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The Ultimate Innovation Strategist's Playbook By Planbox v. June 2016
The Ultimate Innovation Strategist's Playbook
By Planbox v. June 2016
The Ultimate Innovation Strategist's Playbook
Launching an innovation program can be a daunting task. This playbook provides innovation leaders and teams with the roadmap to plan for a successful initiative that will have a substantial positive impact on the entire organization. From selling the program’s benefits to all stakeholders, to defining project roles and responsibilities, to establishing rewards – this guide offers all innovation programs the chance to start or restart on a solid foundation. The systematic investment in and management of innovation is a significant and fundamental positive change in your organization that will impact your everyday processes. Whether you engage in a smallscale or largescale investment, the ideas and experiments that develop will impact your business model, product and service offerings, as well as how you interact with your employees, customers, partners and the market. Use this innovation playbook to bypass the typical obstacles and start creating highimpact ideas that develop into winning projects. The Ultimate Innovation Strategist’s Playbook contains:
Introduction to innovation management Key components and capabilities of an innovation management system Innovation program 30day launch plan template How to gamify innovation to encourage and increase engagement Challengedriven idea creation and development A best practices tip sheets for:
Overcoming the potential obstacles to launching an innovation program Planning and launching innovation contests and jam sessions Activity reporting and analytics
Introduction Transforming a company into a strategically innovative entity takes a major cultural shift. The vision and purpose must be owned at the top. The CEO and his/her leadership team are responsible for developing the strategy, articulating the mission, setting the standards, and resourcing the effort. Tasks and responsibilities can be delegated; ownership cannot. At Planbox we feel strongly about this topic. We know that having truly engaged executives has made the difference in our clients’ abilities to hit their innovation objectives and transform their organizations.
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We stress ownership because it goes beyond involvement. Full ownership incorporates “The Buck Stops Here!” accountability. It also includes sincere personal interest and commitment. It means setting an example with personal actions. It is important to define what innovation means, both operationally and culturally, to your organization. Clarity helps drives participation, engagement and results. This clarity of purpose is also instrumental in setting the course for action, including the establishment of goals, measuring progress and charting the roadmap to attain them. The characteristics of companies taking a leadership position in innovation:
invest time and resources in the development of your innovation strategy explicitly include innovation in the overall corporate business strategy develop open innovation networks with suppliers, customers and other partners adopt an innovation management system that serves as the system of record for
all ideas, suggestions and feedback design and launch an innovation management program that carefully defines
how innovation is fostered and managed in your organization continuously iterate and evolve your innovation culture, processes and systems
to adapt to changing market conditions and based on your team's feedback on what works and what needs change
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Key Capabilities of an Innovation Management System
The diagram above shows the main components and capabilities one can expect to have in an innovation management system. Each of these components are briefly described::
Communities: you can define multiple communities that range from internal employee groups or open innovation communities that include your customers, partners or the general public
Challenges: define communityspecific challenges based on strategic goals and the interests of the community targeted for the challenge
Create and develop ideas: Run internal and external campaigns around the new challenges to foster new ideas, conversations, reviews and expert recommendation. The system provides a collaboration platform for everyone to vote, comment, review, merge, discard, and evaluate ideas
Idea screening: Use analytics, reports and idea screening tools to find the best ideas that match your criteria, for example: low hanging fruits, high risk high reward aligned ideas, blue ocean transformational ideas.
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Innovation events and contests: Define innovation events and contests when the company goes through any major changes such as new challenges (e.g. digital transformation), a new mission or objectives, mergers and acquisitions.
Decision making: Once you have identified top 3 to 5 ideas to invest in, a small group of participants can use decision sessions to collaborate on the choices available and select the best option(s).
Proof of concept experiments: Run proof of concept experiments on selected and approved ideas to further evaluate their merit and potential.
Innovation portal designer: A carefully designed innovation portal has a significant impact on end user participation and engagement levels. Innovation portal designer allows an admin to decide what is displayed on the main landing pages per community and for every challenge.
Form designer: Different forms are presented and have to completed as an idea navigates from being created, evaluated, shortlisted, and discarded or approved. Every organization has different requirements in terms of what fields are displayed at every stage of an idea’s lifecycle. The innovation management system’s embedded form designer allows you to configure each form based on what you require.
