empowering what's next

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!

The finance and insurance industry has dodged disruptive innovations for a long time. But now, like many others, it faces a major change: digitization. Although the digital age only started a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are created and outdated is enormous.

Digitization is creating useful trends that have made life easier for both customers and businesses, as well as many challenges associated with the accelerating pace of new digital innovations.

Keep up with FinTechs

Especially for established finance and insurance companies that have emerged in an offline world, the transformation to a digital enterprise is challenging and challenging. Mainly regarding the size and solid structures, fast changes are impossible. In contrast, FinTechs have emerged in a digital world and are competing with market leaders with new business models. Their advantage lies in their flexibility to react to new things. If you compare FinTechs with major corporations, they look a lot like a sailboat compared to a cruise ship. As a large company, this means staying up to date and implementing innovations.

How to be innovative

Which innovations should your company implement? What trends can you use to meet the needs of your customers better? How can large, established corporations become more flexible and agile?

Find out how your business can be fit for a digital future. Read more in the innosabi report Agile Innovation in the Financial Industry.

No matter the company’s size or industry: there is always at least one person talking about “making things more agile”. But what does it exactly mean? And how can it actually be put into practice and become more than the buzzword that every c-suite seems to enjoy using?

Well, first of all in business context agility is synonymously used to say that something is flexible, proactive, and quick – characteristics that come in handy in a fast-paced and transforming world. But beyond this descriptive meaning stands an entire mindset and philosophy. A way of looking at challenges and doing things that goes a lot deeper than simply putting the agile label on everything that differs from traditional waterfall processes. In short: being truly agile is a question of corporate culture and perspective.

A Short History of Agile

With the digital transformation of all areas of life, not only the needs of people are changing by the minute. Also, the emergence of other new technologies is accelerating. The world is evolving faster and faster. Obviously, companies need to adapt to this pace and rapid shifts in market situations in order to be successful. Therein lies the need for being agile.

To become agile, it helps to have a look at a shining example. One industry that is characterized by agility more than any other – and has been so for the last decades – is software development. It can serve as a model for every other industry wanting to be agile. While many areas are only now realizing the full impact of digital transformation, software development has been at the very heart of this development from the beginning. The way in which it understood the need for new approaches in a quickly evolving world can be best seen in the Agile Manifesto. It was published in 2001 after 17 leading figures in the software industry had met in the Utah mountains. Their common goal was to find the best possible workflows for software development. During their stay, they managed to identify and formulate common beliefs that are defined in the Agile Manifesto. Today, almost two decades later, it is more relevant than ever. Especially for other industries.

The guiding principles formulated in the Manifesto are the essence of the software industry’s capability to keep up with the fast-paced, digitalized world. So, the most important questions that all other industries affected by this transformation have to ask is: What is software development doing differently and how is it able to turn the challenges of speed and flexibility to become part of its very nature?

The key values of agile software development

At the heart of the Agile Manifesto lie four key values that represent a departure from how new products were previously developed. They are the starting point for transferring “agile” into other areas.

• Individuals and interactions: The development team is the focus of the Agile Manifesto. True collaboration, personal communication, and an ambitious, trust-based work environment make successful problem-solving possible.
• Working software: Behind this value stands a strong “hands-on mentality”, which leads to efficient and effective software development. Instead of lengthy documentation, the focus lies on real problem-solving. Minimum viable product instead of a polished end product.
• Costumer collaboration: Often the specifications change during the project. The team has to react fast accordingly. Open communication and cooperation with the customer help to respond optimally to constantly changing requirements. Direct customer feedback on prototypes or new features in a product can help you move things forward quickly and in line with your needs.
• Responding to change: Technology is changing, demands are changing, people are changing. Software development must be able to respond quickly to these changes and integrate them into the current processes.

While these principles were originally formulated specifically for software development, they hold true for any other industry today. All it takes to make them fully applicable to other processes apart from software development are a few adjustments to broaden their scope.

Why agility is so important today

The speed at which new possibilities emerge is breathtaking. Virtual Reality, Blockchain or Artificial Intelligence have already become the new normal. The technological foundation for many potential game changers has been set over the past years. The practical applications will without a doubt follow at an exponential speed. But even as these “new” technologies are beginning to reach the mainstream the next big things are already in the making. Consequently, reacting to such developments is only one part of the challenge companies have to face. Keeping an eye on the horizon, identifying potential game changers, and understanding their implication is the second part. The pervasive nature of the advancements in digital technologies makes things especially important. As everything is becoming digital, it becomes even harder to anticipate the full extent of the impact of new developments. Companies who are not prepared to adapt to these new requirements will quickly fall behind. Therefore, it’s not only necessary for companies to become more digital but also to become faster and more agile. Nothing shockingly new here. So, the real question is: How to start and how to go beyond the buzzwords?

