Innovation is central to every organization for various reasons – staying ahead of competition, attracting and retaining customers with differentiated offerings, cost cutting, improving productivity, etc. However, not all organizations are able to successfully plan, implement, and manage it. Organizations are not being able to create the right culture, participation, speed and governance required to innovate.
Fruitful innovation in any organization requires a robust innovation platform. This means a culture of innovation, access to infrastructure for innovation, focused talent, and positive governance which channelizes the innovation efforts in right direction, and provides effective validation and feedback.
One of the most important aspects is to build a pipeline of valuable ideas that reinforces the organization’s innovation culture and vice versa. Traditional approach like the suggestion box, or the funnel-based innovation approach from recent past were short-lived due to various challenges – lot of processing efforts, complex workflows, lower participation, good ideas going un-noticed, etc. This is very well stated in one of the HBR blogs that “It’s not an idea problem; it’s a recognition problem” [source], and this eventually leads an organization into a vicious circle of the above stated challenges.
There are a few things that organizations need to understand about innovation management. First, innovation can come from anywhere, so it is important to tap into the collective intelligence of a company’s existing asset – employees, and its partners and customers. This helps in encouraging diversity of ideas and gives the organization highest probability of finding relevant opportunities. In addition, it is required to have a right innovation platform and governance model that is tuned to the specific organization’s innovation culture, and simplifies innovation process. And finally, it is vital to make contribution effortless, fun, and ensure that break-through ideas are gradually evolved and recognized.
We offer Innovation consulting to our clients. We bring a comprehensive approach right from – identifying the purpose for innovating and developing targeted plans for innovation – to – providing processes, people, and tools necessary for institutionalization of effective innovation. Thus we help with product/service discovery, refinement, and identification; and adoption of innovation tools and processes. We have been serving our clients for many years with innovation management solutions, consulting, and innovative product development services. Recently, we have expanded and grown via partnering and additional capabilities.
We (Advaiya) are an exclusive partner in India for IdeaScale – one of the largest innovation software provider
[source]. We engage with IdeaScale clients to provide services around implementation, customization/localization, adoption/training, and ongoing support. We are also a Microsoft partner, thus leveraging deep partnership on various technologies including Microsoft Enterprise Project Management technologies. Therefore, with clustering of partner products, we enable an end-to-end innovation technology platform – from idea generation and innovation process enablement – to – project identification, and portfolio management.
We also recognize that simply deploying any innovation technology is not sufficient for having effective innovation, and hence has built capabilities around Innovation – consulting, adoption and training, and managed services. Innovation-as-a-Managed Service is Advaiya’s lifecycle aware approach to support its clients in meeting their innovation purposes -by giving full cognizance to the upstream and downstream aspects of Innovation process.
Internally too, Innovation has been one of the important pillars of Advaiya’s positioning and differentiation. Our cultural orientation has been towards what we call, ‘something new and different’. We have created innovation management solutions covering the aspects of collection, prioritization, and execution. Innovation has been largely informal and ingrained in how we approach any initiative. We have put in place internal tools and programs, like IdeaScale, social, hackathons, scheduled idea talks, etc. We use the IdeaScale platform to accelerate innovation at company level and also to drive innovation into our customer engagements, and solution initiatives.
So, does your organization find it challenging to enthuse and motivate your employees to participate in idea contribution? Do you find the existing innovation process to be complex and time consuming? Do your innovation initiatives enable pragmatic and actionable ideas with mass engagement?
