Ideation + Delivery = Innovation. It’s a simple equation that is often a lot easier said than done. But why? We have heard it time and again…Somewhere between the birth of an idea and the delivery phase, innovation slows or becomes nonexistent. Which is why “Innovation is rewarded but execution is worshipped!” While most innovation management software makes it possible for teams and organizations to gather and iterate on ideas, the question you must ask is, how do you ensure the best ideas become reality?
No matter how you get work done, whether it’s Agile, traditional waterfall, Lean, or something in between, organizations must be able to establish an innovation culture where ideas are collected, evaluated, prioritized, and then turned into amazing products, services, and efficiencies that your business and your customers want.
To help you in your search for the right innovation management platform, we have compiled a checklist of what to look for in an innovation management platform, complete with project collaboration and project delivery capabilities.
For innovation management, you need to:
✔ Create and submit challenges: Engage all employees, customers, and partners throughout the innovation process. Look for a robust, user-centric interface that enables everyone to easily submit and evaluate ideas, so the best ones rise to the top.
✔ Collaborate: Bolster enterprise-wide participation and idea quality with configurable idea capture and collection. Look for a solution that encourages all employees and external participants to help the organization quickly and efficiently evaluate, score, prioritize, and advance the most promising ideas. Look for embedded features like:
- Social media: Elements such as quick thumbs up and down voting, commenting, sharing, and following ideas.
- Gamification: Motivate users to earn badges and increase their levels as a Creator, Collaborator, and/or Supporter.
- Crowd endorsements: Recognize others as a Citizen, Maker, Connector, and All-Star.
- Reputation scoring: Easily identify the best ideas and contributors: The higher the score, the more weight it carries in ratings.
✔ Automate the innovation workflow: Look for a solution that provides automated workflows and configurable scoring methods to quickly move ideas through the process.
✔ Pairwise comparison. Look for a tool that lets your employees, customers, and partners do the heavy lifting of identifying winning ideas using fun and simple pairwise comparisons.
✔ Estimate idea implementation and value. Employee-generated predictions allow you to capitalize on the power of the crowd to more effectively predict average effort and outcomes.
✔ Celebrate innovation success. Visualize employee participation and activity, innovation value, and ROI with analytics and reporting.
For successful delivery of those ideas you need to:
✔ Plan and organize. Look for a solution that has project Gantt charts and roadmapping capabilities. Gantt charts enable organizers to plan and visualize every step of a project to track progress and ensure deadlines are met. This includes milestones, dates, and durations.
✔ Assign work to teams: Look for a solution that has customizable Kanban boards for a visual representation of your work streams, where each work task is represented as a card. Contain the work and tasks assigned to team members. Kanban boosts motivation and engagement within the project team and makes follow-up of project deliverables both easier and more accurate.
✔ Workload views: Look for a tool that gives you visibility into a work and capacity to determine team member availability. Help track key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics, be it time, costs, materials, or whatever is related to your project to see the status of the work.
✔ Document management. This is a major plus! Look for a solution with document collaboration capabilities to ensure documents are in one place and that any changes to those documents are visible in real-time and maintained with version controls that show the history of those documents.
The right innovation management solution helps bring ideas and delivery together in one coherent experience and collaborative effort. It helps foster a team experience and brings everything and everyone together. It’s an out-of-the box solution with the ability to customize and configure everything to fit your project.
To learn about how Planview’s Innovation Management solution can help your organization, check out the demo Connecting Innovation and Delivery.