Business rules/workflow engine: The business rule engine is at the heart of the innovation management system. Ideas flow through multiple stages as they go from being submitted, evaluated, selected, implemented or discarded. These workflows may be different from one community to another, and involve different types of people, security and roles. The workflow engine orchestrates the idea filtering and selection process, sending notifications and updates along the way.
Reward and recognition management: This component enables you to define points, badges and prizes for every action or for a cumulative taken
Notifications: You can setup a variety of notifications for events such as when someone votes or comments on your idea, your idea changes status (is evaluated, merged, discarded, approved or rejected), or when work is assigned to someone. Notifications help people stay engaged, know what is going on and take action when they are called upon.
Work management: This component manages work assignments, followups and reports required to develop, evaluate and screen ideas.
Task automation: An innovation management system should include a powerful task automation system to automate mundane tasks such as assigning points for any activity based on a defined point system, sending alerts, performing background synchronization and integration with other systems.
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Innovation Management Software Selection Planbox has completed over 400 implementations and responded to thousands of RFPs, RFIs and RFQs for 15+ years. We have put together an exclusive innovation management software requirements guide based on all the great questions and inquiries we have received over the years as a guide to help organizations who are interested in Innovation Management software to leverage our wealth of expertise. You can use this guide to create your own RFP, use it to shortlist the vendors that are most suitable for a closer look and to make sure you ask the right open ended questions that elicit meaningful answers that help you understand what differentiates the offerings. Here are some of the questions and topics covered by the innovation management software requirements guide:
Workflow and business rule engine capabilities that will save you time and automate mundane repetitive tasks
Configurability features that substantially reduce or eliminate any customizations What types of notifications, nudges and alerts you need to increase engagement Key gamification, reward and recognition management features Recommended out of the box reports, dashboards and data analytics Deployment strategy, best practices and support processes to look for System and application security, and user authentication Integration and innovation management software data exchange features
You can request a free copy of the Planbox Innovation Management Software Evaluation Guide here : http://planbox.com/freeevaluationguide/
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Agile Innovation Management Program Launch The following is a 30 days, from kickoff to launch, turnkey agile innovation management program launch plan based on Planbox team’s twenty years of experience working and collaborating with customers on hundreds of handson innovation projects and initiatives.
The launch plan described above requires a determined and collaborative effort by your team and the innovation management system’s service team. Each team must be led with a designated project manager who plans the work, prioritizes tasks, reports progress, and communicates with all stakeholders throughout a phased rollout of the new system and processes.
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Innovation Roles The following roles have to be defined and assigned in your planning phase. For smaller teams and organizations, the same individual can play multiple roles; as long as he/she understands the work and responsibilities that comes with accepting each role:
Role Description
Innovation Administrators Manages and monitors all innovation activity, including submitted ideas, collaboration on developing ideas, tasks assigned, notifications sent and activity reportings
Idea Creators and Participants
Anyone who is invited to participate in the program can submit ideas, vote, comment, and be assigned to complete a task related to developing an idea,
Moderators Moderators are responsible for encouraging dialog and participation for the communities and challenges they moderator. Moderators also act as gatekeepers, ensuring that inappropriate content is removed, and ideas get the attention and review they deserve. The number of moderators required depends on the number of communities and challenges you run at any given time.
Subject Matter Experts (SME) and Reviewers
Review and approve which ideas merit further evaluation based on the SME’s areas of expertise. SME’s may also participate in or comment on cost estimates, value, feasibility, risk and other factors that are considered in the idea evaluation process.
Intellectual Property Assessment / Legal
Legal team reviews how rewards are calculated and awarded and any intellectual property matters related to the collaborative innovation effort.
Data Analysts Innovation management systems generate a large amount of data. Data analysts create reports and perform trends analysis to provide actionable quantitative and qualitative information to all stakeholders.
Leaders The direct involvement of a Clevel executive helps champion the innovation program, engrain the processes into the company’s culture, and improves the odds of the program’s long term success.
