
How to create an innovation roadmap
Innovation management is more than just standard project management. From idea development to successful innovation, there are numerous obstacles to overcome. The innovation process is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. An innovation roadmap helps to manage these uncertainties.
Instead of a rigid project plan with fixed tasks and responsibilities, clear milestones are defined. The road to these milestones can change. This approach is comparable to agile project management, where goals are defined. How these goals are achieved lies in the responsibility of teams.
The benefits of having an Innovation Roadmap
The establishment of an innovation roadmap has clear advantages for companies and innovation teams:
Companies that rely on an innovation roadmap instead of rigid project plans in innovation management are more agile in the implementation phase and the quality of innovations increases.
Failure – for example, a technical development or an acceptance test with customers – is not regarded as a failure, but as a necessary part to deliver the best possible result at the next defined milestone.
Characteristic elements of an innovation roadmap
A sophisticated innovation roadmap follows a simple principle: develop, test, optimize. Innovations go through the following stages:
- Concept
- Prototype
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- the development of the finished solution
In each stage, new insights for the development of the innovation are being generated.
Setting up an innovation roadmap in the Innolytics® software is easy
In the Innolytics® software’s so-called “process manager” you can configure the innovation process according to your needs.
The “Roadmap” menu item is located in the Process Manager. Here you can specify which elements you would like to include in the roadmap.
Enter for example:
- Completion of the concept,
- Presentation to the management,
- Development of prototype,
- Prototype test,
- Revision of the prototype,
- Presentation of results to the management
- Realization
You can determine whether innovation teams can deviate from the defined roadmap or not. The template for an Innovation Roadmap has been created.
In the next step, you determine in which phase of your innovation process the roadmap should be active. Already in the first phase of idea submission? Or only later, when it enters the concept development phase or even the implementation phase? If you use different methods of innovation management (e.g. CIP, idea management, open innovation, etc.), you can define different innovation roadmaps for different methods.
You may be driving different innovation projects with different logic at the same time. For example, the development of a new product, a digital business model and the development of a joint business model with a partner company. All three projects require a different logic for milestone planning. The Innolytics® software allows you to define an individual innovation roadmap for each project, which takes into account the particularities of these projects.