The Innovation Management Process

For innovation to flourish, it requires the right strategy, investment, leadership, and risk appetite. Therefore, following a clear and streamlined innovation management process should be a priority for most organizations who want to spark change and initiate innovation.

In our previous guide to "What is innovation management?", we looked at the fundamentals of this concept, and why it is essential for progressive modern business operations. Next, let's focus on the innovation management process and its phases.

Understanding the Innovation Management Process

Corporate innovation is described as “having out-of-the-box thinking as a strategy within your business”. Innovation management should allow entrepreneurs to freely work on ideas, but there should be a clearly defined process. 

An innovation management process will provide guidance. How this process works is different in each organization and depends on the underlying method used.

While there are different approaches to the innovation management process, there are five general steps:

1. Generation of new ideas
2. Capturing and documenting those ideas
3. Evaluating ideas to determine if they are worth pursuing
4. Deciding and prioritizing which ideas to execute
5. Idea execution

An innovation management process must cover at least these five steps to be effective. As far as the details go, there are a few different approaches to take when innovating.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Innovation

Innovation management processes can take two main strategies: top-down and bottom-up. 

Top-down innovation is driven by company leadership. In a top-down innovation management process, senior leaders, managers, or dedicated innovators are responsible for ideation and driving the process. This strategy provides focus for innovation efforts and ensures resources are being committed to the most important projects.

A bottom-up innovation management process, on the other hand, collects ideas from employees at large. One of the advantages of bottom-up innovation is that employees are often able to identify opportunities for improvement in their day-to-day operations that management might not be aware of or have the expertise to recognize. Bottom-up innovation is an essential part of any innovation management process because these front-line employees have an invaluable perspective on the products and processes they deal with every day.

Traditional top-down innovation can often limit creativity and decisions to a select few. However, bottom-up innovation allows the organization to cultivate a culture where innovation is accessible to employees at all levels of the business, guaranteeing a greater volume of ideas from multiple perspectives.

Top-down and bottom-up innovation don’t have to be mutually exclusive. An effective innovation management program takes advantage of both. That way, you benefit from broader employee perspectives plus the focus on management-driven, top-down innovation.

The Phase-Gate Model

One of the most common innovation management processes is the phase-gate or “waterfall” model. This process works by separating innovation projects into small, manageable stages of innovation activities, each locked behind a “gate.” When an idea reaches the next gate in the process, it is evaluated to ensure it has met predetermined criteria. Ideas must pass this evaluation to advance through the gate to the next phase to receive continued investment. At each decision point, the potential outcomes will be; go, kill, hold, recycle, or conditional go.

The phase-gate model is good at weeding out bad ideas or those that are just not financially viable. Its rigid structure and gate requirements ensure ideas are held to high standards and are driven to implementation in a consistent way, making it especially effective at handling incremental innovation.

However, this standardization is also a weakness of the phase-gate model. An innovation management process with standard, predetermined gate requirements tends to produce ideas that are similar to one another and are…well, not very innovative. How did that song go in the 90s? Don’t go chasin the waterfall model? Something like that.

The Lean Startup Model

The lean startup model is inspired by lean manufacturing, aiming to reduce inefficiencies while always looking for better ways of doing certain things.This is another popular innovation management process type to consider. 

The aim is to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and release it as fast as possible. Then, a feedback loop is used to improve and release new versions based on more data gathered. This in turn leads to an improved product, and so on. This iterative process is called the build-measure-learn loop.

The KICKBOX Model

While the phase-gate model gives standards and structure to the innovation management process, it can stifle bold ideas that get stuck behind a gate that wasn’t designed with bold ideas in mind. Other strategies take the structure of the phase-gate model and implement concepts that can grease the wheels a bit. One example is the Kickbox methodology.

The biggest obstacles to innovation are those that keep employees from ever sharing their ideas in the first place. In a standard phase-gate process or in an organization without a formal innovation management process, ideas often stall because of the need to convince management to approve them.

With the KICKBOX intrapreneurship program, ideas are collected from the distributed knowledge and experience of the organization’s employees using an online platform. The platform guides idea management, and the KICKBOOK acts as a guide from idea generation to execution, giving employees ownership of their ideas and allowing them to drive them forward.

KICKBOX Intrapreneurship takes the power of bottom-up innovation and makes it into something tangible and scalable. Instead of phase gates, it uses a progression of physical toolboxes as ideas progress toward implementation to gamify the process and build enthusiasm for innovation. As innovators develop their ideas through the process, they can get help and advice from coaches, consultants, and other innovators. This helps facilitate bottom-up innovation by providing resources employees can use to share challenges and best practices with other successful innovators.

Develop your Innovation Management Process

While there are several ways to tackle innovation, the innovation management process needs to be clear for all relevant parties. Tools like the KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program, put the right frameworks in place to support individual and collaborative efforts while also allowing organizations to tap into the collective talents of an external network of innovators.