Social and gamified innovation - agile innovation management

According to industry studies around 90% of enterprises have not created repeatable innovation processes. Of course, not every company have to innovate all the time if the current products are already selling well enough. Yet delivering new innovations is by far the best opportunity for finding the new growth. In established businesses focus is mostly in production and customer service, while innovation’s front end is managed with the left hand on reports and meetings.

It’s quite surprising how little the enterprises have formally invested on innovation while seeing how much effort is actually put into new developments. Innovation’s front end can cover almost 50% of all activities – no matter have you formally invested on it or not. When creating something new people need to share ideas, combine them into new concepts and manage the stages from early inspirations to delivered innovations. Why does most of the enterprises create process for this only at the stages where plans for new innovations are already getting formalized and approved?

The biggest corporations have successfully been solving this issue with a good selection of large innovations systems, such as Brightidea, Spigit or Hype. Industry leaders screen all the time new opportunities and formally transform them into new innovations. And they keep on growing even bigger with new delivered products and services. What would happen to Apple if they didn’t launch a new product every now and then?

How can a regular sized enterprise gain repeatable and sustainable innovation processes?

For mid-sized and small enterprises a process-driven innovation platform can be an overkill solution. Strict and complex process-driven innovation is simply too bureaucratic for everyday hands-on development. Fortunately there are many agile idea management platforms, such as Wazoku, covering the basic idea sharing and processing. But what happens after ideas have been shared and planned to be implemented?

With LumoFlow we have taken a step further to provide tools for hands-on innovation. We implemented an agile goal-driven innovation process on top of our existing social collaboration solution. This way we made sure that innovation process is not only for serving information systems and reporting. Innovation happens when people with different skills and knowhow collaborates together.

(See the attached picture how LumoFlow creates structure to innovation)

In the heart of our solution is a co-creatively managed innovation portfolio (the innovation funnel) that grows over the time while people are working on new ideas and concepts. Front end of the funnel can have a great variety of ideas and concepts, while outcome is well planned and controlled with decision making and stage gates. All information is connected with a clear structure, while processes are kept as agile as possible.

How does this change the world? Innovation has many forms. That’s why many innovation platforms are such a complex giants. But think for example an iterative lean business development process: Build-Measure-Learn. Even with very thin and agile process it’s already easier to manage development and measure the results. Learning happens when ideas are shared and people across organizational boundaries can instantly comment your blueprints and working demos. Feedback is not coming only from inside your company, but also partners and other stakeholders can easily join. LumoFlow encourages users to participate with gamified and social features. At the same time the whole process is on front of people’s eyes – also the targets are well defined. Ideas are rolled into implementation with determined steps instead of lost email conversations and scattered communications.

With these and other agile solutions we have already changed the world of our customers. I think that’s a very good beginning.

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