Invention Machine’s Innovation Agenda

I have been writing regularly about innovation trends and the importance of executives championing a company’s innovation agenda. Now let me share with you my company’s innovation agenda and give you a taste of what’s to come in 2010.

Our innovation agenda is pretty straight forward. Hire and retain the best minds. Help drive and sustain our customers’ innovation initiatives and boost their return on innovation. Our technology is designed to strategically infuse innovation into every step of the product development process and deliver the right products, quickly and cost effectively — which in turn positively impacts a company’s bottomline.     

Like many CEOs, I meet with customers regularly to learn about their challenges and achievements. I then share the information with my team so they can create new technology or programs to meet our client’s innovation goals. Each week I also meet with my executive team and collectively design and shape our corporate agenda. Here are Invention Machine’s focus areas for the year:

Product Development

As leaders in our industry, we pay close attention to our customers needs and act on them quickly. Several months ago, they told us that collaboration and identifying experts were important to their business. We delivered Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0, with automatic expert identification and collaboration functionalities, along with other new features. Now global teams can use the technology to better collaborate and work outside their silos.

As the role of innovation is expanding, so is the usage of Goldfire, our innovation intelligence platform. Initially thought to be the exclusive domain of scientists and engineers, companies now recognize that innovation happens across the organization, every day. Mapping to this shift, we have decided to broaden Goldfire’s innovation workflows and are looking to add new workflows for tasks such as tracking user sentiment and technology landscaping. 

We will also incorporate additional capabilities to manage broad deployments while making the software easier to adapt across multiple departments. New language support will be added to expand Goldfire’s current multi-lingual offerings of English, French, German and Japanese. 

Client Services

This year, our focus is shifting from just successful software implementations to becoming a trusted advisor. To ensure our customers success, my team has created roadmaps to empower users to easily design an Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem, build high performance teams and see return on innovation  within 90 days. Our innovation experts will work closely with individuals to tailor the use of Goldfire to their specific job functions as well as design customized workshops for broader groups that will help the team further accelerate the innovation process.

Marketing

As innovation practitioners and champions, our clients are dedicated to delivering successful projects.  As we all know, just delivering great products and processes are not enough. One must effectively communicate the value of innovation initiatives to their peers and other potential communities across an organization. Therefore I have asked my marketing department to engage with our clients and their internal communications team to create campaigns that will effectively spread the word of their innovation success. This will also help attract people from other departments and geographies who may be able to pitch in as well as learn from best practices, all of which will foster better collaboration and impact revenue.

These are some highlights. Obviously I am not giving you every detail of our corporate strategy. Would you? In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you help drive your company’s innovation agenda.

Boost Revenue with the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem

During a recent trip to Europe, I had the opportunity to meet with more than a dozen clients. It was great to listen and learn from executives and engineers on how they are navigating through today’s challenging times and what they are doing and need to do to maintain their innovation edge. It was also gratifying to see how our innovation software is helping drive their innovation initiatives and hear rave reviews about our next technology release.

Now, as I mull over these conversations, two key items rise to the top. First, every company has multiple groups of innovators and each group needs relevant intelligence to drive their innovation tasks. Secondly, every company must have an Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem to drive sustainable innovation and revenue. Let me explain.

The innovation community

Global companies have multiple communities of innovators. In most, about 10-20 percent of innovation workers are master innovators who focus on driving disruptive innovation and strategic innovation initiatives. These projects include designing new products to increase competitive-edge, redesigning existing products to cut costs or identify new markets to drive revenue. This small group of scientists and engineers takes full advantage of advanced innovation technologies.

The second group consists of every day innovators who work on smaller innovation tasks, ranging from solving problems for customers and resolving field situations to researching competitor landscapes and ways to reuse existing technology. In addition to engineers and scientists, they could also be members of new business development, strategic planning and competitive analysis teams. This group of every day innovators represents 70-80 percent of employees, and while they may not make headlines, their innovation ensures their companies’ success.

Collectively, both master and every day innovators are responsible for maintaining a company’s innovation edge. In order to drive optimal success and help the community of innovators do their jobs effectively, each individual needs access to the right intelligence. Precise innovation intelligence can validate concepts upfront and help them deliver the right products the first time as well as solve every day problems faster.

Precise intelligence is the heart of innovation

To knowledge-empower these innovation communities, every company should design an Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem^TM – a framework for delivering precise and critical information from a variety of sources that lead to increased productivity. Internal innovation intelligence can come from legacy product design, best practice and customer usage while external content includes competitive intelligence, technology trends and scientific theories. Giving the innovation communities access to such critical information empowers them to deliver on strategic and every day innovation tasks and initiatives effectively.

Let me give you an example. One of our life sciences customers recently reported that by using Invention Machine Goldfire to drive their Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem, the engineers reclaimed more than 20 percent of their time, effectively increasing productivity by more than 30 percent. Invention Machine’s innovation platform allowed the engineers to devote more time to revenue-generating activities and deliver more products to market, faster.

Drive revenue with Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem

By knowledge-enabling the innovation community with an effective Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem, a company can successfully:

• increase productivity and cut development costs
• drive and sustain a continuous innovation process
• design cutting-edge products repeatedly and
• increase growth, revenue and market share.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on creating and supporting an Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem. Do you think it will help boost and sustain productivity, innovation and market share?