What is Innovation Management?, Pain Points and Benefits

Innovation is key for growth. Companies recognize this and they are doing their best to bring new products to market. R&D expense as a % of sales is up to 18% but the most recent studies reveal how difficult innovation is. Most new products fail either during development or once they reach the market. What can you do? The first step is to identify the reasons that products fail.

Companies invest their time and resources in developing a lot of concepts without doing the upfront necessary homework. Thus when 10 concepts get proposed, ten get approved and developed, and only 1 succeed.

Companies today are lacking a centralized idea pool to gather and capture ideas that come from within their four walls as well as outside of the company. They lack structure at the front end to efficiently and effectively evaluate the ideas that are captured in order to have the analysis needed to further an idea onto a concept or kill an idea early in the process before large sums of money is spent.

They lack collaboration with everyone involved in the front end process – marketing, R&D, legal, manufacturing, sales and logistics, external partners, suppliers and agencies. This helps to better identify constraints very early in the process, and hence manage development risk.

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

What is Innovation Management?

Salespeople and marketing are important sources of ideas. Traditionally, sales, field operations representatives and call centers find it difficult to channel their experiences and feedback from customers to R&D. Often, they rely on email and phone, if at all. However, CRM systems are being instrumental in capturing all the feedback from these critical functions.

By integrating into CRM, helps a company to capitalize on this feedback. Product groups can thus identify customer needs and environmental patterns and trends quickly with rapid follow-through.

Helps to institute a direct line of communication from the sales functions to product groups and enables a company to respond to market needs more quickly.

Innovation Management helps companies to identify and capitalize on their best ideas and translate them into successful, innovative products. An idea points to a business opportunity for a specific new product or service. However, it does not provide in-depth analysis of the matter. It is a suggestion presented to other users for further consideration.

The idea can be transformed into a concept in order to further assess its validity. A concept is a draft for a product or service innovation. It starts out as a rough sketch that describes basic functions of the new product or service and relates them to customer or market needs.

In the course of concept development, business and technical feasibility studies are carried out in order to refine and validate the draft.

This process encompasses idea submission by a regular employee or external partner, customer etc. Followed by refinement and enhancement by the idea pool manager or a competent subject matter expert and approval or rejection by a responsible person. This process is used to streamline and structurize idea creation.

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

What is Innovation Management

What are the Pain Points in Innovation Management?

There are many key pain points in product innovation.

• Ideas from key sources go uncaptured
• Limited access to customer needs
• Disconnected collections of hardly consolidated ideas
• Inefficient evaluation of new product concepts
• Fragmented requirement change management
• The ideas and concepts that are captured are insufficiently defined or understood in light of real opportunities
• They are also evaluated and promoted without full consideration their effect on the product portfolio with lower product success rates and poorly performing product portfolios with unacceptable levels of risk

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

How do we know that we will have the appropriate resources to develop this product? Overwhelmed resources mean that deadlines are missed and all project budgets and schedules are jeopardized. The final and one of the most critical pain points has to do with simply sharing information and past analysis across functional and geographic boundaries. Today, most companies rely on email and isolated documents for their product development workflow.

The result is that tasks are overlooked, considerable rework and organizational learning remains a dream.

To address these pain points, you need a solution that will help you. The functional capabilities that enable this are systematic idea capture from multiple sources with repeat integration advantage, classification schemas for grouping related ideas so ideas can build on others and role-based workflow ensures appropriate follow-up so that idea submitter can see the outcome of their suggestions.

Having more ideas to choose from is the first step. Now how does the system enable you to act on them?

What are the Key Challenges in Innovation Management?

Innovation Management will help capture multiple sources of ideas from sales, other employees, customers, partners. It will also help in better utilization of those ideas via smart classification schemas and appropriate workflow.

The simplicity and the standardization of the process with Innovation Management also helps promote a culture of innovation. Innovation Management ensures that all concepts go through a diligent evaluation process. It also provides the necessary flexibility to adjust the evaluation process based on the appropriate risk level of concepts such as improvement vs. breakthrough innovation.

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

What are the Key Challenges in Innovation Management

• Inefficient evaluation of ideas in new product development
• Drop of new product introduction success rates
• Time-to-market too long
• Waste of resources
• Inefficient roll-in and evaluation of ideas and requirements
• Inadequate new product assessment and poor design management
• Disconnected processes and flow of information from business development to product design
• Track requirements through the entire product lifecycle

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

What are the Benefits of Innovation Management?

Innovation Management captures multiple sources of market information from customers, sales information, third-party research from firms as AC Nielsen, It marries the market information with that of internal capabilities that may exist in different unstructured documents or structured back-end systems. It ensures that cross-functional perspectives (from marketing, R&D, market research, sales,etc.) are integral to the evaluation process.

By aligning different cross-functional information and perspectives, Innovation Management helps the team to identify potential constraints much earlier in the process. Innovation Management maintains a centralized source of all concept information available throughout the development cycle.

Benefits of this process include good ideas are not lost, but found and made visible to required people and bad ideas are killed quickly. Idea generation workflows are structurized and made more visible. The idea Authors submit ideas and experts provide opinions on Ideas via formal evaluations and/or informal discussions. The Innovation Manager reviews submitted Ideas, Links related Ideas, Calls on relevant experts to evaluate the Ideas, Based on expert opinion, decides whether to progress the Idea.

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

What are the Benefits of Innovation Management

• Provide collaborative services for concurrent engineering, ramp-up, and market launch
• Monitor your company's current product portfolio
• Ensure a efficient and faster process for new product development and introduction
• Develop innovative products that match current market trends and are in-line with your company´s strategy
• Save costs through early go/kill decisions for product ideas
• Shorten lengthy design cycles through a collaborative work environment
• Avoid mistakes by managing changes in requirements across the entire product life cycle

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software

You may like to read: Top Idea & Innovation Management Software