Innovation management is critical to long term success

In today's rapidly changing business environment, managing innovation effectively has become an essential requirement for staying competitive. Long term sustainability for a business may be determined by a company's ability to competently direct innovation resources to address a constantly changing market and economic environment.

What is innovation management?

Innovation management describes the decisions, activities, and practices that move an idea to realization for the purpose of generating business value. It is managing the investment in creating new opportunities for generating customer value that are needed to sustain and grow the business or company. Generally, innovation investment focuses on the development of new products, services, or technologies. However, the types of innovation that can enhance business results go well beyond these, including changes to a company's business model. Identifying and making these investments successfully and repeatedly constitutes the key objective of innovation management.

Decisions critical to successful innovation

Those involved with innovating will generally tell you that generating ideas is not the difficult part of being successful with creation and change. Numerous decisions will be made that impact the progression and ultimate success of good ideas. These good ideas need to be related to solving a real business problem or growing an opportunity. Questions that hint at these decisions include: Is the potential innovation aligned with the business strategy? How does the proposed change generate value for the customer?

What investment is required? Will the needed investment generate an acceptable return? What would be the impact of the innovation on the current business? Could it disrupt existing profits? How long will it take for the new concept to be realized and impact the business? How might the innovation change or disrupt current markets? Will the new concept generate new revenue or reduce costs? How will the innovation enhance existing or create new barriers to competition? Is there easy access to the competencies needed to realize the new concept?

Many of the decisions associated with innovation management are common to the choices associated with a new venture start-up. Conflicts created by some of these choices points to some of the dilemmas associated with disruptive innovation.

Requirements for managing innovation

Having an innovation framework can be a key component to continuous effective change that increases the capability of the business to generate customer value. A critical part of this framework will be the decision making process that is used to funnel the potentially long list of ideas down to the critical few that will deserve investment. For large organizations, this is typically accomplished as part of a stage gate process, but multiple innovation models exist. Often these investments are considered as part of an overall business investment portfolio decision. Innovation promotes the need for constant change and renewal, potentially impacting all areas of a business. Change is often resisted, necessitating appropriate incentives and rewards to promote needed innovation. Many of the most enduring innovations have required long term investment and staying power. This must be addressed as part of the organizational decision making approach if an innovative environment is to be sustained. The desire to create long term competitive advantage will often lead to intellectual property and innovation being closely connected. As a result, innovation processes will often have requirements for generation of intellectual property that can protect advantages created by an innovation investment.

Benefits that come from managing innovation

Innovation management is quickly becoming a critical requirement for enabling a sustainable business. Some of the benefits for doing it well include: Improved timing for market introduction Ability to maintain or improve business margins

Enabling access to new customers and markets Increased market share Improved and longer lasting competitive advantage Increased employee engagement and initiative Improved customer satisfaction Sustainable increase in shareholder returns

Innovation is the development of new customers value through solutions that meet new needs, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding new ways. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different (Lat. innovare: "to change") rather than doing the same thing better.

The word innovation derives from the Latin word innovates, which is the noun form of innovare "to renew or change," stemming from in"into" + novus"new". Business and economics Main article: innovation economics

In business and economics, innovation is the catalyst to growth. With rapid advancements in transportation and communications over the past few decades, the old world concepts of factor endowments and comparative advantage which focused on an areas unique inputs are outmoded for todays global economy. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, who contributed greatly to the study of innovation, argued that industries must incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, that is innovate with better or more effective processes and products, such as the shift from the craft shop to factory. He famously asserted that creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.[3] In addition, entrepreneurs continuously look for better ways to satisfy their consumer base with improved quality, durability, service, and price which come to fruition in innovation with advanced technologies and organizational strategies.[4] One prime example is the explosive boom of Silicon Valley startups out of the Stanford Industrial Park. In 1957, dissatisfied employees of Shockley Semiconductor, the company of Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley, left to form an independent firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. After several years, Fairchild developed into a formidable presence in the sector. Eventually, these founders left to start their own companies based on their own, unique, latest ideas, and then leading employees started their own firms. Over the next 20

years, this snowball process launched the momentous startup company explosion of information technology firms. Essentially, Silicon Valley began as 65 new enterprises born out of Shockleys eight former employees.[5]
[edit] Organizations

"Smartly screened, problem-solving innovation proposals"

Innovation management that gets you to your goals

Shortening product life cycles, globalization and the increased speed of innovation combined with complex corporate structures make it difficult for top managers to assess what they need to respond to external changes. Strategic goals become difficult to communicate and disseminate and when information overflow is added to the picture many innovation proposals simply miss their target. As a result resources are wasted on projects that could be merged, synergies are overlooked and new products or services do not meet expectations. Studies suggest that this could be the main reason why the life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company is less than 50 years.

Business challenges

Focus innovation proposals on the needs of the organization and the goals of problem resolution Provide a virtual space where solution seekers can expose their needs to problem solvers and problem solvers can build solution proposals to meet those needs Realize synergies by merging like-minded proposals or by re-using proposals and solutions that have already been evaluated Break down corporate silos to involve the relevant people reviewing and evaluating proposals Enable social collaboration, document sharing and discussions on proposals Use knowledge, insights, and experiences to provide context

Systematically compare solutions using standardized ranking methods and evaluation forms

Solution
The Innovation Management module helps solution seekers publish their needs, collect and validate ideas from problem solvers, and enrich and mature the best ideas into smartly screened proposals. Ultimately, it helps you make the crucial Go/No-Go decisions with confidence. The module combines social collaboration, workflow and process management, rich context information and Inova's unique Enrichment Technology to support your innovation teams collective quest for the hidden gems.

Solution mktin

The process of defining, educating,and providing access to complete and integrated solutions that deliver customer value by helping customers to solve their problems.
http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2010/06/29/invention-or-innovation/ http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2009/02/27/fixing-the-mix/ http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2010/05/23/solution-mktg-strategy/ http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2009/12/30/intro-to-solution-mktg/ http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2010/06/29/invention-or-innovation/