Three Aspects in Innovation Management

Innovation must have an end result. It starts from managing business goals transparently together with innovation.
Innovation Management is an important pillar of strategy management. With today's emphasis on innovation per se and its importance to corporate survival, perhaps innovation is so important that the semantic should be recognized as such. So how to identify the gaps and manage it seamlessly?Are there truly bad or wrong ideas? Or merely poorly executed ones? Can we unilaterally pick "winning ideas" or is that subject to interpretation and ultimately implementation/execution? Gaming as it applies to innovation is intriguing -- to truly have the impact it MUST capture both the fuzzy front end and the strategic back end of innovation, what are the further aspects of Innovation Management?


Innovation ecosystem and governance are very important. It is a common knowledge, that innovation management requires the highest risk taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets. Create a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches, shielding innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standard operating procedures, which can stifle new thinking and approaches. It’s also important to highlight the benefits of "interaction." Innovation is a non-linear process much akin to evolution. Seeing innovation as a complex adaptive system one can easily see the value of placing ideas into an environment of interaction/ collaboration where they can be tested and are have the opportunity to evolve.

Close three gaps in innovation management: idea gaps, collaboration gaps, and implementation gaps.  This differentiation helps delineate the problems and opportunities for innovation. Build a heterogeneous team with a diversity of thoughts is the best way to close idea gaps; modern technology has made collaboration increasingly easy and seamless. The gap between collaboration and innovation is a big issue, especially in the booming world of collaboration software. Even after implementing a company-wide social collaboration platform, it hardly never affects to your innovation development directly, true collaboration doesn't happen as often as we'd like and people are sometimes afraid of letting go regarding of their title or whatever... It is also more difficult to just create human contact when the teams spread globally and/or if sharing values are still poor due to organization belonging importance. What also vexes most companies (and "innovators") is an implementation (commercialization of new ideas). That is why most innovation initiatives fail. People need to learn how to incubate and commercialize ideas more successfully. And in today's go-to-market business environment - the art of commercialization is becoming increasingly complex.

Innovative organizations have deployed a range of different management, technology, process, and structural solutions:• Earlier commercial involvement in project decision making, in an effort to enhance focus on commercially relevant compounds• More rigorous procedures for portfolio management and more stringent criteria for the adoption of new projects• Clearer guidelines for the handover from discovery to development, and for the integration of basic laboratory research with clinical trials and other applied research• More sophisticated and comprehensive incentive and reward structures• New structures that enable more external partnerships for discovery and the outsourcing of “non-core” activities

Innovation must have an end result. It starts from managing business goals transparently together with innovation. If social collaboration, innovation management, and development processes are driven with clear strategic goals, the risks are easier to manage. This also enables co-creative processes not only to innovation but to business development overall. Achieving the above objectives requires a contracted process with clear stages, performance thresholds, and decision-making parameters combined with an iterative, experiential learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu