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Systematic Innovation Management Means Business!

 

Innovation Management in the Making

I have worked with Innovation Management Systems (IMS) for a couple of years now. What got me started was a speech by professor for innovation management Søren Salomo at a conference titled New Nordic Innovation.

Søren talked about the European Innovation Management Standard. This standard has required quite an effort to complete,  since there are many different opinions about how to approach innovation management.

Gamification of Innovation Standards

The speech inspired me to develop INNOCULTURE, a board game which provides a nice entry to this standard.

Along the way, I have been on the lookout for evidence that innovation management works. You may read one of my recent posts on this topic here.

IMS = Innovation and Business

Recently, I came across a great study, in Journal of Engineering and Technology Management – the complete reference is given in the bottom of this post. The article is one of the first studies that tries to answer the following question:

Do a standardized innovation management system
improve the innovative capability and business performance of companies?

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The answer is a resounding yes, as you will see from the following research, which is based on a survey of 73 Spanish companies, of which 42 had been certified in the standard UNE 166002, one of the firsts national certifiable SIMSs that exist globally.

innovation-capability-and-sims
Based on Mir et al., 2016
business-performance-and-sims
Based on Mir et al., 2016

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13 Hypotheses

Let’s dive into some more details of the article. 13 different hypotheses were investigated, with the the 6 most important hypotheses shown below:

Based on Mir et al., 2016

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Three Factors

The three factors were Innovation Capability, Innovation Performance, and Business Performance.

Based on Mir et al., 2016

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Conclusion – IMS Matters!

The overall conclusion is shown here:

Based on Mir et al., 2016

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Should an IMS be certifiable?

This question is still open to intense debate, and the landscape may be mapped as follows:

ims-landscape

The dilemma whether innovation standards have to be certifiable or not is open to debate, but the results of this study are clear and conclude that standardized innovation management systems enhance innovation capability and business performance of companies even in a crisis period, and the standard analyzed in this study is a certifiable one.

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How to Get Started with Systematic Innovation Management

I am often asked “Where should we begin?”, and my answer is clear:

  1. Start small, by getting an initial overview of what you have: Take our online IMS survey here, to put some numbers on what areas you need to focus on
  2. Have an INNOCULTURE session in your company, to initiate a dialogue about how and why you can benefit from systematic innovation management
  3. Take our Danish online INNOCULTURE survey to further define your strong and weak spots
  4. Arrange an Innovation Camp to write your first blueprint for your own IMS

Article Reference

Mir, M., Casadesus, M., Petnji, L.H. (2016). The impact of standardized innovation management systems on innovation capability and business performance: An empirical study. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management. Vol 41. pp 26–44.

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