Implementing an Innovation Process

I came across this nice blog on Innovation Process Framework, by Jeffrey Philips (via Innovation Weblog)

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The blog is a nice read and tries to outline a framework for Repeatable Innovation. Towards the end Jeffrey appeals to the readers to provide feedback.

If you care to, please comment or provide your feedback. I think if we practitioners, consultants and interested bystanders can create a consistent vision for the future of innovation and the tools and processes necessary for success, we can help our clients and business partners become more successful.

I have been experimenting with a few tools and some ad-hoc processes for innovation (in small product groups). So let me start out with a few tools and see how we can start putting together, elements of this framework.

I would like to start out with open source product, called Plone. It is also possible to use commercial portal products like Sharepoint, BEA or IBM portal servers.
Plone provides a portal framework with a flexible content management system. In addition to supporting standard documents like Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF etc., you can also define your own content using a capability called archetypes. Plone includes pluggable authentication (PAS). Connectors are available for LDAP, SQL Databases, Active Directory or any other similar tools. Plone supports extensible workflow management. You can define your own flows on how documents move from creation to publication. Plone supports wikis, blogs and the ability to create new products using Python. With that background, let us see how we can go about building a prototype of the tools required to bootstrap your Innovation Process based on the framwork described by Jeffrey.

1. Trend Spotting

You can use several products that exist in the marketplace to track trends. The tools I list here provide you information to detect trends. Here is a list.

• Google Alerts- A service to receive alerts based on certain keywords
• Yahoo Alerts - A alternative service to Google Alerts
• InfoMinder - Our product to track specific web pages for changes (you can optionally specify filters) and receive notification. Unlike Google or Yahoo alerts, InfoMinder is specific to the pages you want to track.
• Digg, del.icio.us, Techmeme, reddit or any of your favorite social bookmarking service (you can look for specific trends or retrieve information using tags)
• Technorati or Google Blog Search tools
• Tag Clouds (many of the services mentioned above provide tag clouds that tell you the more popular trends) or you can create your own tag clouds.
• Google Trends - A product from Google that allows you to see trends based on searches
• A set of high level Text Mining and Tech mining tools ( a subject that deserves almost a blog of its own)

A combination of these services and other customer serivces, can be used to perform trend capture. You need to figure out a way to make sense of trends from these different pieces of information (Trend Spotting). Fortunately many of these tools provide RSS streams or APIs. You can use these to integrate them with Plone.

2. Generate Ideas

You can set up a workflow where people with the role of Generators, look at the captured trend information, combine it with other sources and generate ideas. These can be either stored in the native object database in Plone or any relational database like MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.

3. Capture additional Information
In the system, Ideas are just a specific type of document with certain metadata like creator, date of creation, source of idea, description etc. It will be nice to add the capability for anyone to tag ideas. Based on tags and other criteria, ideas can be routed to Evaluators.

4. Evaluate Ideas
The evaluators can add comments, additional tags, classify the ideas to be further researched and send them back into the system. With each iteration, the circle widens. Ideas are further validated, combined with others or split into multiple ideas and put back into the system.

5. Develop and Launch

Stakeholders are found for ideas, prototypes built, ideas developed and launched as products/services. Plone is used as a record keeper in this phase.

6. Workflow/Process Automation

This is functionality built into Plone. Ideas can move from one stage to another (nascent, researched, validated etc.)

7. Idea Archetypes

One of the important aspects of the design of Idea Archetype is the progressive addition of information. Some ideas are listed here:

• State - specifies the current stage of the idea. As it goes through the system, the state of the idea keeps changing
• Strength - an indicator of the strength of the idea. As ideas float through the system and gather support, the strength can be progressively increased. Support increases this value and opposition decreases this value.
• Next Steps - For each idea there can be a sequence of steps which can be started by the creator of the idea and collaboratively edited by others. For example, the legal department may add a patent search as a next step

8. Process Maps

Argument maps, Concept maps and other mapping tools can be loosely integrated (most of them export data in XML format) with existing Plone products.

9. IdeaLogs

Ideas can also be published in blogs (priviate if they are meant for a small internal group). There are a few blogs available as products in Plone from third parties.

10. Wikis as Collaborative Knowledge Bases

Wikis can be used as a knowledge bases to share, collaboratively edit and archive ideas. Wikis are alternative to idea archetypes, I mentioned earlier. Many of the wikis now provide templates for creating structured pages.

Any portal framework that supports content management, custom content types, workflow, collaboration, authentication can be used to jump start the Innovation Process in an organization. It is easy to boostrap an innovation process using this framework and existing tools in a few weeks.

The best approach is to start with something as simple as a portal, set up some simple workflows, use a single page with extensible metadata as a basis for collaboration.