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How to Gamify Innovation to Increase Engagement Rewards and recognition are tangible proof to participants that their input is valuable to the organization. These important tools not only validate the individual’s or team’s effort, but go a long way in building trust in the innovation process, create “buzz”, and motivate the entire participant community. To be effective, however, rewards and recognition must be inclusive, impactful, immediate, and visibly promoted by senior management. While monetary prizes and material items are popular and useful carrots for getting people in the game, they are decreasingly effective motivators of participant behavior in the long run. Recognition and other nonmaterial perks are “levers where the value to the individual is greater than the cost to the company”, a consideration that becomes ever more important to companies dealing with a tough economic climate. They are essential to the incentive structure of a welldesigned innovation process. Here are the four types of rewards to consider:
Careful thought and consideration has to go into designing a system that rewards participants for their contribution while keeping them curious and engaged on a continued term basis. For more information on designing a reward system please refer to the Planbox guide How to Gamify Innovation that can be downloaded from http://planbox.com/resources .
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ChallengeDriven Idea Creation and Development
Introducing shortterm, focused idea challenges keeps the innovation initiative current and aligned with current business issues and customers’ needs. These periodic campaigns around idea themes are an effective way of keeping things fresh and interesting. The use of Challenges also enables the organization to address topical or timely issues in a responsive, opportunistic and proactive fashion. Challenge campaigns need to be managed like any other product/service; good visuals, exciting themes, clear message and good awareness. Frequency should create buzz without being overlyintrusive or creating a risk of overexposure. Short time horizons create urgency. Procrastination is reduced. Here are the steps to follow to manage a challengedriven innovation program:
Identify key problems that need solving: Launch a series of challenges Measure and analyze the impact
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Creating Effective Challenges
There are many ways to design challenges. The two most common are to introduce challenges either on an idea topic or open them to a subset of the eligible participants. A few examples are provided here to start you thinking about the possibilities. Employees Challenges directed to employees provide two benefits:
Purposeful ideation directed at a specific business issue An opportunity to direct those that are looking to get involved but don’t have an
immediate idea or know where to apply their energies.
Managers Departmental and business unit managers are important drivers of participation, motivation and task closure. Making them interested success owners with a stake in desired outcomes is critical to insuring process rigor and program continuity. Challenges
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aimed directly at managers drive the peoplecomponent in alignment with specific goals and shorten response times for processrelated deliverables. Processes, Products and Services Challenges can be aimed directly at points of pain or opportunities. Whether internal, external or both, submitters and collaborators can be guided to focus their idea energies directly at a given business imperative; which can be calibrated to the desired timesensitivity as well as discrete audiences within the target group(s). External Challenges are often branded as idea and/or innovation contests. Partner Challenges Challenge campaigns targeted at customers, channel partners, academia, shareholders, suppliers and/or other stakeholders enable you to tap into perspectives outside your company. Your partners play a significant role in the successful execution of your business model and often have fresh perspectives to offer that aren’t visible from the inside. Manage Partner Challenges differently than internal ones; in matters of rules, communications, collaboration, incentives and expectations. But the real opportunity is in the diversity, random creativity, collective expertise and distribution of labor that engaging these folks can bring to the mix. Managing Idea Volume Assuming that the launch and ensuing communications campaign are successful, ideas will flow in quickly. Because this will be new for idea creators as well as other role players, it is sometimes helpful to put a cap on the number of ideas any one participant or group can submit in the first three months of a program. It is better to have a few good ideas to work on than volumes of poorly developed ones. Setting a submission cap gives process management a breakin period to get up to speed without overwhelming them. It also encourages participants to submit their best ideas first, improving the chances of idea approval and the ability to celebrate and promote early wins.
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Best Practice Tip Sheets
The following tip sheets are based on the expertise of Planbox innovation management experts and professional services team members. These best practices have been developed as we worked on innovation projects for hundreds of mediumsized organizations or divisions of Global 2000 organizations; and based on customer feedback throughout the program or event launch, deployment, onboarding and analysis phases.
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Overcoming potential obstacles to launching an innovation program The following obstacles are typically encountered in the early stages of planning to launch an innovation management program.
Obstacle How to Overcome
Status quo Why try to change when it is comfortable
Investing in innovation is like buying insurance. There is no certainty that it will pay off in the short term. It is however, the best indicator of the long term prosperity of the organization. See Planbox white paper Executive Sponsorship of Innovation for more information.
