Innovation Funnel – Aim Technology Partnership

“Every organisation needs to understand their innovation engine – and you all have one, whether you realise it or not …”

Do you understand your innovation engine?

Innovation is every organisation’s engine for being more efficient and productive, for growth, for serving their existing customers better, for attracting new clients and for doing what they do better and better.

Every organisation needs to understand their innovation engine – and you all have one, whether you realise it or not – and here is a list of questions to ask yourself to help with this:

What are your innovation engine’s mechanisms – funding, roles, divisions, processes, tools and templates?
What fuels your innovation engine?
How often is it tuned up and who is the chief tuner or innovation guru?
How do you measure your innovation engine’s performance?
Do you have a competitive engine and do you actively compete with your rivals in innovation?
How much is your innovation engine internally focused and how much is it externally focused?
How do you identify innovation opportunities (competitions) to race your engine in?

We can help you to understand and improve your organisation’s innovation engine by helping to formalise methods, identify opportunities, set up and manage an innovation funnel, pick innovation champions, and run a continuous innovation programme and strategy – rather than a start/stop programme with discrete, disconnected projects.

Most businesses have a sales funnel. They formalise sales teams and divisions and use (mostly) formal methods to strategise, to create and manage sales leads and opportunities. They have a sales funnel and are constantly focussed on sales and identifying sales opportunities – after all, that’s why they are in business.

What about innovation? How much focus should an organisation have on innovation? And how much effort should you put into establishing innovation as a mainstream activity using innovation management methods?

“Just as you have a sales funnel for constantly pursuing sales opportunities, you must also have an innovation funnel for constantly pursuing innovation opportunities.”

Our answer is to undertake as much innovation as you can. Just as you have a sales funnel for constantly pursuing sales opportunities, you must also have an innovation funnel for constantly pursuing innovation opportunities. Not every innovation will lead to a new product, some may just help with productivity by rearranging the furniture – yes, seriously! But every organisation should care as much about innovation as it does about sales.

We can help you to identify innovation opportunities, set up an innovation funnel, select methods and tools to manage it, and run a continuous innovation programme and strategy – rather than a start/stop programme with discrete, disconnected projects.