The Innovation Funnel

Pipeline Management – Where do your best ideas come from? Once your company has accepted innovation as a concept planned at strategic level you have to address the practical implications of an integrated innovation process.

An effective starting point is to understand where innovations originate and how to collect and screen them. The most innovative companies automate this creative pipeline. Innovation and ideas can come from any part of a business. They can be a result of planned activities, such as focused innovation workshops and brainstorming sessions or from individual ideas by chance.

Idea generation is not the preserve of the R&D or marketing department. Nor is it merely limited to customer or employee ‘suggestion schemes’! The most innovative companies realise that everyone has a part to play. It is important that wherever ideas originate, they are collected, coordinated and managed as a valuable source of information central to the future of the business.

Clients who have engaged with us to create an Integrated Innovation Framework have initiated such mechanisms as:

• Monthly Focused Innovation Workshops (FIWs)
• Market & Customer Insight (MCI) sessions
• Internal Creativity Brainstorming sessions
• Online suggestion schemes
• Monthly Innovation Boards

Creating an Innovation Pipeline will:

• Ensure all ideas are aligned to your strategic goals
• Ensure effective prioritisation of ideas
• Grab any opportunities from planned or reactive business cycles
• Collate all ideas into a strategic database
• Allow a comprehensive scoring system for ideas and insights

In recent years the term “Open Innovation” has been adopted to reflect the fact that more ideas, thoughts and insights are stimulated outside of their organisation than within it! Working in partnership with third parties, customers, suppliers and independent innovators businesses with an effective pipeline can make huge gains in creating and effective business innovation pipeline.

Create a Pipeline Buzz

As well as developing formal processes and events for idea generation think carefully about how you can create a ‘culture of innovation’ across the business. If leaders show an interest in people’s ideas and give support then your pipeline will come to life!