Innovation Management: Need of the Hour

Here we look at the core benefits, essentiality and workplace potential of innovation management in your organisation.

When you’re part of a company or an organisation, creating innovative new products or services might be part of the parcel. You never know where unique ideas or an ‘Aha!’ moment may come from, and it’s essential to your organisation that all your employees have the chance to add their contributions. But before we get to the how, let’s talk about what innovation management is and what it means for your organisation. 

What is Innovation Management?

We all know what the word ‘innovation’ means, but what do we mean by ‘innovation management’? While the name itself suggests managing innovation in an organisation or company, it’s not that simple. Innovation management combines innovation in product, business process, and marketing as well as organisational innovation for efficient management of these processes. Innovation management helps you:

1. Create new products and services: Your organisation can derive several profits by developing new products and services or implementing improvements in the existing products. 
2. Encourage the workforce:  Innovation management relies on collaboration within your workforce, and helps encourage them to come forward with their innovative ideas that can be rewarded or help them gain recognition for. This collaboration benefits your organisation in several ways that we will cover below.
3. Maintain Competitiveness: Innovation management when applied in your organisation can help enhance your profit margin, but it relies on certain factors. 

Factors Essential for Good Innovation Management

Just having innovation management implemented in your organisation is not enough, there are certain factors that can help your organisation stand out from your competitors. If you are not aware of the factors required to effectively manage innovation, your organisation may be reduced to out-dated offerings and can run out of business. Here are the factors that can help your organisation run innovation management the right way: 

• Create the right portfolio of innovation.
• Create an environment that fosters innovation.
• Implementing innovation that adds to the value of your business.
• Have a clear objective that your business wants to accomplish through the innovation.
• Define investment costs for implementing innovations.
• Map progress of the implemented innovations to find out which ideas are adding to the business and which projects need to be halted.
• Unbiased approval strategy on application of innovative ideas.
• Enable each employee to contribute their ideas that are conducive to your business environment.
• Define clear responsibilities for the employees to improve various processes.
• Ensure the management is supportive of innovation process.
• Define change management strategies to keep up with the modifications innovations create in your organisation.

By clearly defining these factors, your organisation will have a future strategy and roadmap that ensures your business is set up for success and can overcome any unexpected obstacles that it may face once these innovations are brought out into the open. 

Core Benefits of Innovation Management

While with the constantly changing consumer behaviour and business environment, innovation has become the need of the hour within various industries, but how does it benefit your organisation? Let’s find out the core benefits your business will gain through innovation management: 

• Improved Customer Satisfaction and ROI: You can decrease the setbacks faced by the end user considerably with innovative ideas received from your workforce that solve the challenges faced by your customers.
• Enhanced Employee Satisfaction and Productivity: Due to the increased engagement within your organisation and the recognition achieved through collaboration, there’s increased enthusiasm within the employees to help bring your business to forefront, which in turn increases productivity. 
• Augmented Operational Effectiveness: Innovation management helps improve not just the challenges for your customers but also for your organisation. Whether it’s for your customers, your business process and strategy or even your employees, innovation management helps improve your business’s core values and contribution by helping streamline the processes of your organisation.
• Foster Diverse Talent: With diverse workforce, there’s an increased chance of diverse innovative ideas that help contribute to solving challenges in different locations where your organisation may be based. It also becomes easier to spot errors and implement improvements to various projects effectively as your workforce may have diverse points of view to the same solution offered.

If this wasn’t reason enough to apply innovation management in your organisation, we have something that simplifies the process even more for you. The IdeaBridge® Innovation Management Platform, a customizable innovation management platform incorporating the power of crowdsourcing, social collaboration, game mechanics and big data analytics that helps companies gain and execute ideas received from employees and customers. The ideas can then be transformed into highly profitable projects and best practices, to improve not only your business process and strategy, but enhance employee engagement and customer experience as well.