Defining Innovation

I think we can all agree that innovation is a buzzword today. It seems like everything is an innovation and everyone is an innovator.  Yet, innovation means different things to different people, depending on their perspective or profession. People often talk about innovation being a good idea and a company is judged by the number of patents filed. Is that innovation?

Let me take a moment to share with you my definition of innovation and ROI as it pertains to our business and clients.  

To me, innovation is transforming ideas into market-leading, practical products – products that are affordable and impact life and society every day. Innovation for innovation sake is wasted investment. Innovation must be useful to a company’s target audience not just be a ‘cool’ idea that will hopefully find an audience. As for patents, they must be monetized so they add value to a company’s bottom line and give the company a competitive-edge.

Innovation is also about identifying new markets, improving existing systems and product evolution. Given the recent economy, many companies chose to invest in new market opportunities for existing products or expanded into emerging countries. Improving products is just as important. Often, you might be able to solve a problem by repurposing concepts from another industry or even learning from nature, a growing field called biomimicry. Despite the Latin translation, innovation doesn’t have to be something new.

But most importantly, innovation has to be repeatable and sustainable. It’s not about one brilliant idea but being able to sustain the product innovation process. And, innovation happens across the company not just in the R&D department. Today’s innovation community includes new business development, strategic planning and competitive analysis teams, among others.

Given our economy, innovation must result in revenue growth and increase market share within an accelerated timeframe. Therefore the innovation agenda and ROI must be tightly integrated with a company’s corporate goals.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?

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.

Innovation Trends in 2010

This is the time when everyone is recapping the year and forecasting trends in the coming year. So, let me jump on the bandwagon and reiterate some of the trends I have been talking about based on customer interactions.

Innovate to Dominate: Innovation will continue to be a focus for all Best-in-Class companies. No surprise there. In NESTA’s recent ‘Everyday Innovation’ report, 78% of participants said innovation is key to improving their products and services and 70% said their focus on innovation has been reinforced. Also, 80% claimed innovation is an important part of their role. However, just ‘innovation’ is not enough.

Reign of process and collaboration: In 2010, we’ll see large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses focusing more on structured and sustainable innovation vs. an ad hoc innovation process. Sustainable innovation is the only way for companies to compete globally and drive the innovation economy. In addition, global collaboration with experts will become an integral part of the innovation process so teams can leverage innovation intelligence and deliver the right products the first time.

Changing of the guard: Emerging companies and countries around the world will become more innovative. Innovation leadership will no longer be exclusive to Global 2000 companies or established global powers.  In fact, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland topped the 2008 list of world’s most innovative countries, while the US dropped to number eight. Don’t be surprised to see China and India topping next year’s list. Emerging growth companies will also become innovation leaders as they can quickly amass greater market cap values and overtake or take over yesterday’s leaders. This is possible because lower stock prices in this economy have made multinational companies more vulnerable to acquisitions.

Ideation to productization: In 2009, the US patent applications dropped by 2.3 percent, primarily due to the economy, according to experts. Perhaps this trend will continue as companies will focus more on transforming ideas into commercial, revenue generating products and leverage existing technology from different industries to design new products or solve problems. After all, a company’s true success is measured by its revenue and products sold, not number of patents.

Green is the new black: Companies will continue on the path of green innovation. Today, many companies and government are still talking the green talk. But few are able to design cost efficient products that meet customer demands. In 2010 we expect to see more companies operationalise green innovation across an enterprise, making it a key business imperative for driving profitability and competitive-edge.

These are my top predictions. What are yours?