Home	Marketing	Sales	Management	Finance	Downloads	Subscribe

Innovation Management Process

What are the 7 Steps to Innovation Management Process?

Understanding the Different Aspects of Innovation Management

The innovation management process has become an important part of the operation of many businesses as the recognition of the importance of initiatives toward innovation has become much more common. That said, while many companies do attempt to have a solid approach to creativity and innovation, all 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 hope 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. This can be accomplished with 7 basic steps.

Goal Establishment

An innovation begins with a goal in mind. It is usually based on finding the solution to a problem or a challenge. 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 even involve others such as your customers (who can provide suggestions and feedback based on their own experience with your product) or other stakeholders in the business.

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.

Combination

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.

Evaluation

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 scientific 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.

Testing

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 idea is to create a prototype. 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.

Execution

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 company.

Assessment

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.

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.