Bringing best practice innovation management to your organization

Innovation Management Workshops

Intuitively, the concepts of “innovation management” and an “innovation process” seem to be oxymorons. The cultures that stimulate new ideas would seem to thrive in organizations that “think out of the box” and breed creativity. It might seem that “managing” something as creative as innovation would have the effect of reducing not increasing innovation levels in an organization.  Indeed creating the right balance of “trust and control” in an organization, is a challenge which many organizations find difficult to overcome. This is where the research and experience of the Canadian Innovation Centre can help.

From Ideation to Implementation

The Canadian Innovation Centre takes the view that  “ideation” (coming up with new ideas) is only one part of the innovation process. Successful innovation only happens in organizations that implement their innovative ideas, and this is the challenge. Most companies find it quite easy to get up with several innovative ideas, but are challenged to decide which to implement, and then to manage and resource the implementation process.

This is why the Canadian Innovation Centre’s developed the Inno-Gate™ approach to innovation management. Inno-Gate™ builds on the work of Bob Cooper (former Director of Research at CIC) and the Stage-Gate Institute, and brings together best practices in the fields of ideation, new product development, project and change management, to create an end-to-end innovation management approach. The process not only increases the likelihood of successful innovation project implementation, but kills less promising opportunities early, to focus resources where they can have the most impact. More importantly, the process itself becomes an agent of cultural change, where decisions are explained, and failures and successes widely communication within the company. The most innovative companies are those who can generate many good ideas, identify which are the most beneficial to pursue, implement them quickly and effectively and learn from the process.

Delivering Innovation From Day One

These practical workshops focus on real innovation opportunities facing an organization.  Over the course of the workshops, the CIC will also address the cultural and organizational issues that must be dealt with to allow innovation to thrive in an organization.

The primary outcome of the workshops will be a documented innovation management process, operating in pilot mode, addressing your real innovation opportunities.  Also included are an implementation plan for the rollout of the innovation management process and action plans for addressing your cultural and organizational issues.

Our established process can help an organization to quickly and efficiently tap its innovation potential.

Adapting Best Practices to Your Company’s Unique Situation

The CIC can help a company benefit from these best practices by applying our proprietary Inno-Gate™ approach to an individual company, whereby we merge these tools and processes with the existing processes within the company, to create a process that builds on companies strengths. The standard deployment of the Inno-Gate™ process involves 3 meetings with senior executives and a series of 3 workshops over a twelve-week period with the Innovation Management team. This enables the CIC to facilitate the development of a customized innovation management process and create a process which is implementation ready. These workshops discuss:

Identifying organizational barriers to innovation
Developing criteria for evaluating innovation opportunities
Designing a process for innovation management
Creating an innovation culture that enhances innovation speed and success rates
The Benefits of Innovation Management Workshops:
Provides a systematic approach to introducing a new product or service
Includes innovation productivity improvements as innovation opportunities
Provides a checklist of critical factors that should be considered when implementing innovation
Creates a decision-making framework that enables different functional areas to strategically assess competing innovation opportunities, including: research, operations, finance, IT, marketing and sales
Identifies possible showstoppers: Go / No Go
Suggests remedial action
Creates a detailed document for discussion and implementation that helps provide ongoing feedback to stakeholders

Here’s how the Inno-Gate™ Process works:

Inno-Gate™ follows the Stage-Gate™ approach, but is designed to help organizations adopt  process, service, and business model innovations into a company, based on input from all functional areas – production and operations, finance and, sales and marketing. The introduction of an Inno-Gate process requires the company to adopt the tools of quality management, product management, process management and change management.   Like the other services offered by the Canadian Innovation Centre, Inno-Gate™  uses a red, amber and green light at each of these stages. The intent is to put the issues into perspective and sequence. More importantly, each stage closes with a commitment and an understanding to go forward, pause or retreat and adjust, or to stop and they answer the questions of why, what, where and how.

Talk to one of our advisors about your specific needs!

The Canadian Innovation Centre has a wide range of services to help entrepreneurs, innovators and inventors transform their ideas into reality.

Other Resources

Visit our Learning Centre for Corporate Innovators for white-papers, articles and presentations on innovation management.