What is Sustainable Innovation?
Posted on Thu, Oct 14, 2010
Innovation is the lifeblood of a company - driving top line growth and increasing market share. But to enter new markets and continuously fuel product pipelines with new and competitively differentiated products, companies can no longer rely on ad hoc innovation processes and accidental innovation.
To fuel continuous innovation, organizations must drive sustainable innovation.
Sustainable innovation is generating and validating ideas in a repeatable and more predictable way. As a process, innovation can be systematized to bring unprecedented efficiencies and ROI to idea generation, research, problem solving, market and technology landscaping and more.
To drive sustainable innovation, organizations need to:
Empower innovation workers with knowledge.
On a daily basis, engineers, scientists, researchers and other innovation workers, must tackle complex product development challenges. With access to internal knowledge like lessons learned and best practices, innovators can avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating costly mistakes. Access to external knowledge such as patents and online publications provides fresh perspectives, spurs creative thinking and provides insights outside of your domain or industry.
Provide a framework for collaboration.
Much of critical institutional knowledge is not well documented, but instead resides in the minds of employees. As innovators tackle new innovation challenges, they struggle with identifying and leveraging the right subject matter experts. With a collaboration framework, innovators can connect – actively and passively – with subject matter experts based on what they know and in the context of the innovation challenges at hand.
Give innovation workers the tools they need to perform innovation activities.
Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right innovation software, tools and skills for innovation success. By arming your engineers and scientists with tools to help them focus their problem solving and speed problem resolution – all the while leveraging internal and external knowledge and sharing and exchanging this knowledge with their peers – innovation and product delivery are accelerated and worker productivity is enhanced.
Invention Machine’s Goldfire innovation software combines access to precise “innovation intelligence” with tools and methods to collaborate, generate ideas, and solve problems. These combined capabilities uniquely enable innovation workers to more efficiently and effectively tackle innovation tasks – from developing new products to entering new markets to improving existing products and processes – and seize opportunities. These efficiencies lead to a more repeatable and sustainable innovation processes – driving top line growth, higher profits and market leadership.
