Best Practices for Innovation Management
Innovation management should not be confused with management innovation, a relevant theme that signals how management is changing with the advent of AI (see further below for a session being held at FEI 2025). That being said, establishing a foundation of sound innovation management practices is an important stage to start the process.
According to Hype Innovation’s “Innovation Management Strategies and Best Practices,” there are several keys steps to take to enhance the innovation management process. These include:
1. Align your company strategy and innovation goals. Your company won’t benefit from unaligned innovation management. No matter how fantastic the idea is, if it doesn’t align with the business strategy, there won’t be enough cultural readiness to realize it.
2. Launch targeted idea campaigns. If your strategic innovation areas describe what kind of idea categories your company is looking for, a targeted campaign is the vehicle to find answers.
3. Build a transparent process and reporting structure. Innovators may experience the process as vague or fuzzy, and others may think it’s all just a waste of time that can never result in actual benefits. You’ll need to show the complete process and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) to build trust, grow sustainable sponsorship, and engage your audience.
4. Continuously communicate your campaign. “Communicate, communicate, communicate.” Work related to innovation management programs is often added to employees’ already very full-time jobs, and although your innovation program might be all you can think about, it’s not top-of-mind for everyone.
5. Align your evaluation process with your campaign goals and approach. The evaluation stage can be a massive pain for evaluators when not well prepared. And, if you didn’t set the right criteria to evaluate against, you won’t end up with the proper selection of ideas to solve your campaign challenge.
6. Recognize everyone who adds value to your program. Recognition is a very important element in your innovation management program. You’re asking people to do something in addition to their regular jobs, to share their thoughts about another department’s challenges, and to use (innovation) methods that they are unlikely to be completely familiar with. Entice your employees to participate by showing upfront what’s in it for them. Carefully consider what behaviors you’d like to see and recognize and reward them.
To improve upon these best practices, Hype Innovation further recommends seeding your campaigns to enhance engagement and quality; enforce a time limit to stimulate creativity and get answers when you need them; create collaboration between highly diverse audiences; and educating your crowd on innovation processes and theories to create a climate where people share, discuss, and improve ideas.
Welcome to Management Innovation
At FEI 2025, Oscar Barranco Liebana, Enterprise Innovation Program Director at Qatar Research, Development and Innovation (QRDI) Council, Qatar, will hold a session, “Management Innovation Workshop.” We are now facing perhaps the biggest technological disruption in history that is impacting all across the globe, all industries, all functions, but particularly management. The organizational functionality that is facilitated by emergent technologies is impacting our potential to lead and to manage.
That means that we have to rethink completely the way we are managing our organizations. Not innovation management, but management innovation. That means that we need to orchestrate new management practices when we are thinking about the potential of GenAI or Adaptive AI. Right now in all industries, we have to think differently.
We have to be aware of another way of making innovation happen. And when we are talking about challenge-driven-innovation or rapid-collective-innovation, there are new aspects of management that will bring a new value to our organizations. And we need to adapt our effectiveness to the speed of the challenges that the world is bringing us. Join this workshop on:
- Driving management adaptability in a changing landscape.
- Realizing that adapting human intuition along with machine knowhow is part of the construct.
- Benefiting from contextual or adaptive AI and what it requires on management change.
- Continually evolving as outcomes are realized.
Becoming an Advocate for Innovation
Innovation management ultimately includes a set of tools that allow managers plus workers or users to cooperate with a common understanding of processes and goals. It allows the organization to respond to external or internal opportunities, and use its creativity to introduce new ideas, processes or products. The democratization of innovation has also helped flatten this process, where organizations strive to open the process of ideation and innovation to everyone in the company to inspire creativity and curiosity.
Once you have your innovation management best practices established, don’t be surprised if you have to pivot as the environment changes. Enter management innovation, which refers to a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices, or a departure from customary organizational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed.
Overall, innovation management entails a great deal of communication, engaging stakeholders and cross collaboration. And if you won’t be an advocate and champion for the innovation management process, then who will be?
Video courtesy of Hype Boards
