innovatie

the creative mind

As this part of the website concerns my professional life, all is in english. It will contain news about my occupation with 'innovation management'. My work on innovation management concentrates on new product and service development within and between private companies. What inspired me to enter this area is the combination of economic trade-offs (my original profession) and creativity.

I work at the department of Management of Technology and Innovation (MTI) at RSM Erasmus university. Currently, I am responsible for a bachelor course on innovation management at RSM. I also give a course in the Master Management of Innovation (MI) at our school.
My main research interests have always evolved around cooperation in technology and new product development. Currently, I am involved in an OECD project on Open Innovation and Globalization. A more extensive overview: www.rsm.nl/pbeije

Innovations are those 'new things' that are realized through a 'considerable effort'. They take money (budget), time, and often a project team. There are many changes in practice which are too 'small' to be called innovation (I would call them 'improvements').

Managing innovation projects means managing the team in such a way that the money, time, and quality is more or less controlled.
Of course, ideas must first be assessed and selected before they become projects. For this we need a(n) (innovation) strategy. Once you know what you want, you have the criteria at hand to select the right projects.

Innovation management therefor begins with:
1. A vision on how innovation contributes to the (profitable) growth of the company
2. Establishing a portfolio of viable innovation projects that contribute to this vision
3. Run all projects in the best way possible

In order to execute 2 and 3, a company has to develop and/or acquire specific expertise and it needs to free money.

Not all people are very creative, but in allmost all companies there are enough creative men and women. The question is whether this 'overall' creativity is stimulated or frustrated.

Frustrating creativity means killing every idea people have to change things in even a minor way, let alone in a major way. Good ideas are quite often the result of first having bad ideas which were discovered as such after a while by the people who came up with them or by other people around them, which they trust.

If creativity is not frustrated, most people in the company come up with good ideas on how to change things for the better, based on their experience with what customers do with the products and what the company does for making these products.

Creativity to change the whole industry and to come up with new products and services that customers did not even think of, is much more difficult. Fewer people have this kind of creativity and it is much riskier for a company to pursue such ideas. 

Most of the time, there are enough ideas, hidden or exposed. From a management perspective the main point is how to select the right ideas. Modern insights into management of innovation' have led to the opinion that one should not kill ideas too quickly.

Get rid of the wrong ideas, but give people the freedom to work a bit further on the doubtful ideas and pick up the vary promising ideas as soon as possible.

Until a budget is allocated to 'an idea', elaborating on the idea (make a proposal to convince managers by for instance careful thoughts about technical and market feasibility) is not expensive. So, killing to many ideas too quickly means not getting enough innovation projects in the pipeline. Increasing competition demands a full pipeline of innovation projects..

Many good ideas lead to minor improvements in organizations, which can be implemented in a few days or even a few hours. I call them 'improvements'.

Ideas for which a business case is written, I call 'project ideas'. All project ideas approved and followed up by an actual innovation project (with budget, team and planning) I call 'innovation project'.

Innovation projects need careful management, especially in the beginning (that is, after approval of the business plan, but before elaborate development), because mistakes in the beginning may be very costly later on.

A generally accepted model in innovation management research is the so-called 'stage-gate model'. This model identifies a number of 'logical' stages in the innovation project separated by gates. At each gate, the previous stage of activity (and especially the results of those activities) is assessed. And only after management approval, the innovation team can continue with the next stage.

The model is also used by many companies. Often the number of stages is migh higher and some stages run parallel to each other. In my version of the model above, I distinguish a few stages of the innovation project, which can be seen in most industries (I mean, they are so common, that they are not industry-specific). I call the activities in those stages 'primary innovation acitivites': the actual technical and market oriented team work to bring the initial concept into the stage of a marketable new product (or a commercial application in-house). Next to these primary activites, I distinguish 'management activities' and 'supportive activities'. The management activities include resource support to the team, encouragement of the team, but especially screening at the gates. Support activities are more general, like patent application. These activities are largely non-project specific and (therefore) carried out by specialist supporting all innovation teams. Small firms must hire outside specialists for such support.