In today’s dynamic business landscape, innovation isn’t just a catchy word: it’s a necessity for survival and growth. But leading your team through the maze of business innovation management requires a strategic mindset, adaptability and a commitment to fostering a culture of creativity. Without those key points and without a plan of action, a company won’t be able to stand out in the broad innovation sector.
However, these are several factors that you can take into account to guarantee your company a successful future. For example, to lead innovation, you must first cultivate a culture that encourages and celebrates creativity, foster interdisciplinary collaborations and create channels for open communication to ensure that innovative ideas are recognized and valued. Also, you should invest in your team’s skills and provide them with the necessary tools to attach innovation. Training programs, workshops, and exposure to new technologies can stimulate creative thinking.
Creative thinking is fundamental when we talk about innovation. Source: Unsplash
Yet, one of the most important things to achieve your goal and lead business innovation is technology. Keeping up to date with innovation is no easy task, so having different technological tools to help you stay on the cutting edge is a point to bear in mind. Over the last years, a big amount of specialized software services has been developed to pave the way for companies to lead better innovation management.
Linknovate as a tool for scouting and monitoring innovation
In lots of cases, the first step of leading innovation management involves looking for emerging tech and innovative companies that are developing interesting trends: in other words, to lead innovation scouting. This process can be highly time-consuming and energy-draining, but luckily new companies have emerged to help innovation teams make this task easier and quicker.
Linknovate tops the list of software that provides tools for companies to stay on the technological innovation wave, offering a distinct approach, allowing users to oversee and analyze innovation, technological shifts, and market demands. Linknovate is a competitive intelligence and tech scouting platform that helps companies identify emerging technologies and markets, as well as the key-players behind them. It provides scouting and monitoring tools that offer aggregated data and real-time updates on the latest trends, patents, scientific publications, and news about specific sectors such as energy, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and more. The platform employs AI and ML to furnish fast and valuable insights into emerging technologies and nascent companies, allowing users to generate automatic reports about their discoveries. Setting itself apart from competitors, Linknovate fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange among teams, cultivating a landscape conducive to innovative breakthroughs and robust business networking.
Linknovate main interface. Source: Linknovate
Organization of novel ideas
Innovation management includes the management and organization of novel ideas that lead to disruptive projects. Several companies have started developing solutions for this branch of innovation management. One good example is IdeaScale, an ingenious platform dedicated to curating, organizing, and assessing ideas within a company. This software presents an array of tools that actively engage employees, customers, and collaborators in a collective effort to generate pioneering concepts. Consequently, it nurtures internal innovation, facilitating the adoption of unique and highly lucrative solutions. Alternatively, Exago shares striking resemblances with IdeaScale: an idea management software fostering collaboration among partners through a co-creation process.
Management and the evaluation of ideas is a key point in innovation management. Source: Unplash
Innovative spaces and AI for data management
Beyond these types of platforms, it is also useful to have at hand software that, like Linknovate, are cloud-based, but are also capable of offering collaborative spaces, tools and resources that encourage the development of innovation, far beyond the management and evaluation of ideas and small projects. This group includes other companies such as Saleforce with its Lighting tool, which provides a space to build and deploy customized business applications, fostering innovation through customization and stability. IBM cloud by IBM is another platform in this category, which offers a wide range of cloud-based services, including Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and analytics to support innovation and digital transformation initiatives.
Finally, there are certain innovation software that use Artificial Intelligence itself to provide quality recommendations, based on the company’s own data or sector-specific information, capable of guiding a company towards liberating the innovation sector. These include Linknovate, which employs AI and Machine Learning to analyze massive amounts of external data in few seconds and develop automated reports about innovation topics and new market trends; Tableau, which provides visual analytics of internal datasets to help uncover new insights and patterns to inspire innovation; or Qlik Sense, which incorporates cognitive capabilities to provide data analysis and recommend strategies that can be innovative in products, marketing or even user experience.
Tableau’s AI provides relevant and detailed information in the analysis flow, enabling you to make decisions that lead innovation projects. Source: Tableau
In short, leading business innovation management involves a strategic approach that encompasses both organizational culture and the adoption of effective tools. The mentioned solutions represent a diverse and powerful set that can help you drive innovation from a variety of perspectives. The key lies in finding the right mix that aligns with each company’s goals and vision. Ranging from scouting platforms like Linknovate, which represents one of the most comprehensive tools in technology and innovation scouting, to platforms more focused on idea management or cloud solutions that foster customization and stability, these tools offer the support needed to stimulate creativity and progress on an ongoing basis. And don’t forget adopting an open mind towards innovation and taking advantage of these technological resources in a strategic way will be your best ally to lead and adapt in a constantly changing competitive environment.
