Let Innovation ThrivePerhaps no ingredient is more important to business success than innovation. How can your organization deploy knowledge and information management to enable it to thrive throughout the enterprise?Continued from Page 1 Scanning. This process is about defining the operating landscape of your business and paying constant attention to it in order to build and continually refine your image of it. The landscape could include certain internal and external activities, such as those of competitors or business partners. It could include monitoring some key performance indicators in your business for comparison to external benchmarks of market peers. The scanning process depends on a monitoring system that can help you to identify the unexpected and spot incongruities so that at least you have some capability and think-time to react to them. It also depends on event management, which means the ability to recognize events occurring both inside and outside your business that you expect will have a material impact. Innovation may be triggered by both threats and opportunities, so a monitoring system must be able to identify both and communicate them to the right stakeholders for analysis and action. Collaborating. There will always be the individual genius capable of producing innovation as a solo pursuit. But most people agree that innovation, whether upstream or downstream, is more likely to succeed when groups of individuals collaborate. In today's business context this does not mean just groups of employees but cross-organizational clusters of business partners that may include customers, suppliers, and investors. The collaboration process depends on the ability to identify common goals and share data and information so that participants can make sense of innovation collectively as well as individually. The content created by a collaboration process is also a way to identify mood swings and introduce new knowledge. Sparking. Without a spark plug, the internal combustion engine can't drive anything. Sparking is the process of receiving input from a wide variety of sources and processing it to jump-start innovation. Employee suggestions, customer feedback, marketing surveys, brainstorming, and focus groups are all ways to encourage sparking. Sparking may simply depend on creating the time or space for inspiration to emerge. But the sparking process is likely to help pinpoint mood swings and incongruities or generate new knowledge that otherwise would lie dormant. Although sparking is often associated with creative thinking techniques, it is also about paying closer attention to the way consumers look, act, and speak. Shepherding. Shepherds know that abandoning your flock of sheep to the elements and predators is hardly likely to put meat on the table. Once identified and acted upon, innovation opportunities demand careful shepherding to reach their potential and deliver value. The shepherding process has a lot of similarities with the concept of start-up company incubators that attempt to create a business environment that enables fledgling businesses to flourish. The task is no different in shepherding those key drivers of innovation: ideas. Every idea needs careful shepherding to realize its potential and deliver innovation. In the innovation business, shepherds may be called "visionaries," "evangelists," or "product champions." Whatever the name, they are all responsible for publicizing, protecting, nurturing, and realizing innovative ideas. (See the sidebar, "Five Catalysts for Innovation.") Gartner's Five CategoriesA Gartner Research Note published on January 21, 2002 (see Resources) suggests that innovation management products are emerging in five categories:
Idea management technology is used to stimulate, capture, evaluate, and qualify ideas. This technology goes way beyond employee suggestion boxes and customer feedback surveys by creating a means to process ideas in a structured way. Innovation life-cycle management technology attempts to coordinate the entire innovation life cycle from the envisioning stage through to the rewarding of individual innovators or innovation workgroups.
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