The first element is to define and communicate your innovation strategy for your business. Your innovation strategy sets the direction and parameters to guide your idea generation efforts. These should allow for breakthrough, out-of–the box ideas, yet give sufficient guidance to provide coherence to your idea generation efforts and avoid wasting resources.
Define innovation objectives – the first step is to define qualitative and quantitative goals for your innovation efforts. Qualitative goals may include the role you want innovation to play as part of your overall business strategy. Quantitative goals may include the number of new product and service innovations you want to generate in a specific time period, or the percentage of sales you want to generate from new products. These objectives both give guidance to your innovation efforts, and can contribute to your motivation and reward processes.
Define market focus – a second component of your innovation strategy is your broad market focus. Your market focus should be based on your core competences and long term strategy as a company. Are you B2C or B2B? If B2C, which household income and demographic characteristics? If B2B, which industries, size of organization and decision makers are within your scope? What is your geographic focus? New product ideas can quickly be evaluated to ascertain whether they fit your current and future market focus.
Define technology focus – a third primary component of your innovation strategy is your current and future technology focus. As with market focus, your technology focus should also be based on your company’s core competences and long term strategy. Which areas of technology fall within your scope currently? How should this change over the next few years? This too provides an important guide to which new product and service ideas are in or out of scope.
Evaluate your product roadmap – fourth, consider your current product roadmap, and your current mix of existing offering improvements, new products or services, and new platforms or businesses. In light of your latest market and competitor analysis, does your roadmap need adjusting? Where is innovation most needed to do so? Gaps in your roadmap provide direction for your idea generation efforts.
Summarize and communicate your innovation strategy – finally, prepare a summary of your innovation strategy for both internal and external communication. While naturally you should not reveal competitively valuable information to the wrong people, it is important to share these guidelines with the appropriate stakeholders. By focusing your idea generation efforts in this way, you will significantly improve the quantity of useful ideas generated and reduce wasted time and effort
Our next entry will address : Generating ideas internally
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