Return on investment how to justify spend.
Planbox has developed an ROI model based on results of hundreds of innovation initiatives. Contact Planbox for a free analysis and your custom innovation ROI calculator.
Lack of available resources Other urgent issues always demand more attention. Funding ideas there is not enough budget to fund ideas and experiments
People will always be very busy especially your best team members. The key is to make innovation a key deliverable that is part of everyone’s everyday activity. See The Magic of Innovation and How the Best of the Best Innovate . In Harvard Business Review’s How to Prioritize Your Innovation Budget diagnostic of how to tackle this obstacle, they recommend: 1) Segregate funds for improvement and innovation 2) Identify the root causes of the daytoday operational turbulence and address them 3) Create new organizations and controls for innovation.
How to manage intellectual property issues and other legal risks
If the innovation campaign is internal then employee agreements generally cover IP and protect the organization. For openinnovation and cocreation campaigns, a mandatory workflow step/business rule can be added for certain user types, requiring acceptance, prior to participation.
Processing Ideas the sheer volume of ideas hinders the process of reviewing them.
A workflowdriven rulebased screening process allows for ideas to be routed to the right reviewers and actioned on. Also see section on Managing Idea Volume for tips on how to focus your campaign more on quality than quantity.
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Planning and launching innovation events and jam sessions An innovation event or jam session is a short duration (3 to 15 days) event to find solutions that help your organization better identify business transformation opportunities. Everyone works collaboratively together to find solutions to your business challenges breaking down the typical business silos and innovation divides.
What to Consider Recommendations
Purpose Discover new opportunities
When is this really necessary Highly prescribed innovation event to extend leading position
Frequency At least once a year
Clevel executive involvement and engagement Low
Event duration Typically, 3 to 14 days
War room (executives + innovation expert) Not Applicable
Community moderators/broadcasted event Recommended/Recommended
Promotions and invitations Highly promoted event – invitations sent
Importance of gamification (full game design) Low
Importance of soft rewards (reputation) High
Participation/Diversity of participants Massively crowdsourced/High
Level of engagement Super charged
Objective Make solving a business transformation challenge the collaborative effort of everyone
Nature of detail provided Tends to be missionbased, strategyfocused
Posed as an openended question Generally, yes
Degree of vagueness Tends to be very specific challengebased
Reward expectation Can have points that result in appearing on leaderboards, improve reputation
Initial reviewers of results Higher level executives – business case
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Activity reporting and analytics Monthly, quarterly and annual reports that show the level of engagement, collaboration and activity are an important element of an innovation management system. A careful analysis and review of such reports will highlight what works, potential problem areas, and what investments need to be made. The following report components have been extracted from actual customer innovation activity. All customer specific information has been removed or renamed to protect confidential information. Collaboration Metrics
Task Management Metrics
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Challenge Metrics
Top 5 Most Active Ideas
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Idea Count by Status
Idea Count by Department
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Other Sources of Information Innovation Management Glossary: http://planbox.com/agileworkinnovationmanagementsoftwareglossary/ Planbox Innovate support portal https://supportinnovate.planbox.com Innovation Management Software Evaluation Guide http://planbox.com/freeevaluationguide/ How to Gamify Innovation http://planbox.com/resources/innovationgamificationguide/ Planbox Idea Contest Brochure http://planbox.com/resources/planboxideacontestmanagement/ Planbox Innovate Brochure http://planbox.com/resources/planboxinnovationbrochure/
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About Planbox Planbox is the pioneering provider of cloudbased Agile Work Innovation solutions from creative ideas to winning projects. Our mission is to help organizations thrive by transforming the culture of agile work, continuous innovation and creativity across the entire organization. Our family of products include Collaborative Innovation Management, Team Decision Making, and Work Management applications. Planbox is designed to be the agile work innovation tool for everyone, built for companies and teams of all sizes. Planbox is trusted by some of the world’s most recognized brands including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bridgestone, CMHC, Panama Canal Authority, Sempra Energy, Willis Towers Watson and Verizon with millions of internal and external users. To learn more, visit: www.planbox.com and unleash your innovation butterfly.
References http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/8267obstaclestoinnovation.html http://www.movestheneedle.com/roiofinnovation/
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