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End2End Innovation | Innovation OS

5 Time-Consuming Innovation Tasks You Can Easily Eliminate

We know that time is of the essence for everyone (not only in innovation). Innovation processes entail a number of manual, labor-intensive, and repetitive tasks that can obstruct quick and efficient results. To accelerate and scale innovation, teams have to strive for automation to get work done faster, easier, and more consistently without human intervention, giving you the time to focus on what matters most.

This is where software that systemizes and streamlines processes can help. Let us give some examples: here are five time-intensive tasks that innovation teams can easily eliminate or speed up.

1. Gathering and analyzing data

Breakthrough innovation always starts with understanding change and identifying opportunities. Scanning your own business environment must be a continuous, ongoing process — so you can understand and decide how to adjust your strategy. However, it includes time-consuming, tedious tasks that require a lot of resources but if done right it will boost your business model innovation process at the end.

The ITONICS Innovation OS includes an array of tools and features that allow users to easily gather and analyze data related to their innovation efforts.

Without automation With ITONICS

You jump through more than one search engine or website and scan through a significant amount of data to find relevant information.

You use ITONICS Insights to write a boolean query on a topic of interest to get an instant overview of the most relevant information gathered from thousands of verified sources, including RSS feeds, news, patents, and publications, related to your search query.

The search results must be saved in another document or spreadsheet in order to go back when needed, which can result in them not being revisited on a long-term basis.

Save a boolean query/ search field you have defined by creating an Insights Preset for you and your colleagues to return to regularly and process further in the software.

You must perform the same search efforts in order to track the developments happening in the topic.

You can simply search the saved preset and scan new articles and patents to track the developments happening on the topic. The Timeline Visualization feature also helps to automate tracking developments over time.

Scattered efforts by different teams across various documents and tools.

You can simply create a separate workspace on the ITONICS platform where all information can be stored.

If you scout for startups or competitors, you have to individually go through the websites of the companies and look for relevant information.

Integrations with data aggregators like Crunchbase and Tracxn make it easier for you to access and update information about businesses and startups and help to ensure accuracy and quality when scouting and assessing potential business partners, all in a single platform.

You use a spreadsheet application like Excel or Google Sheets and create rows and columns to sort and filter data and identify necessary relations to make sense of the data.

ITONICS provides recommendations for relations, tags, and experts help you quickly and easily organize keywords or themes (tags) to reveal constellations of topical interest areas for quick analysis. These intelligent recommendations help teams arrive at more profound insights and conclusions about the data faster. There are also suggestions that help identify relevant individuals, subject-matter experts, and/or organizations (relations) worthwhile connecting and collaborating with on the respective innovation projects.

You have to manually consolidate collaborative input to evaluate data, which can be an intensive process.

You can easily aggregate ratings of various criteria from multiple users. The 'weighting of rating criteria' feature allows you to put more importance on certain rating criteria if required.

You have to visualize data manually or use separate tools to gain insights. You list the relevant trends and technologies or present them in a third-party tool. You manually create a timeline to view and present the developments of drivers of change and map the regions where trends and technologies of interest are making the most progress.

You use the Radar tool to evaluate, connect, discuss, and map relevant data (trends, technologies, risks, startups, etc.) on one collaborative platform.

Features like Timeline Visualization and World Map Visualization help you view the rise and fall of different trends and technologies and the regions where they are making the most/the least noise.

Gather and analyze data with trend or technology radars

2. Tracking of innovation projects

Innovation teams have to keep track of their innovation initiatives for a number of reasons. One challenge is to measure the progress of initiatives and identify any potential issues or bottlenecks in the process and make necessary adjustments. Moreover, it helps to prioritize resources and ensure that they are being used effectively for the projects with the greatest impact.

In the ITONICS Innovation OS, you have several features that allow you to track the progress of innovation projects and ideas in real-time.

Without automation With ITONICS

You have multiple separate project management tools that you need to maintain and in which you need to keep the project and portfolio statuses updated.

You can integrate ITONICS into an existing third-party project management tool such as Atlassian Jira, Asana, or Microsoft Project. This integration synchronizes project updates such as status, budget, and priority changes between the platforms.

You need to coordinate projects using distributed documents, formats, or platforms which hinders you to innovate.

With our configurable workflows, it becomes easy to steer progress with phase-gate processes while improving visibility across the organization. Best-practice task templates help you to get started.

You have to regularly review the progress individually or as a team and establish a clear system for communication between team members to reduce oversights and adjust requirements.

You can set custom reminders for yourself or others to ensure essential tasks or deadlines related to innovation projects are met on time. These reminders can be set to occur at a specific time or on a recurring basis.

Using interactive Kanban boards, you can keep tabs on innovation projects at the team, business unit, and corporate levels.

You have to manually create a timeline for the project that includes the start and end dates for each phase.

