shortlists a few, assessing their potential value and buyers as well as how well they fit her skillset. Finally, she picks one and further refines it. Once she feels confident that this is the idea to invest her time and effort in and has a plan on how to proceed, she gets to work.
A professional painter is a single person innovating for her work, but the essentials of the process are not so different from innovation in business contexts. However, for an organisation, nailing that process and making it a success factor is not so easy. Innovation is about creativity, and creativity is a fickle thing to lure out and harness. The key ingredients to achieve this are organisational competency, a clear innovation strategy and a robust approach to managing innovation.
WHAT IS INNOVATION MANAGEMENT?
Innovation management is a structured process through which an organisation fosters innovation, validates ideas, identifies the most viable ones and proceeds to develop them into concrete solutions. It is often called a process or, perhaps more accurately, a discipline. A standardised one, too – ISO 5600 covers innovation management.
In today’s fast-paced operating environment, where the next ground-breaking disruption or destabilising force majeure is probably already looming nearby, highlighting the importance of innovation is hardly necessary.
But, just to briefly recap, we need to first acknowledge that innovation can be focused on many things: internal processes, product development, external opportunities, organisational development, or outmanoeuvring competition, just to name a few. Hence, the benefits largely depend on the realm in question. That being said, the often-mentioned benefits of innovation management are:
It increases adaptability to change – which, as mentioned, now tends to come in abundance
It improves competitiveness – if you don’t figure it out, someone else will
It fuels growth – whether a little or a lot, it still matters
It is worth being aware that, at least in technology, innovations now happen at such a pace that the return on investment is actually showing signs of decreasing. If anything, this calls for businesses to be even cleverer about how they manage their innovation process.
INNOVATION STRATEGY GUIDES INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
Ideas are easy. Almost everybody has them. A known truth in the start-up scene is that a great idea is useless if the team working on it is not capable of making it commercially viable. Just like while many people are amazing painters, few have the skills required to make a living out of it.
For a business, innovation strategy sits higher up in the hierarchy to innovation management. It defines the strategic goals for your efforts, sets the vision and objectives, and ensures that resources allocated to innovation serve the strategic direction of your business. Thus, you need to set up your innovation process so that out of all those ideas your organisation can produce, only those aligned with your innovation strategy are taken forward.
MANAGING INNOVATION IN PRACTICE
Here is an example of what an innovation management process can look like, from start to finish:
Create an innovation ecosystem. It sounds like a buzzword and perhaps it is, but what it means is that you need to fine-tune your organisation’s workspace, processes and culture so that employees are encouraged to think creatively, passion projects are encouraged, and collaboration across the organisation fosters innovative thinking.
Build a process to capture ideas. Without it, they get lost in the wind. Find a way to record them as they come, ideally in a format that labels them and assesses them against your innovation strategy. It’s also a good idea to build the process in a way that’s easy to share with key stakeholders.
Evaluate each idea. Does it solve a problem? Is your business the right fit to work on it in terms of competencies and capacity? Can it be made commercially viable? Is it in line with your strategy? Will it stand the test of time? This is when you weed out the unusable and pick the ones that fulfil your criteria.
Prioritise your ideas. Smart resource allocation is a key part of innovation management. Grab the low-hanging fruits and assess the rest in terms of urgency and effort needed – perhaps conduct a risk analysis, as well.
After all this is done, you should have a good idea of where to start and who in your organisation is the best fit to take the lead.
STREAMLINE YOUR PROCESS WITH AN INNOVATION MANAGEMENT SOLUTION
Innovations that improve your business internally are no doubt valuable, but looking outside is where high-value opportunities are often found. From Apple to Netflix, we’re all familiar with the stories where a company figured out something ahead of its competitors, disrupting its entire industry.
So, if you are ambitious about innovation management, find a way for your teams to scan the landscape outside their usual realm of work on a regular and systematic basis. The right kind of tools can help build this into your innovation management process instead of, say, relying on internet browsing.
With Futures Platform’s all-in-one solution for strategic foresight, you can easily spot the latest weak signals of change before they emerge into the mainstream, read in-depth analyses on the potential future directions of trends by professional futurists, and stay ahead of change with a future-focused news search engine.
Integrating the tool into your innovation process will expand cross-industry visibility and diversify ideas, which might lead to your business discovering the next disruptive innovation that could accelerate your growth and drive your strategy forward in an unprecedented way.
