Leverage Lessons Learned to Avoid Innovation Déjà Vu

  

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Great ideas and answers already exist within your company. The trick is how to get at those ideas when you need them most in order to drive innovation and avoid repeating past mistakes.

To address this challenge, many companies have created innovation communities to foster creative idea generation and exchange.  Making time to innovate – and fostering a community where those ideas are shared – is certainly a best practice.

But what if you aren’t in the innovation meeting where ideas relevant to your domain are discussed? Or what if you encounter an issue requiring an innovative response and don’t know who to turn to? How do you find the innovative solution to a problem you are facing if that solution came from another division or location?

Invention Machine’s Goldfire software:

• Supports active and passive collaboration – allowing users to leverage the ideas and insights of colleagues – even those no longer with the company – by accessing documented lessons learned, project files, designs, technical notes, and more. 
• Automates the identification of domain experts in real time - anywhere within the organization – across teams and divisions and even across language barriers.
• Provides a mechanism so that innovation and knowledge workers addressing different innovation imperatives can - at any time - reach out to team members and the broader community to find out who knows what they need to know  - when they need to know it.
• Includes intra-lingual capabilities so users can search across English, French, German and Japanese documents and retrieve document summaries in their own languages, making available to them content that would have never been otherwise
• Indexes problem-solving discussions and exchanges so anytime an innovation worker looks for answers to a similar problem, they will automatically be directed to those exchanges and past experience and expertise.

So, while innovation communities and making time to innovate are great ideas, companies also need to invest in infrastructure and technology to ensure those ideas, lessons learned and best practices are readily accessible to engineers, scientists, researchers, and other innovators within your company.

Without a system in place to leverage lessons learned and tap into the wisdom of your colleagues across – and outside – your company risks repeating the same work and mistakes day in and day out.