This is followed by resource identification, assigning tasks to members, and setting deadlines in rigid and isolated documents.

With our digital Roadmap tool, you can link activities to trends, technologies, opportunities, campaigns, and other drivers of change that your team has identified and evaluated.

You can simply view internal milestones and add connections that indicate the impact of other projects and/or developments on milestones and timelines.

You can report on progress easily with transparent views on the status of projects and tasks. 

Integrating different business units and aggregating roadmaps require multiple tools and a significant amount of time.

You can integrate several business units and aggregate roadmaps of these units into one single roadmap. 

You can also connect multiple innovation activities in a single platform.

Track innovation projects with roadmaps

3. Coordinating and communicating with multiple stakeholders

In corporations and multinationals with offices and departments spread around the globe, it can become difficult for innovation teams to communicate developments, create transparency about innovation projects, and align stakeholders.

The ITONICS Innovation OS serves as a single source of truth where all relevant information is gathered. It includes features that foster collaboration and communication with multiple stakeholders in a central location to streamline your innovation process.

Without automation With ITONICS

You create different spreadsheets, documents, and presentations to relay all information across teams and the entire organization.

You simply create a separate workspace on the ITONICS platform where all information relevant to a project can be stored, processed, and managed.

You have to coordinate with multiple stakeholders through separate channels.

You can connect recent actions from ITONICS to existing collaboration tools such as Yammer, Microsoft Teams, or Slack to keep everyone up to date.

To communicate new progress or assign tasks, you have to send out emails or initiate meetings or group chats.

Users can simply comment ideas on the platform and tag specific people to share their thoughts or assign tasks.

To share your insights, you have to create and design presentations and distribute information to all relevant stakeholders manually.

You can easily export presentation-ready Roadmap or Radar views or embed interactive radars on your Intranet, for example.

You can update teams and stakeholders on developments and results with newsletters that you can send directly from the platform.

Radar exports to communicate innovation insights

4. Innovation metrics tracking and reporting

Reporting metrics and results of innovation projects to stakeholders and management is a crucial task for each team or innovation manager. It helps build support and understanding of the importance of an innovation initiative, identify areas where you may be able to improve processes or make more efficient use of resources and evaluate the progress of innovation efforts over time. Moreover, regular reports help to ensure that your innovation efforts are aligned with business goals and objectives.

You must be able to get quick, real-time reports in order to enable agile decision-making. The ITONICS Innovation OS helps you to standardize reporting and track results in real time.

Without automation With ITONICS

You have to gather data on the status of innovation initiatives manually (sometimes from different sources).

You get quick status overviews on innovation initiatives and can use dashboards in ITONICS that help you report innovation metrics.

You have to prepare data and reports manually.

Easily incorporate reporting in newsletters straight from your system to keep everyone in the loop and enhance strategic decision-making.

Newsletters to report innovation metrics

5. Identifying and prioritizing ideas

Involving experts, employees, test users, clients, suppliers, or external crowds helps organizations leverage the intelligence of the hive and get diverse perspectives.

Effective idea management offers a systematic and structured approach not to miss a great idea or simply let an opportunity-rich concept slip through the cracks too early on in the innovation process.

The ITONICS Innovation OS includes tools that allow you to capture, evaluate, and prioritize ideas systematically and provides features to speed up the identification of winning ideas.

Without automation With ITONICS

Idea generation is slowed down:
You bring together the entire team to assess the feasibility of each idea, the level of difficulty in implementing the idea, and the risks involved.

The ITONICS Innovation OS allows teams and experts to rate (criteria-based evaluation) and provide feedback on submitted ideas. This can help to automate the process of evaluating and prioritizing ideas, as you can quickly see which ideas are most feasible and have the most support.

You need to put in hours of manual labor with decentralized tools to create workflows around the submitted ideas, followed by tasks and responsibilities.

You can create and customize workflows for submitted ideas by setting up custom stages, defining specific criteria for each stage, and assigning tasks and responsibilities to team members. ITONICS workflows are easily visualized using Boards allowing users to view their data transparently and connect to other stages of innovation. You can also automate the phase-gate processes, ensuring that ideas don't move forward until certain criteria have been adhered to.

You need to reach out to key stakeholders, seeking their input and buy-in. The inputs then require manual organization and integration into the innovation project.

Idea submission portals allow external parties to submit ideas and suggestions to the organization. This can help to streamline the process of generating external ideas, as all submissions can be easily collected and tracked within the ITONICS Innovation OS.

Idea ratings to identify and prioritize ideas

Boost your innovation process and innovate with ease

The ITONICS Innovation Management Software is designed to systemize all activities from strategy to execution at scale. If you and your team want to speed up your processes and upgrade your capabilities, ITONICS is the solution you need. Learn more about the features and benefits of our Innovation OS in a free demo!


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