Introducing the Innovation Portfolio Management Playbook
What is Innovation Management?
Every company wants to be more innovative. The difficult part is making it happen consistently over time. Innovation management is the process of organizing all of your innovation activities into a cohesive program that is streamlined to bring results. It’s an umbrella term that covers several areas, but at the core it’s all about identifying a strategic direction for your innovation efforts, engaging with the right audiences and data points to gather innovations, and managing a process that incubates them into solutions.
Enterprise Innovation Management Software
Innovation management takes the form of several methodologies. Take a look at each page below to get an understanding of these core solutions and how they can help your business to be more innovative.
Idea management is the structured process of collecting, screening developing, and implementing ideas that can help your organization to be more innovative and efficient.
Continuous improvement is exactly what it sounds like – the practice of continually improving and incrementally enhancing the performance of a company’s products, processes, or services.
Innovation & technology scouting allows companies to bypass these obstacles and deliver new products, services, and solutions that can dramatically enhance their value proposition.
Trend management refers to all the activities involved in scouting for and acting upon trends to fuel an organization’s innovation efforts.
Innovation portfolio management is a term that describes the maintenance and progression of an organization’s various innovation projects.
What are the Benefits
of Innovation Management?
Product & Service Development
The innovations that can be conceived, nurtured, and commercialized as part of your program will include new products and services that can open up a new place for your organization in the market and deliver that all-important ROI. However, other innovations that improve your existing products and services can be just as lucrative.
Optimized Process
Innovation isn’t just about what you sell to your customers or the touchpoints they interact with. New or improved processes behind the scenes can also radically improve your efficiency and profitability. Process improvements can deliver lower costs, better use of time, money, and other resources, and generate substantial ROI for your innovation program.
Crowdsourced Solutions
Whether it’s that lightbulb moment for a disruptive idea or a solution to a tricky business challenge, the solutions are out there somewhere. Whether it’s through scouting for trends or technologies, or challenging your employees or customers to submit their ideas, you can take whichever approaches you prefer to leverage the expertise and creativity of your stakeholders.
Culture of Innovation
Today, many successful innovation management programs open up the innovation process to the entire organization by engaging employees to contribute their ideas. In doing so, it can nurture a culture of innovation that runs across every team in every department, promoting positive approaches to problem-solving, and increased employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity.
Quantifying Innovation
Managing your various innovation activities as part of a systematic process helps to reduce the uncertainty around innovation by arming you with the information you need to make the right decisions. As part of your innovation management program, you will define a process to effectively develop your projects, track their performance, and drill down into the data available to you so that you can move forward with conviction.
What Are the Challenges of Innovation Management?
Corporate Barriers
Buy-in from leadership and the rest of the business is vital to the success of any innovation management program, but isn’t always straightforward
Breaking Down Silos
When you’re trying to unleash innovation across the organization, it can be difficult to shift the mindset that it is best left to the boardroom or R&D departments
So Much Data
Idea generation, technology scouting, project performance, every aspect of the innovation process generates masses of data that needs to be gathered, managed, and leveraged
Simplifying Processes
Whether you’re focused on an individual aspect of innovation management or in charge of an extensive program, identifying the most efficient processes is perplexing
Awareness & Engagement
Not only do you need to make everyone involved in your program aware of the process and their roles, you need to encourage constant engagement long-term
What is Innovation Management Software?
Innovation management software refers to a range of tools that allow you to carry out the full range of innovation activities: from trend management, technology scouting, and idea management, to continuous improvement and innovation portfolio management. Some providers may offer software that allows you perform only one or more of these activities, but Qmarkets offers a scalable ecosystem of solutions covering every aspect of innovation management.
Our Solution
The Innovation Ecosystem
One innovation ecosystem with infinite possibilities. Unlock your organization’s potential with Qmarkets’ intelligent suite of innovation management solutions. Start small with a single tool and scale at your own pace, with your very own Customer Success Expert with you every step of the way.
Benefits of The Innovation Ecosystem
Help to instill in your audience an innovator’s mindset and develop a culture where every contribution is considered
Identify and gather solutions that will deliver amazing results for your business
Challenges
Harness the collective wisdom of the crowd to solve your toughest challenges and seize your biggest opportunities
Scan millions of data points to research and engage with startups, technologies, experts, patents and more