Innovation management is the discipline of managing processes in innovation. It can be used to develop both product and organizational innovation. Without proper processes, it is not possible for R&D to be efficient; innovation management includes a set of tools that allow managers and engineers to cooperate with a common understanding of goals and processes. The focus of innovation management is to allow the organization to respond to an external or internal opportunity, and use its creative efforts to introduce new ideas, processes or products.[1] Importantly, innovation management is not relegated to R&D; it involves workers at every level in contributing creatively to a company's development, manufacturing, and marketing. By utilizing appropriate innovation management tools, management can trigger and deploy the creative juices of the whole work force towards the continuous development of a company.[2] The process can be viewed as an evolutionary integration of organization, technology and market by iterating series of activities: search, select, implement and capture.[3]
Innovation processes can either be pushed or pulled through development. A pushed process is based on existing or newly invented technology, that the organization has access to, and tries to find profitable applications to use this technology. A pulled process tries to find areas where customers needs are not met, and then focus development efforts to find solutions to those needs.[4] To succeed with either method, an understanding of both the market and the technical problems are needed. By creating multi-functional development teams, containing both engineers and marketers, both dimensions can be solved.[5] The lifetime (or product lifecycle) of new products is steadily getting shorter; increased competition therefore forces companies reduce the time to market. Innovation managers must therefore decrease development time, without sacrificing quality or meeting the needs of the market.
Common tools include brainstorming, virtual prototyping, product lifecycle management, idea management, TRIZ, stage-gate process, project management, product line planning and portfolio management.
To manage complex innovation, ask the right questions
Innovation is the change that outperforms the previous practice. To lead or sustain with innovations, managers need to concentrate heavily on the innovation network which requires deep understanding of the complexity of innovation. Collaboration is an important source of innovation. Innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected according to their comparative advantages, and operating in a coordinated manner.
When a technology goes through major transformation phase and yields a successful innovation then it becomes a great learning experience not only for the parent industry but for other industries as well. Big innovations are generally the outcome of inter and interdisciplinary networking among technological sectors along with combination of implicit and explicit knowledge. Networking is required but network integration (networking of networks) is the key to success for complex innovation in today’s era where diverse technologies are available at its best. Social economic zone, technology corridor, free trade agreement and technology cluster are some of the ways to encourage organizational networking and cross functional innovations. To win with innovation in a flat world we definitely need complex networking and crowd-sourcing.