Communities are effective ways to improve an organisation’s innovation capacity. Enabling collaboration, however, isn’t easy as corporate dynamics are very different from the dynamics of the Internet. Communities do not become successful by themselves, they require careful management, so effectively managing communities is of great importance. Creating a successful innovation community entails more than merely implementing an online software tool; it requires proactive community management.

The success of an innovation community depends largely on the participation rate of the community members. To increase the participation rate of these communities, Innovation Factory supports its clients by:

Employees, customers, and suppliers are a vast resource of ideas. For a multitude of reasons these ideas don’t surface sufficiently. In order to access this great pool of ideas, a company needs to set up a process and an organisation that supports idea management and, in many circumstances, an idea management tool to automate the processes and store ideas.

Setting up idea management involves addressing a number of subjects. Some examples are:

Idea Challenge

Idea challenges are run to generate valuable ideas for a specific theme or problem. They can be used to improve top line results as well as to improve operations to become more efficient and effective. The most important reasons to execute idea challenges are:

• Strong focus ensures powerful idea generation.
• The level of enthusiasm and output of contributors remains high because of the limited timeframe.
• Relevant timing can positively influence results.

Innovation Factory has extensive experience in implementing Idea Management within large organisations. To host the Idea Challenge, we usually deploy our IdeaNet software. The combination of the best software tools for challenges and our consultants with a proven track record ensure results. The UPC Fiber Power Idea Challenge is a perfect example of an Idea Challenge.

Cost Saving Challenge

To help you generate cost saving ideas, Innovation Factory now offers a short, limited version of an Idea Challenge at a discounted price, centered around Saving Costs.
Cost savings
Get short term results with our IdeaNet software specifically set-up for cost savings. A couple of the benefits the cost savings Idea Challenge will deliver:

• Lots of ideas in limited time
• Direct cost savings
• Fast payback
• Engaged employees
• A proven concept
• For just €5000,-

To give the creation of new services and products a flying start, Innovation Factory conducts innovation workshops with you. These workshops are specifically designed to guide you through the different Innovation Funnel development stages, and have already enabled several of our clients to get the best out of their project teams. (Naturally, these workshops achieve the best results when they are a sequenced part of an integral innovation process.)

Developing your people is an integral part of becoming more innovative. We have extensive experience in setting up develop programs for a wide range of clients. These kinds of programs are usually tailor made, so feel free to contact us for more information. We will be happy to meet with you to get to know your goals and wishes.

Being an innovative organisation cannot be left to plain luck and hoping for the brilliant ideas to pop up occasionally. To make sure that innovation is a continuous process delivering new products and services on a regular basis, an innovation funnel is required. The innovation funnel provides organisations with a staged process for innovation. It makes sure that a large number of ideas are generated that will be selected and further developed in a rigid manner. Stage gates between the stages select the ideas that are developed further to ensure that the organisation gets maximum revenue out of its innovation activities.

Improving the innovative power of organisations is not an easy task. All organisational systems should support innovation. For example, the culture should support innovation by valuing entrepreneurship and risk taking; the reward and assessment systems should take into account the contribution to innovation made by employees and not only take current operations into account; budgeting systems should be able to accommodate innovative projects for which no clear ROI can yet be calculated, etcetera.

Inspiration for innovations is all around us. Discovering opportunities for new products, services or even processes is a matter of being aware and keeping an open mind. EyeOpener facilitates this process. It helps people achieve an open mind set and find inspiration in everyday situations. EyeOpener is targeted at those that can really make a difference in an organisation: middle management and up.

Organisations that have clearly defined the areas in which they are to innovate have greater returns on their innovation investments. Clear innovation strategies provide focus for the organisation and define what competences are required to be successful.

Approach
Innovation Factory applies a structured approach to develop and formulate an innovation strategy:

Successful entrepeneuring requires that you put in motion today what is necessary in order to have the right resources in place tomorrow. But how do you know which technology, processes, knowledge, and experience you should have in place to meet future demands for products and services? Evidently, this requires understanding of future developments as well as thorough strategic planning.

Roadmapping helps you create a unified outlook for the future. You will develop an overview of the needed resources, and alignment between them. Also, a detailed plan for implementation will be drawn up. Above all, roadmapping is a communication process, involving all layers of your organisation.