Collaboration Fuels Innovation

This week we are hosting our annual worldwide user conference, Invention Machine Power to Innovate, in Boston. I am looking forward to catching up on our customers’ successes, hearing about their challenges and collaborating on their innovation initiatives. 

I am also looking forward to discussing our technology roadmap with our advisory council members from AkzoNobel, Applied Materials, Boston Scientific, Leggett & Platt, Northrop Grumman and StatoilHydro. Their input is invaluable in designing our future products.   

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘collaborate to innovate’. Therefore, over the next few days attendees will hear a lot about collaboration and the role of knowledge in sustaining the innovation process. As innovators, you know that collaboration is key to fueling innovation and that the right innovation intelligence can boost efficiency and product delivery. I also think it’s time we step up collaboration between companies, government and academia.       

At Power to Innovate, we’ll provide an overview of the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem™ and how it leads to increased revenue and competitive edge as well as ways to successfully deploy the initiative across an enterprise. Attendees will also hear from a company that significantly increased productivity by designing a process to capture, share and reuse knowledge.  

In addition, the agenda is packed with in-depth innovation sessions and best practices from some of the brightest minds in innovation. We hope participants will find the sessions informative and that the networking will open doors for worldwide collaboration between peers. If you are not attending, but would like to get event highlights, please follow Invention Machine on Twitter or #P2I09.

In the meantime, I’d like to get your opinion on collaboration. Do you think it’s essential to driving and sustaining innovation?

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?