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Questions & Answers with an Innovation Management Leader from Intel: Viki Almog-Ayzenberg

Last month we hosted a webinar with Viki Almog-Ayzenberg from Intel on the topic of Scaling Innovation Success. This insight-packed session told the story of Intel’s experience implementing a decentralized approach to innovation across various business units at the company. A recording of this webinar is now available to view on demand, so if you haven’t already watched it, be sure to check it out by registering here!

One of the most inspiring parts of this webinar was the Q&A portion – questions were raised during the webinar and of course at the end. In fact, we received so many amazing questions from our attendees that we were not able to respond to all of them during the webinar. As such, we have put together a quick post sharing a full breakdown of all the questions and answers that were raised. Take a look and reach out if you have any additional questions that we can help you with.

Innovation Program Background & Context

Did you have an internal process of innovation within Intel before you reached out to Qmarkets? What was the trigger to roll out an innovation program and how did it begin?

Viki: We did have different innovation efforts, some of them less impactful some more, but we felt that overall they didn’t bring the results we wanted and that the process wasn’t scalable enough. Eventually we decided to do it in a more managed way and decided that we need a dedicated tool to help us achieve it.

Qmarkets: In case your organization already has an established innovation process, Qmarkets’ Customer Success experts will advise and guide you on how to configure our system to support your needs, combined with our advanced capabilities in order to maximize efficiency and ROI.

In case you are just starting your innovation journey, we will share our knowledge and best practices with you to make sure you will achieve your goals while building a true innovation culture in your organization.

At Intel, is “Innovation Leader” a dedicated position? Or is this time they dedicate on top of their “day jobs.”

Viki: We have a core innovation team located in Israel, but we consider the innovation leaders, or as stated here catalysts to be the reps from the BU who are managing the activity and their campaigns in addition to their daily jobs.

Qmarkets: The core innovation team is usually madeup of  dedicated positions, since they need to determine the innovation strategy and methodology behind it. However, we’ve seen how bottom-up initiatives have successfully scaled up and brought results, thanks to Innovation catalysts from a specific business unit or other segments of an organization. These people will need to mitigate some things that a dedicated innovation team already has (like mandate to engage with such activity, resources, and even work harder for management buy-in) but it’s possible.

In addition, Qmarkets provides various advanced AI-based tools to ensure the process is efficient and not time-consuming for the innovation leader.

How many people are on the team managing these innovation efforts?

Viki: In the core innovation team we have 4 poeple, but as we said the campaigns themselves are managed by representatives from the different business units.

Qmarkets: We recommend to allocate 1-2 campaign managers per campaign, and involve more stakeholders throughout the process.

Defining Innovation Challenges and Campaigns

What types of challenges does Intel engage employees to participate in? Marketing, managerial, scientific and technical, or others?

Viki: At Intel we are focusing on a combination of process improvements, technical challenges, product challenges, and more.

Qmarkets: Due to our comprehensive self-administration capabilities, campaign topics can easily be changed and vary as needed. The system will allow you to adjust the process, submission form, transition rules, assign different stakeholders, and much more per campaign.

Does your system accept “non-campaign” challenges (miscellaneous ideas that don’t fit in a current campaign.) If so, who evaluates these non-campaign ideas?

Viki: Currently since we’re using the de-centralized approach – and business units are running their own campaigns – we don’t have a general repository for miscellaneous ideas.

Qmarkets: We believe that the best approach is to run time-based challenges side-by-side with a dedicated process to handle miscellaneous ideas. The process, submission form and more can be adjusted to fit both use cases. The miscellaneous group of ideas can be evaluated at predetermined intervals (we recommend monthly or quarterly), and can also help with identifying pain points coming bottom up, that possibly can be discussed in a dedicated campaign but would otherwise be overlooked.

Are your campaign audiences Israel-only, or across all Intel?

Viki: The campaigns we ran were open globally, usually targeted audience was from 3-5 geographies.

Qmarkets: We recommend to start from whatever segment will bring you the quick wins you need to use as a success story that you can build on and scale. It can be a country that has local leaders that will be able to ensure results, it can be departments that are naturally innovative or have a real pain point in a given time, or it can even be a topic that you’re sure will be budgeted. Once you have that, you can build a plan to scale up. Eventually, when a company is mature enough with this type of activity, we see a combination of cross functional/global activity vs. several more targeted campaign along the year managed by different stakeholders. Once you go global, the system has huge benefits in removing barriers such as different time zones, different languages and more.

Within the Qmarkets program, how do you close a campaign and announce the results in addition to the “Awards” event? On the Overview page?

campaign summary 1

Qmarkets: The results can be announced and promoted in various ways: once the campaign is closed, there is an option to publish a “Campaign Summary” page within the campaign, that can include a short paragraph that describes the achievement of the campaign, a strip that promotes specific ideas, a strip that acknowledges specific contributors and more. In addition, the system administrator can publish the campaign results as a news item, on the homepage ‘beehive’.

