Recently, Brightidea Senior Innovation Consultant Kristen Jordan Fotter joined Carrie Nauyalis, New Product Development Solution Evangelist of Planview, to share how companies can take their innovation program to the next level by leveraging best practices during the front end phase of the innovation process.
You can view the webcast in full here: gotomeeting.com
Additionally, here is an overview of the 8 key areas of the front end of innovation highlighted in the webcast:
Identify the Problem and the Opportunity
From the very beginning, it’s important to set the precedent for the key challenge you’re going to set out to solve among employees, colleagues, and subject matter experts. Rather than creating a general bucket to collect ideas, you can provide direction and a goal for your participants by creating multiple challenges to solve – for example, cutting costs in production, going green and more.
Engagement: Enticing Participants with Incentives
To bring the desired participants to the table, you’ll need to develop an engagement plan to attract and draw in people. As you’re developing your engagement plan, you’ll need to understand the key aspects of your audience. Where are they located around the globe, and in what time zones? What are the demographics of your desired participants? What positions do they hold within the company?
Engagement: Attracting Participants with Marketing
If you build it, they will come…well actually, just creating an innovation campaign on its own won’t necessarily draw in participants automatically. You’ll need to uncover key motivators for engaging people to participate. This may include positive feedback from their direct manager, attention from leadership, opportunity to lead a team, and more. And, have some fun with it! We encourage you to engage campaign sponsors, idea submitters, idea evaluators and those supporting the process for ideas on how to engage participants.
Idea Generation, Collection and Collaboration
Brilliant innovations come from collaboration and the merging of ideas. The science behind innovation is creating the environment and bring the right audiences together to develop and cultivate those ideas. The right tools will offer an environment, a digital space where people from all over the world can come together to share, collaborate, talk to each other and develop innovations that will solve those key challenges.
Idea Evaluation: SME Scorecarding
During the front end of innovation, you’ll be collecting thousands of ideas for a campaign with the objective of narrowing these ideas down to around 100, and you’ll work with subject matter experts during this process. It’s important to have multiple campaigns around a specific problem, so that you can compare responses and vet the ideas to become more streamlined. In the scorecarding process, you’ll answer a lot of questions, such as patent availability and potential costs.
Establishing a Workflow
Ultimately, no one standard workflow will apply to every campaign you run as every topic, every participating audience is unique. We suggest taking a look at the topic and who is behind the generation of ideas, and build the workflow from here. After you’ve identified the workflow, make sure that you have also estimated the budget based on ideas to implement as this will also set a precedent with stakeholders.
Measuring ROI
You have to be able to measure the performance of your innovation campaign. Start with the end in mind, talk about what you want to achieve with each campaign, and what you want that outcome to be to define your ROI. Is it cost savings? Employee satisfaction? Time savings? For example, one of our customers, a global telecom company, was able to measure cost savings and new revenue generated in excess of $150 million during lifetime of their innovation program. Whether you’re looking for new revenue or improvements on loyalty and retention, develop your plan with how you’ll measure ROI and you’re one step closer to getting your challenge off the ground.
For more insights on the front end of innovation, please feel free to contact Brightidea anytime with questions and stay tuned for more webcasts.
