Innovation Management Systems

innovation management system process

Innovation management systems rely on the corner stones governance, process, organization, and tools. Refining strategy and agreeing on governance first is an essential prerequisite.

Using strategy, leadership and culture as a foundation

While an innovation system is building on strategy not all existing capabilities are in perfect sync. We help our clients to understand and fill gaps before investing into organizational changes and systems.

Systematic and scalable innovation creates a flywheel of success and validated learnings because it connects your strategic initiatives to the “fuzzy frontend” and ideation funnel.

Continuously selecting and testing ideas provides crucial feedback to sponsors. Experiments to test hypotheses become a standard rather than a risky project.

Only with a feedback loop the control of tight innovation budgets is possible; 

don’t you want to know where the innovation-dollars went and what impact they had?

Measuring the R&D-rate for example (R&D-spend/sales) is an input metric provides no evidence of innovation effectiveness!

The Innovation Process

The innovation management systems and processes Sensaco is building with clients are always tailored. To get quickly up to speed and to integrate best-practice they are based on current thinking from industry research and academia

innovation management framework

Innovation Horizons

Aligning needs for profit and growth, adoption curves from a market perspective and mapping S-curves from the technology side, horizons are a concept to structure innovation portfolios and allocate budgets. Using horizons helps to understand how risk and reward evolve progress and how effective decision and selection processes are.

How to balance horizons depends on your business. Most agree, however, that they face challenges to invest in H2 and H3 at all. A good reading about these challenges is provided here: Click Here

s-curves innovation horizons
innovation management system process

Innovation management systems using the "double diamond" process

Our core processes combine agile decision making with frequent experimentation, the well-known “double diamond” system spearheaded by the Design Thinking community.

The overarching framework connects strategy and execution resulting in a functional system with process, governance and defined roles.

Standards

The framework used as well as the processes are based on the Standard ISO 56002 “Innovation management — Innovation management system — Guidance”.

One of the most comprehensive frameworks is Innovation360® which is used by Sensaco’s consultants as licensed practitioners.

Strategic Question

  • Profit?
  • Market?

Innovation Strategy

  • Incremental
  • Radical

Strategic Question

  • Need Seeker
  • Market reader
  • Technology driven

Type of Innovation

  • Products
  • Processes
  • Organizational Structures
  • Management System
  • Production
  • Business Model
  • Services

Leadership Style

  • Cauldron
  • Spiral Staircase
  • Fertile Field
  • PacMan
  • Explorer

Capabilities: 66

  • 16 Aspects
  • 10 Personas
  • Innovation Process
    – Ideation
    – Project Selection
    – Development
    – Commercialization

Way forward

Setting up governance, organization with matching roles and defining processes and tools will need a top-down commitment and systematic execution.

Implementation

Depending on a business’ complexity a minimum of 3 months is needed to implement and roll-out repeatable processes. A high-level overview of the process is given in this HBR article.

Interested? Applying any innovation framework or improving existing innovation management systems and processes starts with a first consultation: