Understand the importance of end-to-end innovation management

When talking about innovation management, it is easy to pinpoint lots of benefits it can bring to an organization. New revenue and growth opportunities, improved efficiency and business performance, engaged and empowered employees are just a few. There are many more benefits associated with innovation management, the difficult part is realizing those benefits.

In my opinion, it has never been more important, however a huge number of organizations are still passive in their management of benefits and struggle to demonstrate the true value that innovation can bring. Not only does this mean innovation teams are not getting the credit they deserve and missing vital learning opportunities, but senior level sponsorship becomes reduced as leaders cannot see the value in their investment. I want to talk about end-to-end innovation management, why it is important and how an effective end-to-end process enables organizations to successfully translate ideas into business value.

Of course, different organizations tackle innovation in different ways, however when looking at end-to-end innovation management that focuses on delivering benefits, I like to break it down into five key areas:

• Strategy

• Ideation

• Justification

• Delivery

• Benefit realization

Now, let’s dive into each of these areas and the role they play in the end-to-end innovation management process in more detail.

Aligning your innovation efforts to your organization’s strategy

Innovation is an enabler of the organization’s strategic direction; it is therefore important to align your innovation strategy to the corporate strategy. The innovation vision, strategy, and objectives that you build must be flexible and adaptable to any internal and external change. This calls for regular evaluation to ensure that it stays relevant and supports the continuous improvement of the organization. Although it might be obvious, clearly communicating all elements of the innovation strategy is essential to getting all parties onboard, and consistent communication is key. Only when employees understand the strategy and key drivers can they be expected to align innovation to it and drive the right ideas forward.

Building an ideation process around curiosity and collaboration

Innovative culture is curious, it is important to drive the behaviour of constantly asking questions and foster a culture of learning and creativity. This includes democratizing innovation to include the entire organization, in doing so, you harness knowledge at scale and open the door to completely new perspectives and ideas.

During the ideation process you need to able to effectively capture, analyse, review, and prioritize innovative ideas. Start by setting challenges and providing employees with a safe place to share their ideas aligned to your strategic priorities. It is important to clearly define the problem you are trying to solve and highlight the cycle it will progress through; this includes the criteria being used to judge the idea and information about what will happen to the winning idea. Having a clear feedback loop with employees helps to keep them engaged as they know their ideas have not fallen into a black hole, never to be seen again.

Very rarely does an idea stay in its original form by the time it is implemented, you want people to ask questions, comment and collaborate. We often underestimate the ability of teamwork and how it can help aid the development of both the idea and individuals. Innovation management software can help enable collaboration during the ideation phase and finding a platform that integrates with collaboration tools you already use such as Microsoft Teams can be a huge benefit when it comes to adoption.

Justifying and evaluating ideas to ensure only those with the most potential move forward

As ideas progress it is essential to have a clear set of variables to evaluate them. Refer to your innovation strategy and organizations KPIs when thinking about these to ensure you are driving the right ideas forward.

Before moving ahead to implementation, business cases are very useful, they allow you to cost evaluate and justify an idea into a project, highlighting any potential delays and predicting where and when benefits will be realized.

Although an excellent tool, time and time again many organizations are not using them properly, they go through the process of creating a business case and rarely re-evaluate it during the course of the project. The business case shouldn’t just be filed away, it should be a living breathing document that project managers can refer to and monitor whether a project is on track. With business case software this process can be made completely transparent and standardized, helping to accelerate the approval process.

Delivering ideas effectively and knowing when to stop projects

It is important for delivery to understand what is coming downstream so they can prioritize and prepare for new ideas coming their way for implementation, while also managing resource for live projects. By connecting your project management processes to the wider organization you obtain an earlier indication of requirements and set yourself up for successful delivery.

Knowing when to stop a project is also important. Although there is still fear around failure, you need to create a framework that allows people to raise their hands when projects are in danger of going off track and not delivering the benefits that were originally anticipated. This is where the whole benefit realization piece is so important, you need effective methods throughout the end-to-end process for managing, monitoring, and measuring benefit to ensure that you are only allocating resources and funding to the projects that will generate true value for the organization.

Realizing the full value from your innovation efforts

Benefits can be realized at different timescales after implementation, this could be six to twelve months later and is unique to the project. It is vital to go back and revisit business cases to review if the benefits were achieved, you also gain lessons learned and insight into how it could have been improved and enhanced. A question to ask yourself once you reach this stage is: What benefits were really delivered from each innovation challenge? Sadly, not many organizations can easily answer this question. As mentioned before, you must manage, monitor, and measure the benefits of innovation throughout the process, only then will you be able to demonstrate the full value. Technology is an excellence enabler, the edison365 suite is an end-to-end innovation and delivery platform built for Microsoft 365. It provides you with a transparent and centralized method to drive the right ideas at an accelerated rate, while ensuring they are delivered successfully and the full value is realized, all within your own Microsoft 365 tenant.

To summarize, effective end-to-end innovation management is important for organizations to recognise the full benefits of their innovation efforts. You need to address every stage of the pipeline to truly generate value and accelerate the right ideas from the drawing board onto the balance sheet. Being able to prove that the investment in innovation is delivering value will make sure senior sponsorship and funding not only continues but will likely increase. In turn, the more you invest in innovation, the more the organization will change and transform and ultimately benefit from it.

Author Bio:

As a passionate innovation and technology evangelist, Tad is the Executive Vice President at edison365, working with some of the most innovative companies in the world, every day. With years of experience in change management and business building, Tad has plenty of transformation stories to share in manufacturing, engineering, financial services plus health and life sciences. A long tenure at Microsoft, at the front-end of innovation and ideation software, helped him see what it means to transform and deliver at scale.