Why innovation management is changing faster than ever before
Until recently the definition of innovation management seemed to be quite obvious:
Creating and monitoring an innovation process in order to optimize business processes and develop new products.
Due to increasing market dynamics and trends like digitization innovation managers today face more complex challenges. Innovation management is becoming more agile and more adaptive to face today’s business challenges. Methodologies like the continues improvement prozess and traditional innovation processes are still needed. They are complemented through methodologies like open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation
Future challenges of innovation management
Improving business processes has always been the focus of state-of-the-art idea management and innovation management systems. Some of the companies we worked with have separated continuous improvement from their innovation management. Others see the improvement of internal business processes as a part of innovation management. With trends like digitization the transformation of analog business processes into digital ones will generate even larger challenges in the years to come.
Technology driven innovation management like the development of new and better performing products will be as important in the future as it is today. Facing the rise of smart products more and more companies see an increased need for speeding up innovation processes to be able to offer digital services in the nearer future. In a lot of cases products must be redesigned to meet the challenges of the digital business world.
Innovation management – new skills and capabilities are required
Methodologies like open innovation will therefore be a vital part of a future innovation management system in companies. Innovation management has a need for the ability to absorb external knowledge and to work together with experts that are traditionally not a part of the innovation process. For example, experts for the internet of things.
A company’s capability to stay competitive in today’s markets is mainly determined by its ability to serve customers with state of the art digital services. The need to rethink the traditional value chain is a crucial challenge to master. Digital services and business models cannot be developed with traditional innovation processes. New agile methodologies are necessary in order to meet these challenges.
How the Innolytics innovation management software supports companies to master their challenges
When we designed the Innolytics® innovation management software and idea management software we had in mind that innovation management is changing faster than ever before. We designed the software to meet all of the innovation management challenges described in this article.
The underlying concept of the Innolytics® software is a multi-platform approach. Innovation managers can execute traditional innovation processes as well as campaigns on an open innovation platform. They can also implement innovation platforms for digital accelerators. The Innolytics innovation management software has been designed as a result of scientific work done by Innolytics® CEO Dr. Jens-Uwe Meyer. Between 2009 and 2016 he compared more than 200 studies done on innovation management. He concluded that the innovation management of the future is driven by a company’s ability to apply a variety of innovation methodologies. Based on his scientific work he developed the concept for the Innolytics software that provides companies with state of the art innovation management software and idea management software.
