When it comes to thriving in the ever-evolving and highly competitive business landscape, innovation is the name of the game. Without innovation, companies run the risk of becoming stagnant, an industry follower, or worse, completely irrelevant in the wake of industry disruption.
Nowadays, the majority of companies recognize the importance of innovation as a driver of business growth. According to the McKinsey & Company study, 84% of CEOs named innovation as a primary focus of their growth strategy. However, many businesses struggle to tangibly define their innovation culture and implement it in a way that produces measurable and replicable results.
This problem, in part, stems from a common misconception that innovation is simply a matter of generating new, creative ideas. But without a set framework for implementation, testing, and refinement, these ideas are impossible to execute effectively – this is where innovation management comes into play.
What is Innovation Management?
Innovation Management involves the comprehensive oversight of an organization’s innovation procedure – it includes organizing, leading, motivating, and controlling resources to create new products, processes, business models, and propositions, as well as enhancing customer value and experience. It also includes developing an innovation culture, demand management, portfolio management, project management, and reporting.
Before we can delve into the details of implementing an innovation management system, we should first highlight 3 major challenges to innovation within organizations.
3 Critical Inhibitors of Innovation
Businesses can face a number of internal challenges that inhibit the innovative process, but the most common obstacles can be attributed to 3 distinct problem areas:
- Lack of Engagement. Ideas are the lifeblood of innovation, but to generate ideas consistently, companies must foster an environment and culture that encourages, empowers, and motivates employees to take initiative. An employee or team might come up with a breakthrough idea, but if the systems aren’t in place to support them, or the company has a history of not following up, they may not pursue it and even be discouraged from contributing in the future.
- Lack of Innovation Management Framework. One of the biggest inhibitors to innovation in business comes down to simple organization. Some businesses readily produce new ideas but lack a system of consolidation and analysis. As a result, promising ideas often get put on the back burner or are forgotten altogether. Organizations need to have a proper framework that will govern how innovative ideas contribute to their strategic objectives, transform them into demand, and then realize the benefits once they are executed through projects, products, or changes within the organization.
- Lack of Visibility. In the same way traditional KPIs, like sales volume or revenue, are used to measure company performance, measuring and benchmarking initiatives is critical to success. But without the proper processes in place, businesses are not able to analyze the overall impact of innovative initiatives on the organization, take action, and ultimately drive company growth.
Cutting-Edge Tools for Innovation Management
Managing the innovation process across an entire organization is a difficult and highly involved task for businesses of all sizes. That’s why many leading companies are looking to streamline innovation management systems with the help of powerful digital platforms like ServiceNow.
The ServiceNow platform enables businesses to create a continuous pipeline of vetted ideas, and monitor the entire innovative process from the initial ideation phase to execution, to finally measuring and analyzing outcomes.
Through the platform, businesses can capture ideas across the organization using the ideation portal, where users can contribute, collaborate, vote on, and track innovative ideas all from a single location. From there, managers can assess and manage demand for ideas, balance resources and streamline the investment decision process for new products, services, repairs and enhancements, and align projects with strategic business objectives.
Once an initiative reaches implementation, managers can utilize dedicated dashboards to monitor project status, get real-time visibility into product development, and gain valuable data and insights reporting on measuring project impact– accelerating time to market by 22% on average.
Your Pathway to Consistent Innovation, Improvement, and Business Development
Creative, game-changing ideas can come from anyone in an organization – from the most experienced senior executives to ambitious interns. But whether those innovative ideas produce results will come down to the systems and processes the company has in place for innovation management.
Devoteam offers its customers an effective framework, coupled with a powerful digital platform and a ready-made network of innovation partners, to power accelerated business growth and development.
To learn more about Devoteam’s services and how we can help you facilitate innovation management within your organization