Innovation management is the process of taking your ideas from the brainstorming stage all the way to execution. Here's how to do it right.

1. What Is Innovation Management?

2. Crowdsourcing, Sustainability,
and Idea Graduation

3. Innovation management is about repeatable process.
Bringing a more precise, strategic process to innovation
-- which often falls victim to ambiguity -- is only logical,
but that doesn’t make it simple.
The need for repeatable execution is still a major factor.
We’ve been waiting around for an obvious pattern, but it
hasn’t appeared.

4. “Innovation management” sounds counterintuitive
Why restrict a creative process?
Somewhere along the line, people started to notice
that great ideas alone weren’t enough. Getting
stakeholders to buy into ideas didn’t always mean
anything would happen.
Big innovation killers are much the same as hurdles
faced by all aspects of a business. But at the core,
we’ve suffered an inability to actually plan around
the promise of multiple ideas — instead of just a
single, specific concept.

5. That means great ideas + available resources = innovation management.
Right?
Wrong.
So far, we’ve been okay at recognizing an idea with
potential, and even mapping out the various resources
we’ll need to make it a full-blown project.
However, the direction we take has typically been
dependent on what the idea is. It’s caused innovation
to be at the mercy of available resources, and in turn,
suffocate before it even gets the chance to breathe.

6. But innovation doesn’t just happen, and you can’t force or predict great ideas!
We can’t leave something this important up to chance
anymore, even if it’s hard to mechanize something
rooted in creativity.
We need a process that supports ingenuity but still
follows a tactical blueprint.
Innovation management allows for the selection,
capture, and implementation of great ideas.

7. Innovation management helps us
develop a way of responding to
market change with fresh
perspectives, and take calculated
risks with more to rely on than just
a pair of crossed fingers.

8. So, how do we make
innovation
repeatable?

9. Crowdsourcing.
• Crowdsourcing is about generating a ton of ideas en
masse.
• It’s a way of engaging people to provide resources
outside of standard organizational means.
• Basically, you get access to widespread genius
without having to do a whole lot.

10. Idea Graduation.
• Vet possibilities that are brought to the surface by
crowdsourcing according to business impact.
• But, let the crowd do the work by implementing
processes like Pairwise Voting, which allows
participants to select ideas through careful
consideration and comparison.
• Remember to involve key stakeholders so that
potential idea-gems don’t get lost in the fray.

11. Strategy, strategy, strategy.
• Be armed with a plan.
• After you’ve chosen one or more ideas that made it
past the crowdsourcing and voting gates, it’s time
perform risk analyses, data aggregation, and resource
assessments.
• Think about schedules, budgets, and team
communications, as well as how project management
will be handled.

12. Do it again. And again. And again.
• No process is worth much if you can’t do it more than
once.
• Be clear about what that process is. Lay it out from
start (engaging and ideating) to finish (implementing
and executing).
• Communicate! Tell your people about it, and then
encourage them to participate, generate, and iterate.

13. Innovation management
isn’t really all that different
from managing other
processes.

14. But it’s all about the
framework — creating a
system that aligns with your
company goals, and weaving
clear, core principles into the
everyday practices of your
business.

15. Want to learn more?
To find out how Mindjet can help
your organization implement an
innovation management program
for repeatable success, check out
the latest release of SpigitEngage.
Learn more about innovation
management by
subscribing to Conspire, Mindjet’s
company blog.