Agile in the field of innovation

We believe that there is one area which benefits most from agile methods: innovation. But why is that? Simply put, the act of innovating often comes down finding a new solution to a problem. Not just any problem but a problem that often lies in the future. For this reason, the requirements for a solution can change again and again. Planning a project from start to end, and then adhering strictly to this plan is in many cases no longer the direct route to success. The circumstances are changing too fast. Whether these are changing user needs, technological requirements, consumer habits, or market dynamics: changes and the accompanying new challenges are inevitable. Nevertheless, words such as unexpected or unforeseen are red flags in classical project management. In contrast, they are no problem for agile teams.

Four Principles of Agile Innovation

As described earlier, the key principles of agile software development provide a blueprint for bringing agility to other areas. We are in the fortunate position to have experienced first handedly how agility works in software development and how it translates to the field of innovation management. innosabi develops software solutions for innovation management in large companies. From day one, our developer team has worked with agile methods. Not long after, our marketing team adopted this mindset and started to work in sprints and tasks with great success. Today, all of innosabi is working agile. What allowed us to access tremendous potential and growth inside our own company is what we try to implement in the innovation management of large organizations. Solving complex problems, defying unpredictable changes and achieving great results – this is what agility is all about. As a guide, we adapted the Agile Manifesto and formulated our own principles: the Agile Innovation Manifesto.

• Openness over Secrecy: Openness means a sustainable dialogue in a large network of different people, including end users, external specialists, employees of other departments or even the general public, as well as employees in innovation management. It benefits from access to more knowledge, ideas, and perspectives. But this also means that corporate structures with impenetrable borders between different departments, indeed a total of silos, can be a hindrance. Thus, openness and transparency can help to implement innovations better and faster.
• Prototypes over Finality: Changing products after launch is a difficult task. But sometimes improvements are needed to better serve the needs of users. Instead of developing an idea all the way to its market entry, prototype testing provides important feedback and reduce the risk of failure on the market. With iterative loops, in which consumers can try out and evaluate unfinished versions, innovation processes can set the foundation for success early on. In addition, this also helps to avoid putting too many resources into an idea that eventually would turn out to be a dead end.
• Collaboration over Transaction: Collaboration promotes innovation. It’s not just about customer feedback; it’s about collaborative exchanges between companies, employees, stakeholders, and customers – the entire ecosystem. Boundaries between teams and departments are dissolved, even the division into manufacturers and users is softened. But keep in mind, we are talking about real collaboration here! Conducting a quantitative survey with customers or awarding large prizes in idea contests is not enough. The focus is on working together towards a common goal. To solve a problem in order to achieve a better result that benefits everyone involved. The principle can be used both with external stakeholders and within a company. Why should companies painstakingly transfer knowledge and know-how from other departments to innovation management if there is the possibility of involving all employees in a common innovation process? Embrace the dialogue!
• Adaptability over Resistance: Change cannot be avoided in a world that is always changing. But an agile approach is about not just reacting to change but acting proactively. The added value in the adaptability of a company is thus not only in the output. When we speak of the application of agile principles in innovation management or product development, we do not only speak of methodology, but also of a change in corporate culture. Because only when it is anchored in the culture that changes or adjustments to a product are no problem as well as certain flexibility in the innovation processes, companies can face new challenges.

Cultural change in the Age of Agile

The paradox of the modern corporate world is that almost every industry feels threatened by uncertainty and disruption but at the same time there is more information and data available than ever before. So the problem really is that information and knowledge are often not properly used or included in decision making. Adopting agile principles and aligning your organization with them is the first step to solving this challenge. An agile mindset deeply embedded in the corporate culture enables a constant look beyond the own organization. At every point along the creation of new products or services and by all individuals involved. With the right agile processes and mindset incorporating or reacting to these insights should not be a problem.

This is only possible when agility is understood in its entirety. When going beyond the buzzword and mere process optimizations. For software development, the idea of agility became the central element that defined the identity of an entire industry. It helped to establish a shared foundation for software developers across organizations and nations. And at the same time set the industry apart from the processes of the analog world. In doing so, the agile principles defined a new type of work culture perfectly aligned with the requirements of a digital environment. A transformation that the world outside software development needs to catch up with.

