What is the Innovation Management System? Why Is It Important?

Innovation, Innovation, Innovation! The term is often being tossed in the corporate world. Nowadays, you would hardly find any business discussion or meet without hearing the term “innovation” or “innovation management.” Irrespective of business, innovation management is a vibrant topic in personal life too. For common people, the concept of innovation is just discovering or inventing something new. However, the quest for innovation isn’t a newer topic; it has a far longer history. Human’s avidity to find newer things is since medieval times.

innovation management

In the last few decades, innovation management has emerged out as one of the hottest topics and is also identified as one of the most powerful techniques that businesses can use to boost productivity and use it to streamline its internal processes. According to Forrester, 53% of the global decision-makers are now investing in emerging technologies and idea management strategies to drive their business. Innovation management hasn’t been such as electrifying topic in the past as it is today. Everyone is talking about it, and innovation management is everywhere. But most of the people are getting sick of hearing about the topic now a then. But what exactly is innovation, and what does innovation mean?

What is Innovation and Innovation Management?

The term innovation comes to the Latin work “Innovare,” which means renewal. According to an economic point of view, innovation creates new and adds benefits to business and organization. The term is often associated with ideas generation and invention. Innovation can be defined as a process that involves multiple activities aimed to uncover newer ways of doing something. But innovation should be misinterpreted with creation as it is an act of making, inventing, or producing something. Innovation is vital for the growth, survival, and success of the company.

“Management” term is often used in the corporate world. It’s a systematic approach to organizing and managing the tasks, coordinating activities to achieve goals. As a result, “Innovation management” promotes innovations in an organization, which includes planning, organization, management, and control. Innovation management thus deals in all the processes that boost innovation in an organization and generate profits. For example:

Launching of new product or service to conquer new market
Modifying or improvising the existing product or service to stand out amongst competitors.
Developing new business models to add extra income

In simpler words, “Innovation management” refers to the act of managing or handling all the activities required for producing something new, which includes activities such as the process of generating, capturing, discussing, improving, evaluating, and implementing them as well as putting them into action. By now seeing the definition, you could have easily demystified the term. Innovation management is simply coming up with new ideas or introducing new things to run business.

innovation management

Extracting newer ideas from employees, building an effective workforce, recognizing employees for their efforts, and communicating with the clients are aspects of innovation management. In today’s digitally revolutionized world, businesses are facing intense competition. It emanates the need for being innovative and to innovate quickly. Innovation escalates business growth and ensures you stay ahead of your competitors. Business management helps the business help the business generate new ideas, creating a new product line, service, and technologies that can conquer the market. Systematic innovation management can even enhance customer satisfaction and boost employee engagement.

Innovation Management Methods

Innovation management methods can broadly be categorized into three types:

Incremental Innovations: In today’s fiercely competitive market, business needs to reinvent themselves to sustain in the marketplace constantly. And incremental innovation enables the business to pull through by constantly updating their product line and services.
Breakthrough Innovations: Breakthrough innovations are like cutting technologies or technological advancements that can boost product or service level and lets you stay ahead of the competitors.
Disruptive Innovations: Disruptive innovations are the ideas that can transform the market behaviors after being implemented.
Architectural Innovation: This type of innovation method is all about positioning. The method has been already been tried and tested and proved to be effective in different market areas or businesses. The failure risk is very low as the method has already proven successful in different user bases or markets. You need to implement your way.
Radical Innovations: Radical innovations are far beyond disruptive. It’s a true innovation. Its where industries are born, and movements are created. Risks are high on the flip side rewards are huge. It’s the area where successful entrepreneurs and innovators play.

Importance of Innovation Management

Innovation and innovation management is the heart and soul of business. Newer, better, and creative products are results of innovative ideas. Fostering creativity and productivity through innovation is immensely important. But its difficult to continue doing so consistently and reliably. That’s where innovation management comes into play. Innovation management has numerous benefits, and some of them are discussed below:

Innovation management is crucial for running a sustainable business. It enables the team to look forward and introduce creative methods and innovative ideas that the competitors could never imagine. When you stay ahead from your competitors, you generate more profit margins. But the inability to understand the benefits of innovation management could lead the business to stick with its obsolete offerings or go out of the business.
Create a sense of community: Lack of communication amongst colleagues leads to a clash. Innovation, creativity, and productivity all suffer due to a lack of sense of community. Even if the workers are hard-working and reliable, the lack of cohesion leads to friction and clash. So innovation in a workplace should firstly be promoted to boosting of sense of community in the workplace. Where colleagues communicate, they understand each other’s which opens avenues for ideas to flow free in the organizations.
Productivity and Engagement Blow Up: Innovation in the workplace can really act as inspiring. It enhances the workplace environment and boosts employees’ morale, and they feel energetic and more engaged in the work. As of result, the milestone is achieved, and the business is on track to success.

Anything which comes under the approach to promote or exploit innovations in business comes under innovation management. Not only new is the focus but reinventing the old ones, so it conquers the market is also the aim. So now, you might have understood what innovation management is? So incorporate it into your business can reap more benefits.

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