Now is an ideal time to drive a company-wide innovation campaign. Clearly we are all experiencing massive life changes and this situation is negatively impacting nearly all businesses. As such you should launch a company-wide innovation campaign to craft new ways your firm can address these issues and reposition yourselves as a leader in overcoming them in future challenges.
To help protect its employees, most companies are asking them to work from home right now, which sounds counter to this idea. But no, the market leading Innovation Management Platforms make it easy to engage remote workers (all your employees, and those in third parties) in these types of campaigns via web sites, mobile apps and social media. And they empower everyone’s engagement beyond just coming up with ideas and reviewing those of their peers. As shown in our latest Forrester Wave of this software market, the strongest vendors help you drive engagement with your full market across ideation, idea selection, iterations of them and once validated by the targeted customers, go to market.
The very best of these vendors, such as PlanBox & Qmarkets, also provide strong connections to data sets that flesh out your campaign topics and can be leveraged by your teams to verify the credibility of their ideas. The leaders also help you identify the in-house and third-party resources who have the skills and talents necessary to build out your chosen ideas. And vendors such as HackerEarth and Sopheon can help you conduct virtual MVP hackathon sessions to prototype your selected ideas.
Conducting virtual innovation campaigns in a time when most employees are working from home are very employee experience (EX) empowering, as they see how your innovation efforts aren’t limited to your R&D team or only to those commuting into your headquarters or engaging in person with your CTO. And by engaging not just your own employees, you ensure that you are able to capture the broadest and most transformative innovation ideas possible.
Be sure that you don’t just select innovation ideas that are incremental extensions for your existing products and solutions. Transformational times like what we are dealing with today, create opportunities for your firm to craft net-new services, extend your company’s value beyond its current focus and disrupt traditional market moves that are falling short in these types of situations. And to avoid tactically focused teammates who tend to block disruptive moves, the leading Innovation Platforms help you shield these efforts from them until they are proven validated. Even if your tactical teams block them then, the leading platforms have networks of startups and third-party vendors you can partner with to bring these disruptive solutions to market for you.
Driving these types of campaigns (the best practices for them are shown below) during these disruptive market circumstances help your employees and partners feel dramatically empowered and will raise their loyalty to you in times when their tactical work issues are so much harder than normal. If instead your employees learn how during harsh times they are empowered to help overcome customer issues and expand your company value, their loyalty and empowerment will rise significantly. Kick off one of these campaigns now.
Best Practice Innovation Flow
Source: Forrester Q1 2019 North American Technology-Driven Innovation Online Survey
Which platforms should you consider to help kick off these types of campaigns? Don’t just consider the winners in our Forrester Wave of Innovation Management Platforms. What differentiates us strongly from Gartner and other analyst firms is how we share with you the scores all evaluated vendors get across all our evaluation criteria and let you select and re-rank the criteria in alignment with your specific needs and circumstance – showing which vendors best align to you.
And if you follow our advice and through these campaigns drive innovations that reposition you for future market leadership, we’d love to hear from you about how these efforts went.
For a good set of examples of innovations your peers have launched to address COVID-19, take a look at Forrester’s FORRward blog.