“At the core, I believe Agile is […] about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about “people as our most important asset” but actually “acts” as if people were the most important, and lose the word “asset”. So in the final analysis, the meteoric rise of interest in—and sometimes tremendous criticism of—Agile Methodologies is about […] values and culture.” – Jim Highsmith, co-author of the Agile Manifesto

What better time to start than now?

In our experience, the Principles of Agile Innovation can only be successfully practiced with the right tools. To enable an agile mindset across entire organizations and ecosystems a scalable digital infrastructure for the right forms of collaboration and knowledge exchange is paramount. Whether it is internal collaboration in highly technical innovation projects or external collaboration with consumers: the desired outcome and the characteristics of the target audience determine how agile principles can be best put into practice. This means that agile innovation with your customers might function entirely different compared to one with your employees.

This might sound like a huge effort and investment. But here’s the good news: you don’t have to do it all at once. Find the right starting point and go from there. Do you already have an accelerator program for employee ideas? Then just make it agile with the right platform for large-scale collaboration, resource funding, and prototype testing. What about customer panels? Why not use these contacts and invite them to a continuous exchange and ideation projects instead of isolated focus groups or surveys? There are many more groups and individuals within your ecosystem that can be engaged in agile ways along all steps of the innovation process: suppliers, research institutions, or even the general public.

Fully transforming your company and imprinting the agile mindset inside your culture like in the software industry will take time. But the only way to get there is by simply starting it. Living it. And by setting the first examples for all others to follow.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Catharina van Delden.

There has been a lot going on with the innosabi software over the last couple of weeks. Not only did we rebrand our entire CI and introduce a new product portfolio. We also implemented a bunch of new features and updates. To give you quick overview, we want to show you the three most important ones in this article.

Pairwise Voting

Imagine this scenario: you have collected over a hundred great ideas and maybe even went through a first screening step. You are now left with this large number of potentially game-changing suggestions. How do you find the one that truly stands out from the rest? The one that really deserves your attention and resources? We now have just the right thing for you. Our new pairwise voting feature!

Basically, you can select any number of ideas from a suggestion or ideation project and move them to a pairwise voting phase. Similar to a classic voting, it is then up to your selected target group to rate them. But here’s the twist: users only ever see two ideas (the eponymous “pair”) at once. The task is to select the one which they consider superior. Once selected, a new pair is presented and the game begins anew. From experience we can tell you that this is actually a lot of fun. During development and testing with real platform data, we caught ourselves clicking happily through dozens of pairs without even realizing it.

The simplicity for the user and the great gamification design is only the surface. The real magic happens underneath the hood. We adapted a so called ELO rating algorithm which is commonly used to rank professional chess players. The great thing about it: the scoring does not depend on the number of votes a suggestion received. So even in a short voting phase with limited participants – for example selected experts – you can get sound, meaningful results for a large number of ideas. And not just after completion of the voting but in real time.

User Tagging

We are very happy to present the brand new user tagging functionality! The perfect way to bring people together and address the relevant users in your innovation projects. All it takes is a simple “@”.

Imagine you see an idea in one of your projects which is relevant for one of your colleagues. You could pick up the phone and call or write an email to tell them about it. But that seems quite tedious, doesn’t it? Or what about this scenario: You come across a discussion and you know just the right user who can contribute the missing expertise. How would you engage him or her in the ongoing discussion?

We took a lesson from all the popular social media platforms and adopted their way of tagging other users. Whether it is twitter, facebook, or instagram: the @ connects people! We are soon starting the rollout of the same functionality across all our platforms. Once you get the update, you can simply tag other registered platform users in your suggestions and comments via a simple @ followed by their name. The user who gets tagged will receive a notification via email with a direct link to the discussion.

New Blog Interface

We are very proud to present you the new platform blog interface for all innosabi platforms. We have reworked the article overview as well as the article view to optimize the user experience. We received a lot of feedback that users do not always read articles in chronological order but actually want to sort them by topics or screen them in one condensed overview. We took both of these aspects as the basis for our new blog overview. As you can see in the screenshots and stylized layouts, your platform blog will now also use our typical tile view. Each tile will contain title, image, as well as a short preview of the article. Main articles can be easily pinned to the beginning of the page in full width. In addition, all articles can be filtered by tags which you can easily assign to the individual entries via the backend.

Of course, we want the users to have the same great experience after clicking a tile in the blog overview. So we also redesigned the article view. We updated the rather outdated layout to a more modern look. Instead of displaying blocks of running text across the full width, we applied the design cues conveyed by the tiles in all other parts of the platform to the articles. Blog posts now also resemble large tiles which are nestled in buttons for social sharing on the left and tiles for recommendations of similar articles on the bottom. In terms of user experience, this greatly improves the typical flow of interactions with the blog.

