The Most Important Secret to Successful Innovation

According to research conducted by Accenture, 96% of the studied executives agreed that the long-term success of their companies depends on their ability to innovate. However, not all businesses succeed in innovation. In fact, according to the same study, 72% of companies witness their innovation withering. Why? Glad you asked! The main culprit here is the lack of formalized process or organizational home for such initiatives.

Fear not–we have your back. Below, you can find the recipe for a successful innovation process that will keep your innovation efforts flourishing.

In our practise at Ideanote, we saw time and again that the best organizational home for such initiatives is an idea management platform. In fact, when it comes to innovating, idea management is a helpful tool in each phase of the innovation process.

Innovating with an idea management platform

An idea management platform is a digitalized tool that assists your company from idea generation to implementation. In addition, it facilitates employee engagement while saving the time of running unproductive meetings. That sounds great, right? Keep on the reading to understand how an idea management platform can be used to improve your innovation process.

Phase 1: Idea Generation

Even the brightest and most groundbreaking innovation starts with just an idea, a simple or complicated one. The idea generation phase is always at the beginning of the innovation process, and that is why it is important to start on the right foot.

An idea management platform facilitates your team in generating ideas by encouraging each member to contribute. It systematically gathers all your ideas in one place and helps you to avoid chaos. That's not all! Idea management platform helps you to gather the ideas from employees who are usually difficult to engage in a classic brainstorming session. In addition, it allows team members to come up with ideas and share them anywhere and at any time, by simply submitting them from their phone or computer.

Phase 2: Idea Evaluation

During the second phase, every collected idea has to be evaluated, meaning that a team assessment determines whether it is worth it to proceed with the idea or not. In this stage, each team member contributes to the idea’s analysis by adding his personal thought.

Running an efficient idea evaluation phase is extremely important for the business development

In this sense, an idea management platform is a tool that gives your employees the opportunity to type pros and cons related to the idea. Through using an innovative and simple tool to collect employees’ opinions, you have the guarantee of a qualitative assessment of the idea. Running an efficient idea evaluation phase is extremely important for the business development, since it saves you from wasting time on the 'wrong' ideas.

Phase 3: Idea Experimentation

In this phase, the selected ideas are being tested. However, not so much in its objective, as the overall fit for the company. Some ideas can be ahead on their time, while others can be out of sync with company's vision.

Often running pilot tests or creating prototypes will result in reevaluation of an idea or even more ideas. In this phase, smooth communication across departments is crucial. Idea management platform will enable you to involve everyone in this stage. Poor interdepartmental communication could result in conflicts, inefficiency and in loss of opportunities. In this sense, an idea management platform is a solution to strengthen your business and bring it to the next level.

Phase 4: Idea Commercialization

In the fourth phase of the innovation process, companies dig deeper into how the innovation is supposed to solve customer’s pains. The ultimate goal is to define idea's market value and learn how to clearly communicate its benefits to the customer.

The feedback and ideas of your potential customers are valuable factors to take into account to improve the product

One way of to achieve this insight is to open your innovation process to your potential target group. The feedback and ideas of your potential customers are valuable factors to take into account to improve the product. An idea management platform, such as Ideanote, allows your company to engage as many customers as you want.

Phase 5: Idea Implementation

The idea implementation is the last phase of the innovation process. In this stage, companies strive to get the final acceptance of the idea, while setting up everything needed to convert the abstract idea into a tangible product.

According to Brian Neese, for the innovation to succeed, it will need the proper resources, a marketing plan for customers and an open culture with strong advocacy.

However, innovation is not a linear process. For this reason, the last phase of innovation process is also an open window for the new ideas. The implementation stage will allow your company to find the next set of needs of your customers. And then we are back at Idea Generation.

Takeaways

A secret to successful innovation is a well-thought formalized process that will lead your team from the idea generation to implementation.

When it comes to determining the structure and resources needed to create a successful innovation process, an idea management platform is a perfect organizational home for all your innovation efforts.

Using an idea management platform will enable you to lead your teams through phases of Idea Generation, Idea Evaluation, Idea Experimentation, Idea Commercialization and Idea Implementation all in one app.

Also, if we have one more piece of advise, it is start today.

Still not sure if your business needs idea management? Book a friendly demo call with our Customer Success team and let's explore it together. No pushy sales messages or secret agenda–pinky promise.