3 Ways to Communicate Key Findings from Innovation Activities

Innovation feeds on interaction, information, and collaboration. It leverages the power of two-way conversations and requires the production of enriched knowledge. Cooperation in innovation is often regarded as implicit rather than something that must be continuously nurtured. This blog highlights three ways to communicate the key deliverables of your innovation activities with ITONICS.

Get it right, and you can, over time, build a robust culture of innovation in your organization. Good communication and reporting in innovation can enhance your ability to innovate by integrating different viewpoints, joint ownership, and buy-in. For these reasons, collaboration is a core tenet built into the ITONICS Innovation OS.

Why you need good communication as part of end-to-end innovation

Neglecting communication as part of the innovation journey can be costly. Developing ideas and processes requires collaborative input as a means of stress testing, and organization-wide commitment is needed to ensure the necessary resilience to carry out innovation projects.

By raising awareness and eliciting proactive responses from teams, strategic and unified communication can help drive growth initiatives. Good communication increases transparency and improves collaboration. It continuously draws attention to innovation projects' what, why, and how.

How communication supports innovation:

1. Sharing information props up innovation throughout all phases. Clear messaging is especially important at the beginning stages of establishing corporate innovation in your organization. If teams do not understand what's planned, the goals and objectives, and the expectations, they will likely resist the efforts.
   
   

2. Leaders will need to decide which projects and programs to pursue and how to adjust portfolios in an agile manner. Equally, decisions must be made to discontinue unprofitable projects and balance portfolios to de-risk investment. Communicating effectively and in easy-to-digest ways are imperative to support these decisions.
   
   

3. Innovation does not exist in a vacuum. Efforts that genuinely drive growth need to be collaborative and participatory. To develop ground-breaking solutions, innovation teams must work with cross-functional teams, external experts, and partners.
   
   

4. Developing innovative ideas across your innovation ecosystem entails sharing the right information to inform ideation campaign submissions. Communicating progress and insights to participants also encourages continuous participation and interest.
   
   

5. Communicating innovation milestones help keep teams interested and inform important stakeholders.
   
   

6. It creates spaces for open discussion and co-creation.
   
   

7. Over time, building a culture of innovation demands consistent and strategic communication and reporting. Communication is one of the most crucial threads that weave together activities across geographies, business units, and innovation activities.

Three ways to communicate key results of your innovation activities with ITONICS

1. Show interactive and dynamic views

Showing your progress on the ITONICS Radar to a larger audience can help you communicate critical insights in an interactive and dynamic radar view. By showing a live radar on your intranet or public-facing website, your audience can view real-time information and interact with your radar to encourage involvement. Use Embed to include a specific view from your ITONICS system on your website or intranet to help you communicate results and insights and keep stakeholders informed.

Step 1: Ask our Innovation Success Managers to activate ITONICS Embed for you to try for FREE.

Step 2: To embed content in your websites, ask your system administrator to add an Embed token that you can easily use to show your content outside the ITONICS system.

Step 3: Within each organization in ITONICS, you can create different spaces that allow you to spread responsibility across business units or diverse projects and topics. These are called workspaces. To use your Embed token, navigate to the specific workspace from which you want to use the content.

Step 4: Click on the Embed icon, select your preferences and copy the unique iframe code to embed into your site easily.

In the Embed above, you can see a technology radar which you can interact with straight from our page! Would you like to try it yourself?

2. Get presentation-ready exports in one click

Keeping stakeholders informed is part of successful innovation. You will need to communicate progress, key findings, and KPIs to get the necessary commitment for innovation investments. Quickly accessing relevant views from your ITONICS system to share in a presentation or email helps you provide essential details to stakeholders.  

How to quickly get presentation-ready views from your ITONICS system:

Step 1: According to your ITONICS plan, you can export Radar, Roadmap, and Elements. Navigate to the specific view you would like to export.

Step 2: Click the export button to export your view as a PDF or PNG. Locate your download in your Downloads folder.

Step 3: Insert your export in a presentation or email, and decide who needs to be included. Have a clear objective for why you are communicating specific information with the respective groups—i.e., are you trying to raise awareness or alignment, secure buy-in, and commitment, or call for concrete solutions or actions?

3. In-system newsletters to encourage participation

Captivating emails can significantly support your efforts to get teams involved, excited, and committed to driving innovation within your organization. Regular communication to share progress, exciting submissions, and inspirations to spark disruptive ideas help drive participation and keep teams across your organization engaged and motivated.

How to use in-system emails in ITONICS:

Step 1: According to your ITONICS plan, application owners can set up a newsletter to be sent straight from your ITONICS Innovation OS.

Step 2: Create the email template you will use to communicate with teams inside your organization.

Step 3: Manage your newsletters by testing or previewing emails in your ITONICS system. You can also export your mail as a PDF.

Communicating innovation insights: What’s next?

Want to learn more about the features and functionalities of the ITONICS Innovation OS? Get started with a free software demo!

Get started with the ITONICS Innovation OS

Have more time?

• Read How to Decide If ITONICS Is Right for You
• Read Innovation Reporting: 5 Charts You Really Need to Convince Management
• Listen: Collaboration Is the New Competition