Innovation. A word that moves the world. Literally. Because without innovations, there would be neither progress nor change. Big, drastic changes in the world would not have been possible without innovation. The industrialization needed the invention of the steam engine, digital transformation the internet. Humans always strive for further improvement and change. With this, mankind is the origin of innovation.

But what is innovation? What exactly does this word mean? One definition of innovation that we think is one of the best comes from Jürgen Hauschildt (2016):

“Innovations are qualitatively new products or processes, which differ “noticeably ” – however that is to be determined – compared to a comparison state.”

For us, innovation means change, reform, introduction of something new and often the realization of a novel, advanced solution to a specific problem.

There seems to be a fair amount of meanings for this one word. Even science seems to be disunited on this: These are the two opposing sides: 

• Innovation is a novelty or renewal of an object or a course of action
• Innovation is change and application, which means innovation must first be invented, but introduced, used and applied too

This is precisely where the crucial difference between innovation and invention lies. Especially in English-speaking countries, “innovation” and “invention” are often used interchangeably. However, looking more closely at the meanings, it becomes clear that an invention can only be the basis for innovation. Inventions begin with an idea and the development of a prototype. For an innovation to emerge, the prototype must become a product that is brought to the market and used.

What are the different types of innovation?

Without innovation, no company can survive longer then a few years. Just because a corporation is big, does not mean it is undisruptable.

In addition to the object of innovation, it is also useful to distinguish for which scope an innovation. Additionally, product, service and business model innovations can be divided by their market impact. These two attributes can be used to differentiate the following types of innovations:

• Performance innovations are new ideas for a already well-known market. Often an improvement of the existing offer is made possible by new technologies.
• Application innovations open up a new market for an already existing idea. New and additional customers can now use an existing offer.
• Incremental innovations are advancements/ the optimization of existing products, services or business models. The adjustments often serve to reduce costs, optimize customer benefit or reposition the market.
• Radical innovation means that completely new ideas are translated into never seen before products, services or business models. Their impact on hole markets can be extreme. 
• Sustaining innovations help companies defend their own market position and remain competitive. Any innovation that enhances a supply is therefore a sustaining innovation, whether radical or incremental.
• Disruptive innovations are those that shape new markets or disrupt established ones. Frequently, disruptive innovations are possible through new technologies. The car for example was a disruptive innovation regarding transportation 100 years ago. Whether an innovation is disruptive often depends on the perspective. While the electric car is a radical but sustainable innovation for the automotive industry, it can be disruptive to the petrol industry, because their product is no longer needed.
• Agile innovation means implementing ideas through collaboration and iterative prototype circles/ loops. With the adaptability of agile innovation processes, innovations can be brought to market faster and implemented more seamlessly.

In addition, the trigger for an innovation can be distinguished. So what triggered the innovation? Two main possibilities: Market-pull, where innovations are initiated by customer request, and technology-push, where new technologies enable new applications or products which then are marketed accordingly.

How can innovation processes be implemented in a company?

Agile innovation management is key to innovation success. This is where the different types of innovation come together. There are differences in the people and resources with which ideas are collected and implemented. In Closed Innovation, organizations only involve internal resources in the innovation process. This can be done in the form of classic idea management, using innosabi spark, or via internal innovation projects and knowledge sharing, as it is possible with the innosabi launch pad software. If a company also opens its innovation processes to external partners, this approach is called open innovation. Customers (innosabi telescope) or suppliers and research institutes (innosabi orbit) can be involved in the development of new innovations that way. Interested? Request a demo!

“Disruptive ideas need an unconventional innovation process.” With this guiding principle, Dr. Christian Homma from Siemens launched the company-internal program Siemens Quickstarter. The software developed by innosabi enables employees to participate in the company’s innovation management actively.

“Our employees are creative, but many good ideas lie dormant.” Siemens Quickstarter increases transparency in the innovation process, says Christian Homma in an interview. With the help of the innosabi software, Siemens is breaking open the silo thinking, as employees can now find out which innovation projects their colleagues are working on.

The particular feature of the platform is the possibility for innovation funding. The employees crowdfund submitted ideas on a real budget. Projects that achieve their funding goal can be implemented directly – without a board, without a management decision. In this way, Siemens promotes Ownership Culture:

We have a higher employee motivation. And we live Ownership Culture. We use the platform to promote intrapreneurship because the employees are committed to their ideas. Anyone who reaches the funding goal implements his idea in a separate project.

