During the deep dive sessions of innosabi connect, our annual customer meeting, innosabi’s Customer Success Manager and customers work together on best practices for current topics. This year’s focus was on how to manage your community from onboarding to expert level.
In the dynamic landscape of innovation platforms, understanding the different needs of your community members is critical. Whether they are newcomers exploring the possibilities or seasoned participants who return regularly, tailoring your approach to their level of experience can significantly increase their engagement. In this article, we’ll look at best practices for guiding users at different stages of innovation platforms.
1. Not a community member yet
Let’s start with the journey of attracting the curious and laying the foundation for community engagement by exploring strategies for attracting and guiding users who are not yet part of your innovative community.
Capturing the curious: creating an inviting environment
For those who have just discovered your platform, the goal is to entice them to become part of your innovation community. Consider creating a home page specifically for unregistered users. Use visually appealing graphics and easy-to-understand content to illustrate the platform’s goals and opportunities for interaction.
Engaging visuals and testimonials: Create a compelling first impression
Short introductory videos, ideally featuring a member of senior management expressing the vision for the innovation community, can be a powerful tool. Showcase ongoing projects and their results to give a glimpse of the platform’s potential. Strategically place call-to-action buttons to take users seamlessly to the registration page.
Customizable Homepages: Tailoring the Welcome Experience
In the innosabi software, you can use the flexible homepage configurator to create a customised start page, ensuring that it is perfectly aligned with the content aimed at unregistered users.
2. Newcomers to the community
Once users have created their profile, it is crucial to convert them from registered users to active users. To do this, you need to nurture their enthusiasm and provide them with the information they need to start their innovation journey.
Welcome the enthusiasts: Keeping the registration momentum going
Once users have registered, it’s time to provide them with important information and links to enhance their experience. Use the customizable welcome email feature in the innosabi software, for example, to send a personalised message to each newly registered user. Include links to ongoing projects, important overview pages, or any other content you want to highlight.
Strategic content placement: Facilitate easy discovery
Make it easy for new users to discover ongoing projects and relevant content. Use the homepage strategically by placing high-priority information, e.g., using our hero boards for innovation challenges, and using call-to-action banners to direct users to top content.
Targeted content display: Increase relevance
innosabi’s flexible homepage configurator allows you to display content exclusively for specific audiences, ensuring that users see only what’s relevant to them. While a page with general platform information is valuable, it doesn’t have to be prominently displayed. Provide a link in the navigation or further down the homepage.
3. Advanced Community Member
Our exploration deepens as we turn our attention to the advanced community members who return regularly, seeking to empower them with streamlined tools and intelligent features to enhance their experience and facilitate seamless navigation within your innovation platform.
Empowering Regulars: Streamlining the experience for returning users
For regular users, the focus is on providing efficient tools for navigation and interaction, as they already know the platform and what they are searching for. E.g., implement our global search function that allows users to quickly find the projects or information they are looking for.
Customised assistance: Guide users to relevant areas
Based on their preferences, users should be able to quickly access those specific areas. With the innosabi software, this can easily be done with our customised assistance. Whether they want to submit an idea, collaborate on a project, or explore content related to a specific area, the wizard streamlines the experience.
innosabi Initiative Pages: Dedicated Spaces for Specialized Topics
Thanks to the innosabi feature “initiative pages”, you can create those pages catering to specific departments, programs, or regions. Display quick links on the homepage to direct users straight to the spaces relevant to their key interests.
In summary, understanding, and meeting the diverse needs of your community members is key to driving engagement and success on your innovation platform. By implementing these best practices, you can seamlessly guide users through their journey, from initial exploration to becoming experts in your innovation programme.
Acknowledging the ever-increasing importance of cutting-edge technologies and digitalization in the health care sector, the Zambon Group wants to improve patients’ lives and health through ambitious projects for growth based on innovation and development. Through their research venture, Zcube, they explore and sponsor innovative solutions for patient health. Hence, its General Manager and Board member, Fabrizio Conicella, is strongly involved in daily evaluating technologies and startups, looking for the game changer or the perfect piece of the puzzle. “In our work, we need updated information at a global scale”, explained Fabrizio. “It is not enough to read magazines, market reports, or patents. We need tools to get both real data and insights. That is the only solution to support our startups.”
(more…)
Our habits and behaviors have changed dramatically in the recent past. The only way to really stay on top of your clients’ needs is to engage them in a constant dialogue and make them part of your development process. Easier said than done. But with the help of our tools for customer communities, structured co-creation projects, and scalable ideation, we have everything you need to start getting true customer-centricity done.
(more…)
Unsere Gewohnheiten und Verhaltensweisen haben sich in der jüngeren Vergangenheit rasant verändert. Gerade im Bereich Telekommunikation und Medien erleben wir, wie neue Plattformen oder Technologien in kürzester Zeit vom Trend zum Standard werden. Die einzige Möglichkeit für Unternehmen, die Bedürfnisse der Kunden in diesem stetigen Wandel im Auge zu behalten, besteht darin, sie zu einem echten Teil Ihres Entwicklungsprozesses zu machen. Leichter gesagt als getan. Aber mit Hilfe unserer Tools für Kunden Communities, strukturierte Co-Creation Projekte und skalierbare Ideenfindung haben wir alles, was Unternehmen brauchen, um kundennahe, nutzerorientierte Produktentwicklung zu realisieren.