Implementing & Analyzing Ideas

Who is responsible for leading the POC development, the idea owner?

Viki: Yes – the idea owner – they are the CEO of their idea. At this stage, if they don’t take responsibility for the idea, the chance of it succeeding is too low!

Qmarkets: We definitely recommend involving the idea owner and co-owners along the innovation process, as well as other community members who show interest in “joining the team”. It is also recommended to make sure they have a mentor to guide them through the process.

Furthermore, our product fully supports multiple stakeholders working on an idea. Different owners for the POC stages like idea managers, experts, coaches can be assigned automatically. This can be done by idea categorization (i.e. product type), organization structure (i.e. per department) or manually per idea. Furthermore Qmarkets is able to recommend relevant users for each idea through its powerful AI engine, based on their past activity in similar ideas, their user profile and availability.

What is the best mix to finance your innovation POC´s? We tried 50% central budget (25% from R&D and 25% from the business unit) what is your experience?

Viki: Budget and resources are normally connected to the BU, because it’s a good sanity check to see if they would want to invest at the POC stage, and decide where do they want to invest. Normally during the POC stage we mainly challenge the units to work very lean, and guide regarding the process and tracking.

Which Qmarkets reports do you rely on for your end-of-year report in addition to the All Data Report? What are you finding useful?

Viki: The system delivers a set of real-time reporting and dashboards, plus an engine to customize dashboards, create new individual KPIs and Statistics.

Qmarkets: Based on Qmarkets’ vast experience, we deliver built-in reports that are aligned with today’s business standards and innovation strategies:

  • Dashboard: shows system overview with system activities, users per country/department, user engagement, adoption, transitions and ROI. The dashboard is completely customizable.
  • Innovation Funnel: showing the amount of ideas and ROI per state
  • Idea Sonar, a 5D bubble chart for idea prioritization and portfolio managing
  • Rating Reports and Score Card Magic Quadrant
  • Collaboration Activity: (Users, Accesses, Submitters, Comment Submitters, Voters, % Submitters (out of Accesses)
  • Workflow Efficiency (Average idea processing time per state and phase)
  • Expert Activity (Open/finalized/rejected reviews per expert, percentages etc.)
  • User Statistics (Amount and percentage of  invited, engaged users, idea submitters, commenters, voters, etc., grouped by any profile field or time)
  • Comment Summary (Idea #, idea title, comment author, comment text, comment submission date and time, comment attachment)
  • Top Contributors/Gamification Report (User and points per individual actions like comments, votes, idea transitions. Can be filtered by date, profile and more.)
  • Controlling Reports on Idea KPIs like ROI, Savings etc
  • Tasks Overview (Showing all tasks, their details, owners, dates and related ideas. Can be filtered by numerous criteria.)
  • Expertise Overview (Showing all tasks, their details, owners, dates and related ideas. Can be filtered by numerous criteria.)
  • Ideas Export (Excel Export of all ideas, including all idea fields and metadata)

 Besides those, the system administrator can build his own KPIs, reports and graphs and configure his own dashboard with the use of our powerful Report Generator via a quick and intuitive drag-and-drop interface. On each report he can collect one or several KPIs, filtered, grouped and displayed as graphs by date, profile fields, categories, tenant, challenge etc. They can be displayed as various chart types (pie, bar, line etc.) and exported in several formats.

Reports can be subscribed by mail on a weekly or monthly basis to get the updated file by mail. Integrations with 3rd party providers like Google Analytics, Power BI or Hotjar are easily possible (subject to separate licenses).

What are the KPI’s you use along the innovation process?

Viki: You can see the numbers I shared… that’s a good way to start

Qmarkets: In the first 6 months, we suggest to focus on KPIs for engagement  and collaboration that will ensure a successful adoption of the innovation culture. Starting from the 7th months we suggest to add KPIs for tracking process efficiency and ROI.

Input Metrics

  • R&D spend as a percentage of sales
  • The number of innovation projects started
  • The number of new ideas in the pipeline
  • Number of new employees in R&D

 Output Metrics

  • Number of new products launched in X amount of time
  • Revenue/profit growth from new products
  • ROI of innovation activities
  • Actual vs. targeted breakeven time for new products

I’m assuming the Catalyst Kit is available to partners as well?

Qmarkets: Of course it’s available to all Qmarkets customers and partners. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

If you would like to subscribe someone, just speak to your customer success manager and they will be happy to help.

Once again, you can view the full webinar recording by registering at this link, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly if you have additional questions about scaling innovation success!

intel logo white

About Intel Corp

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation, ranked 51 in Fortune 500 list.  It is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors, which are found in most personal computers (PCs).

viki

About Viki Almog-Ayzenberg

As a business innovation leader, Viki is a business development and innovation expert who has spent the last twelve years living and breathing the Israeli tech ecosystem across multiple sectors.

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This article is a guest post.

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