For companies, setting up an innovation management is important in order to keep pace with changing customer needs.

Incremental innovation provides competitive advantages in terms of production costs, functionalities, or equipment.

• Conventional innovation management often does not go beyond incremental innovation: products are improved, but not reinvented.
• With methodologies like the Stage-Gate Model for the innovation of process and product development, however, companies quickly reach their boundaries, – especially in supersaturated markets.

Particularly in times of digital change, in which new customer needs emerge, companies must be able to develop more far-reaching forms of innovation and bring them to market successfully.

Disruptive Innovation Needs Different Approaches

Companies that want to drive disruptive innovation forward need to take a different approach and pursue a revolutionary path in addition to traditional methods.

• More and more businesses realize that different approaches are critical to long-term growth.
• Innovation has to be more radical in the future.
• This requires rethinking. New management techniques are being sought. More courage and willingness to take risks are necessary.

The result of such management approaches are new products and services for tomorrow’s markets. Business models that are still impossible to imagine today will emerge. Small teams that can act flexibly develop innovative concepts faster to market maturity.

Methods for Managing Innovation

The methods of innovation management are as diverse as the types of innovation:

• Innovation processes, with which developments are steered by a clearly defined procedure through different stages and levels.
• Open innovation and Customer co-creation: methods that integrate customers directly into the development process.
• Innovation labs: Business units in which employees work on the development of innovations outside the daily business
• Innovation challenges: Competitions in which employees are asked to contribute solutions to overcome a company’s challenges.

It is essential to select the right tools for innovation projects and to build up the innovation culture as well to increase the innovation capability of a company.

Using the Innolytics® Innovation Software, you can start right away to develop ideas for different types of innovations. The software is free for up to 15 users.