"If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams about what life should be, then maturity is letting go again" - Mary Beth Danielson

IM2 Level 3 - Innovation Processes

Culture:  Culture is risk-tolerant and new ideas are documented

• At this level, the organization is beginning to better understand the important competitve advantage that innovation provides to their customers, and in turn, themselves.  With a few employee-based ideas launched in to successful products under their belt, the culture has loosened up to be a bit more tolerant of risk and ensure that each and every idea is captured, regardless of whether or not the idea will actually be used or implemented in the short term.

Leadership:  Leaders appoint "Idea Champions" or serve on Idea Boards to organize ideas and form business cases, as well as, relying on middle management to communicate innovation processes

• As with the culture, leadership is growing to accept the innovation process as a path to success.  The leadership takes an active role in ensuring ideas are gathered from all sources.  Additionally, the leadership may take an even more active role in being directly involved with idea selection.

People:   People are encouraged to work with "Idea Champions" to jointly move ideas forward

• While everyone's ideas are solicited, it is at this stage where general ideas are separated from strategic ideas.  Employees are provided with the idea filtering criteria based on the organization's strategy.  Idea Champions are provided to assist idea generators with moving their ideas forward.

Processes:   Idea management processes and related systems are established

• As one would expect with an increasing maturity, the necessary idea management systems and processes are put into place to ensure that all ideas are being collected, documented, organized and moved into the filtering processes.

Tools & Techniques:   General idea campaigns are launched to harvest ideas, regardless of the problem(s) to be solved

• Early on in the innovation maturity of an organization, they choose one of two approaches to generating and collecting ideas...general and targeted.  The most popular option is the general idea campaign.  This campaign does not seek to pre-filter ideas based on a specific problem to be solved.  The goal of these general campaigns are to introduce the employee base to the new system and to promote excitement.  Typically, these campaigns generate a lot of ideas, a lot of duplicate ideas, and a lot of small, incremental improvement ideas.

Training:   Employees and managers are trained on idea generation techniques and available processes while senior leaders and executives are offered creativity and innovation training

• With the new processes and systems in place, the better educated the idea generator pool, the better the ideas being poured into the top of the funnel.  Basic and advanced training become logical additions to the innovation program.

Facilities:    At least one dedicated collaboration room is provided and supplied with necessary tools

• Due to the increased training needs and the focused idea generation sessions that are being conducted, a dedicated idea/innovation collaboration room (commonly called a war room or idea center) is established.

Idea Capture:   Customer and other third party ideas are captured

• Based on the successes of the ideas put into action from employees, leaders begin to invite important clients and vendors to provide ideas into the system as well.  While this stage is just short of customer focus groups, they at least accept the concept that their customers can provide them with valuable insight in developing or improving products and services.

Idea Management:   Ideas are captured, logged and moved to "Idea Champion" for future consideration

• This is the stage where formalized idea management becomes the norm.

Strategic Planning:    Ideas aligned with project or departmental strategy only

• Due to the organization still being in the early stages of innovation maturity, most ideas are not specifically filtered by overall organizational strategy.  Ideas are submitted and implemented with a departmental, divisional or project view only.

Metrics:   Organizations who are beginning to advance through the innovation maturity stages begin to focus their metrics and performance tracking by including the following to their metric scorecard:

•  Percentage of capital dollars invested in innovation efforts
•  Idea Campaigns Launched
•  Ratio of successful ideas to submitted ideas
•  Number of new products launched

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If you would like to see the entire Innovation Maturity Model (IM2), please click HERE.

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!!!