Innovation is driven by various factors: new and changing customer needs, technological developments, policies and laws, competitor activities, and societal change. Gathering the right data that reveals potential opportunities for your organization requires rigorous processes, well-defined capabilities, and robust tools.
But this is only one part of innovation management.
Innovation management consists of various non-linear phases that need to integrate seamlessly. The end-to-end innovation process is defined at ITONICS through three leading questions; Where to Play, How to Win, and What to execute. To find answers to all questions and move dynamically through all phases, innovators require processes, capabilities, tools, effective communication channels, infrastructure that supports co-creation, and consolidated platforms.
Most innovators start with disconnected tools and fragmented processes while still building capabilities. But how do you scale your innovation management?
How innovation management has changed
Typically, documents, spreadsheets, and brainstorming tools are used to do the job. Innovation management often is isolated to a few individuals within an organization, however, we need to adopt the mindset that everyone can innovate. Innovation needs to be faster, more impactful, and include cross-departmental teams as part of the daily business.
For that to happen, processes, people, and platforms must be connected. Involving more people in the process highlights the necessity for a single point of truth. For example, successful open innovation involves receiving solutions and ideas from various sources worldwide. These ideas must be gathered, processed, and developed effortlessly and swiftly.
Increasingly complex innovation needs a solution that simplifies, connects, and helps build a culture of innovation.
When do you need innovation management software?
Do you need innovation management software? The short answer is yes. Regardless of your organization’s or team’s size, if you are aiming at maturing your innovation efforts, carrying out end-to-end innovation efficiently, and establishing innovation as a central driver for growth – you need innovation software. The following questions will help you consider the reasons why you need innovation management software:
1. You need to save time so you can make decisions faster.
The speed of change isn't showing signs of slowing down. Fast innovators are able to respond and adapt to changes quickly. Making decisions, acting, learning, and iterating rapidly could mean the difference between establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage or losing out.
2. You need to systemize innovation efforts to strengthen collaboration.
Collaboration and co-creation are crucial for impactful innovation. You can leverage collective intelligence by gathering various perspectives and getting expert input from across and beyond your organization. Diverse input will help enrich ideas and solutions and propel implementation.
3. You need to improve transparency so you can get management buy-in more easily.
Synchronizing all innovation efforts across different functions improves transparency. Having clear visibility of innovation activities, insights and progress will help keep stakeholders informed, engaged, and invested.
4. You want to establish growth mindsets and build a culture of innovation within your organization.
Firmly establishing innovation as a critical driver for growth requires standardized processes and reliable and robust systems. Build internal innovation capabilities by connecting teams across functions, units, and geographies with one central source.
Find out if the ITONICS Innovation OS is right for you!
If you are still reading, then you likely need innovation software. ITONICS could be your solution. But how do you know if our Innovation OS is right for you?
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What is an Innovation OS?
The ITONICS Innovation Operating System is a one-stop innovation management software solution. Instead of you and your colleagues using a range of different tools for growth strategy, foresight, environmental scanning, ideation, open innovation, portfolio management, or roadmapping, ITONICS is one integrated solution. It becomes a single point of truth to unify your company's innovation activities instead of scattered efforts by different teams across various documents and tools. With ITONICS, innovators can scan through vast amounts of data, arrive at answers fast, and steer strategic decision–making all the way to project execution.
Next step: Review your current processes. Which areas need improvement?
To drive new products and services, you need to constantly scout and scan for drivers of change. Understanding which new technologies are entering the market, how consumer wants and needs are changing, and which startups may disrupt your industry, provides the foundation for uncovering opportunities and threats for your organization.
The ITONICS Insights tool accelerates environmental scanning by providing up-to-date data from millions of data points in a Signals Feed. Scouts worldwide can use the same system to scan and filter to find the 'golden nuggets.' Advanced search, filtering, and dynamic visualizations accelerate scouting and monitoring drivers of change. Teams can share filtered views with saved presets and so unify environmental scanning.
Uncovering the right opportunities to act on or knowing how risks may influence your organization is imperative but can be difficult. Due to fragmented tools and documents, your current processes may be labor-intensive and disconnected. Collecting reliable data and making sense of the data requires a solid structure. Knowing which drivers of change to pay attention to short, mid, and long term can be inaccurate if it relies on a few individuals' viewpoints.
ITONICS Radar helps you to understand, evaluate, share, connect, discuss and map trends, emerging technologies, risks, startups, competitors, and more on one collaborative platform. Radar views provide a 360-degree view of your corporate landscape, and dynamic, configurable visualizations make it easy to interpret collective assessments. Teams can easily evaluate information and quickly see what's most important to them. Use radars to communicate insights and report findings convincingly.
Collecting ideas that aim to maintain or establish your competitive advantage, or respond to a particular challenge can significantly boost impactful innovation. But gathering and processing ideas from global participants require cross-functional support and collaboration. Assessing and selecting the best ideas and developing and processing submissions need well-defined workflows and a system that is easy to understand and accessible across geographies.
ITONICS Campaigns makes idea management easy, whether it is for 10 or 100,000 participants. Enable collaborators globally to submit ideas and evaluate them by asking experts from inside and outside your organization to rate submissions based on your unique criteria. Move ideas through workflows and use built-in dashboards to report to management. Encourage participation with gamification, customizable newsletters, and easy-to-submit forms that can be accessed from your website.
Innovation ideas need to be transformed into actionable growth initiatives. This process requires innovators to prioritize the right ideas, have an overview of all innovation initiatives, and steer initiatives transparently and agilely. Having all innovation activities connected significantly accelerates and strengthens the process from ideas to execution.
ITONICS Portfolio and Roadmap support you in creating dynamic plans and aligning work activities. You can take action based on collective evaluation and identify synergies and bottlenecks. Customizable phase-gate workflows, kanban and task boards, and dynamic roadmaps empower your teams to steer strategy to execution.
How does ITONICS help me to create an innovation culture at my company?
ITONICS supports global participation in innovation activities by acting as a single point of truth. Single sign-on, a branded web portal, rich collaboration features, and a smooth user experience guarantee a fast roll-out and grows the intrapreneurship you need in volatile times.
Why should I choose the ITONICS Innovation OS?
The ITONICS Innovation OS is a simple and efficient way to centralize all your data related to trends, emerging technologies, startups, competitors, opportunities, risks, idea challenges, innovation portfolios, and roadmaps. ITONICS is not just trends. Or ideas. Or projects. It's a system for everything from strategy to execution on one digital platform. On ITONICS, all growth, transformation, and new business activities are transparent, interlinked, planned, structured, and managed. The most innovative organizations around the globe such as KPMG, Siemens Energy, adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and Mondelez innovate with ITONICS.
3 helpful hints for promoting innovation management software in your teams:
- Highlight the benefits and value: Communicate the benefits (how it will enhance internal processes) and value (how it will help the company meet its strategic goals).
- Use the buy-in from colleagues: Ask your colleagues to join you in the 30-day free trial. That way, you can support each other and reach a consensus on the software that best suits your needs.
- Communicate the credibility of the software: By communicating relevant case studies, you will illustrate the reliability of the software and demonstrate how others have used it to innovate.
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