Watch the whole video (English subtitles available):

In the innovation process of Siemens, it says: Just give it a try. For this approach, the program and the Siemens Quickstarter platform of the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) were awarded the Grand Prize 2018. Click here for the video: youtu.be/n4sUsncHzGs

The innosabi software accelerates innovation processes and enables innovation management with the entire ecosystem of a company. But which innovation methods are behind the innosabi products? And in which use cases can our software be used? In just two minutes, our CEO Catharina van Delden clarifies these two questions and introduces the company innosabi.

Are you curious now? Then we recommend the webcast hello world_ this is innosabi! In a total of 20 minutes, Catharina van Delden vividly explains both the method of agile innovation and the use cases of our products.

Fancy more knowledge about innovation methods? Where does Agile Innovation come from, how the four principles of agile innovation management came about, and what are the benefits of agility in the innovation process? Find out in the blog post about our products and the LinkedIn article by Catharina van Delden.

Not only the world around us stands constant transformation, also innosabi is entering a new era. With the expansion of our portfolio, we are adapting the innosabi products to the changing requirements of digitization. Therefore, we are building our software solutions even more around specific use cases. But what has been the trigger for this development? It becomes quite obvious when one steps back for a moment to take a glimpse into the past.

Digital transformation is no longer a task of the future

Our lives are becoming more digital and faster. Software and intelligent technologies are continually expanding their impact on our everyday lives: Internet of Things, Big Data or Industry 4.0 are fundamentally altering the ways we live and work.

These developments drive and inspire the work at innosabi. With our technology, we support our customers in a changing world – so they can be faster and more digital, but also be prepared for a future in which companies sometimes have to completely redefine themselves and their products. We have a profound understanding of the necessity to address future problems right away and find a creative solution through innovation.

Adaptability is the key to success – also for innosabi

In a world that is in constant transformation, change cannot be avoided. Following an agile approach, it is inevitable to put “Adaptability over Resistance”. The world is no longer just about responding to change, but to act actively and to shape the future. However, this principle of Agile Innovation, which we have already introduced here on the blog, is not only essential for our customers, but also for ourselves. Like any other company, innosabi continues to evolve.

Roughly summarized, the evolution of innosabi began seven years ago with unserAller. Via Facebook and our own platform, consumers could take part in the development of new products. From shower gel to mustard, everything was there. Sometimes we even sold the jointly developed products in the unserAller shop. It soon became clear: what works for consumer goods is also interesting for suppliers in many other areas. That’s why innosabi gave companies the opportunity to build their own communities and thus became an expert in innovation software. With the innosabi technology, companies are able to cultivate communities and work on projects collaboratively with their customers. But we have found that companies could benefit not only from external communities. Internal collaboration and employee communities add value to the development process as well.

So much has changed in recent years: new use cases for our software, new stakeholders and now a new, expanded product portfolio. In doing so, we want to continue our development, adapting to the changing requirements of our customers and the conditions of digital change.

5 software solutions for innovation in your business

Agile innovation now covers many areas of company business, indeed the entire ecosystem of a company. The right digital infrastructure is an important prerequisite. With the innosabi software, we are not just providing the right infrastructure, but also the necessary acceleration through agility in the innovation process. We offer five specialized solutions to better meet the needs of different applications and objectives in innovation management.

• innosabi launch pad accelerates the innovation process and connects the knowledge in the entire company. In Innovation Funding and Solution Scouting projects, employees can collaboratively develop, refine, and fund ideas – and quickly find the best path from idea to implementation.
• innosabi spark enables a completely modernized idea management. Through transparent evaluation, efficient workflows and state-of-the-art user experience, companies can fully exploit the potential of employee ideas.
• innosabi telescope is the solution for collaboration with customers. Companies can test their prototypes directly with the end user and get feedback in the development process. Crowd Innovation together with customers opens up the possibility of user-centered, agile and successful product development.
• innosabi orbit provides the opportunity to collaborate with networks and external stakeholders. Engage suppliers in development processes at an early stage or solve problems with a selected network of experts.
• innosabi hub combines the four specialized solutions launch pad, spark, telescope and orbit in one central analysis tool. Thus, our software provides the necessary infrastructure for a networked, digital ecosystem. Advanced data analytics enables reporting across all projects and platforms.

Innovation management and idea management, internal and external, with customers, suppliers, experts and your employees – with the innosabi software you will find a suitable, specialized platform solution for every application and create a digital infrastructure for an agile innovation management. Find out more about the individual platform solutions on our website.