The 8 Phases of an Innovation Management Process

 

Janne Ohtonen

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autor: Janne Ohtonen – The 8 Phases of an Innovation Management Process

 

The innovation management process has become an important part of the operations of many businesses, as the recognition of the importance of initiatives towards innovation has become much more common.
That said, while many companies do attempt to have a solid approach to creativity and innovation, too few actually focus on it as a single function. Instead, they seem to hold many separate activities in isolation, such as brainstorming sessions, pilot projects and campaigns, and vague communication with the market, and simply keep fingers crossed that it will come together in the end. While this has worked for some in the past, it is far from the ideal way of performing this important task. Instead, the best way to accomplish this is to have a set innovation activities which integrates the activity into the regular cycle of your business. The list below shows the phases in innovation management process, which will help your organization to put it all together as one process.

Setting the goals for the process

Innovation always begins with a goal in mind. It is many times based on finding the solution to a problem. Once you have this goal, it should be discussed among everyone in the problem solving team. This team may consist of you and another person, a group of people, or may even be all of your organization’s employees. It may involve others such as your customers (who can provide suggestions and feedback based on their own experience with your product or service) or other stakeholders in the business. When you establish the team for this process, make sure that you have someone representing all the parts of the process from start to the end.

Cooperation

The innovation team should work together so that instead of trying to come up with an idea separately, they can bounce ideas off one another and create a collaborative solution. This can include the use of online tools, attendance of events such as trade shows that can be inspiring and informative, or simply consist of brainstorming sessions. You might  consider having a trained business coach facilitating the discussions. There are many online tools available for real-time document sharing that might help teams that are geographically separated to still have intense cooperation.

Combination of ideas

Once the ideas are in, choose the best ones and then consider whether they can be combined to create an even greater idea. Often, strong ideas will be complementary to one another and will join well to create an even better result. As you know, the whole result can be bigger than its individual parts. And for this combination to work well, you need representatives of all parties involved in the process, because they for sure have ideas that people from other departments could not come up with. Business coaches may be useful here for making sure that all the angles of innovative aspect are covered.

Evaluation of innovation

This is an important and yet all too frequently overlooked aspect of the innovation management process. When the best ideas have been combined, fine-tuned, and polished, it is time to subject them to evaluation based on peer reviews. This helps to ensure that any ideas that have a promising veneer but that are poorly thought out will be identified before resources, funding and time have been poured into them. It also helps to select the ideas with the greatest potential from among several that appear equally capable of being successful. It is cheap to change your innovation at this stage compared to later stages. Each step you take forward will cost you more…

Testing the ideas

Once the ideas with the greatest potential have been identified, they can be tested so that they can be better developed. One of the most common means of testing a product or service idea is to create a prototype or test group. This allows the team, as well as customers and investors to have a better look at how the product will function and what changes can be made to it so that it will be even further improved. Make sure that the product or service not only raises interest but is able to generate orders also. If people say that they are interested in it, then ask them if they give you the order right away.

Execution of innovation implementation

The ideas that survive the testing process can be further developed and altered until they are ready to be executed as a part of the business offerings. The execution of implementation is a step that is unique to your business and, unless your new product causes you to have to drastically alter the typical way that your go-to-market strategy functions, then this part of the innovation management process should be relatively commonplace in your organization. It should be easier for you to move from testing to execution if you were able to generate orders already in testing phase.

Assessment of innovation life-cycle

After the execution of an idea, its implementation needs to be carefully monitored and assessed in terms of a number of milestones that should be set. Should a milestone not be reached, then changes will need to be made or the idea will need to be shut down. Remember to keep always customer in your mind also in execution phase and design your measuring systems so that they measure added value for the customer (you get what you measure and customers weight you based on that!).

 

The next step in the process is simply to start again, always finding new needs, inspiration, solutions and taking them through the cycle until they can be offered by your company. Here are some reflective questions that you can use to evaluate innovation management process in your organization:

  • Do you have a clearly defined innovation management process?
    • If yes, is it effective?
    • If no, how do you see that clearly defined innovation management process could help your organization to achieve goals better?
  • Are all the people in your organization working together towards great innovations or do they do things on their own?
  • Do you always properly evaluate and test your innovations before taking them to market?
  • Do you measure execution of providing services or products from customer’s perspective?

BPM and CRM Tango

Ashish Mathur

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autor: Ashish Mathur – BPM and CRM Tango

 

There are two industry terms – BPM and CRM – which people may be playing around separately to play there day to day business games. Let’s understand each one and see if there could be any correlation between the two.

  • BPM is termed as “holistic approach” to promote business effectiveness and efficiency. It promotes innovation, flexibility and integration with technology.
  • CRM is considered as a way for business to connect with their customers, understand them, increase profits and have better customer service.

By having achieved efficiency and effectiveness (BPM); understand customer requirements and better connection to the customer (CRM); both the terms are coined for getting profits for the business ultimately.

As the business world is moving more and more towards service orientation, the question comes how to achieve process efficiencies and do more business with the availability of many services and software around the corner.

 

One possible answer for this can be CRM with BPM practices

Some of the surveys show that many businesses are struggling to manage customer expectations due to the inability to manage their service requests in a consistent manner. The reason behind this might be that customer service people may have to interact with many systems to service the customer request, which may lead to inconsistency sometimes. The pitfall behind this approach also seems that customer service agents need some training to manage all this complexity of different systems.

One of the best examples of this could be: if a customer asked to add a new member to his insurance plan, then the service agent would have to validate the caller’s identification, and then would have to check his payment history. Finally, she then adds the new member to the policy. Each of these sub processes can be different services which require different systems/tools.

One possibility of improvement at this point could be to combine BPM and CRM which may lead to process and relationship management efficiency. Adding BPM and CRM can cover up gaps which may arise due to the lack of knowledge of different processes and handling with different systems. Another great advantage of this tango could be that it gives the customer relationship agent the same view the customer has, as an outsider (he does not think about different systems). Basically, the customer will act as a process participant in this conjunction who will help in driving the whole process.

 

Challenges

Many people are/might be finding it rigid to combine the both, as CRM is considered as easy and BPM as disruptive. It may be a challenging job to show business users the benefits of BPM to them and there customers. One clinch in this is that many CRM vendors claim to have BPM/Workflows already implemented within their solutions, which fosters the image of not to use BPM as a separate identity for the adaptation of efficiency improvement. BPM is more abstract in terms of concrete details than CRM.

 

Way to Go

If business gets ready to opt for this tango, then the question arises which one and how much: should it be Core CRM with some BPM, or Core BPM with some CRM? Actually, the answer lies in the business nature itself. Some businesses are more process driven than others. Some industries use a robust process driven approach which requires a high level of BPM capabilities raher than CRM, like Insurance or Finance; and some may need more CRM capabilities rather than BPM like in Retail. So it’s up to the business stakeholders which dish they want to pick more. It seems true that use of both in conjunction with each other will take the business efficiencies and do more business to the next level, and so is the business profit.