Ein Unternehmen, das die Kunden bei der Entwicklung neuer Produkte an erste Stelle gesetzt hat, ist die Deutsche Telekom. Bis heute haben sich über 18.000 Telekom Kunden an der Gestaltung und Verbesserung zukünftiger Produkte und Dienstleistungen eingebracht. In einem ausführlichen Gespräch mit Lara Löhrer, Projektleiterin dieser beispielhaften Initiative, haben wir den Schlüssel zum Erfolg und die Erkenntnisse der Telekom genauer unter die Lupe genommen.
(more…)
Our Subject Matter Expert Benoit Chevalier shares his take on corporate innovation and what it takes to make it successful.
(more…)
Technology cross–pollination and globalization, along with the demise of silo mentality, have put significant pressure on the front-end innovation process to identify ideas worthy enough for development and commercialization. The most efficient innovation processes include Design Thinking and Stage-Gates. We propose a new model where software will help manage data integrity, quality control, multiple outputs and open collaboration. When the chaos serves the efficiency, the ability to get better at innovating will not be lacking.
(more…)
Staying ahead of the competition is critical in today’s fast-paced world. Quickly reacting to any changes once they affect your company is simply not enough. You have to continuously look beyond the horizon and identify relevant developments and assess their potential impact. Scouting and monitoring have become two of the key factors that set leading companies apart from the followers in their industry. To better understand the importance of such systematic monitoring and how to implement it with the help of our innosabi Insight tool, we have recorded this short how-to video from one of our webinars. It will guide you through the fundamentals of scouting and how our tool allows you to closely monitor your entire ecosystem.
(more…)
Download our extensive guide to building successful innovation programs! It explains how you can find the innovation method or tool that’s right for your specific needs and what to keep in mind when implementing them. Building and expanding corporate innovation programs is a journey, so let’s make sure you start moving in the right direction!
(more…)
Laden Sie unsere neuestes White Paper herunter: Ein umfassender Leitfaden für die Planung von erfolgreichen Innovationsprogrammen! Erfahren Sie, wie Sie die richtige Innovationsmethoden oder die richtigen Tools für Ihre spezifischen Bedürfnisse auswählen und was Sie bei der Umsetzung beachten müssen. Der Auf- und Ausbau von Innovationsprogrammen in Unternehmen kann ein längerer Weg sein, also lassen Sie uns gemeinsam sicherstellen, dass Sie die bestmögliche Route nehmen!
(more…)
When starting or expanding corporate innovation, you will face a flood of potential strategies, methods, and tools. At innosabi, we rely on a five-step approach to identify and shape the best course of action. In our recent guide “Starting Innovation…the Right Way!” we explain these steps in detail to help you plan and build successful innovation programs. By understanding your challenges and potential solutions as facets of three general categories (better understanding, more ideas, or faster results), you will be able to target specific points of leverage. Maximize impact, get the quick wins, and create the momentum to (re-)define your innovation process step by step. Starting with this article, we want to share a series of blog posts to highlight some of the arguments from the guide. So let’s jump right in with a question that many might have faced already: What’s up with all of the different methods and tools?!
(more…)
innosabi and the Technische Universität München (TUM) have always been closely connected. All four founders were once students at this prestigious institution which not only gave them a world-class education but also vital support and guidance when founding the company. Even as an internationally recognized leader in its field, innosabi has always stayed true to its roots and maintained close ties with the TUM ecosystem. Over the years, in many guest lectures and mentoring programs, the innosabi team tried to pass on their first-hand lessons to TUM students and the next generation of entrepreneurs. In this history of fruitful knowledge exchange, we have now reached another exciting and significant milestone: The TUM School of Management is writing a case study about innosabi’s most recent history with a focus on its evolution to become Questel’s dedicated innovation portfolio and business unit.
(more…)
As we are going through tumultuous times, people working in the field of innovation or who are tasked with shaping their company’s future are trying to answer one key question: “How do paradigm shifts change the way companies innovate?” To find answers and guidance for one’s own challenges, we cannot only rely on analyzing what has worked in the past. The field of innovation with all its touch points and dependencies is constantly changing. Instead, we have to talk to the people who are facing these kinds of transformations right now. We have to learn from their current successes and – above all – listen to their predictions and plans for the future. That’s exactly what we did over the past couple of months. The “we” in this case are Bente Zerrahn, Innovation Catalyst at Axel Springer, and myself, Catharina van Delden, Co-Founder of innosabi. We did in-depth interviews with innovators across several industries and the public sector to really find out, how innovation is shifting and transforming at this very moment. We published the result as Innovation Diaries, a series of articles on LinkedIn. To give you an easy overview and central starting point to dive into the individual interviews, here’s a list and short description of all of them:
(more…)
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, companies need to keep up with changing consumer demands and technological advancements to stay competitive. Innovation is crucial for companies to remain relevant and profitable, but the traditional methods of in-house research and development may not always yield the desired results. This is where open innovation, co-creation, and trend scouting come into play.
(more…)
What is innovation and where does it come from? Which innovation methods and strategies are used? What does good innovation management mean in a company?
These are the questions John Bessant, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter in England, addresses in his famous textbook Managing Innovation. For us, however, he looks to the future and explains which three trends in innovation research are most exciting for him.
Have a look at the exciting interview of innosabi’s Catharina van Delden with her former professor!
[TS-VCSC-Youtube content_youtube=”https://youtu.be/oc3LGFlYweM”]