7 Tips to Boost Your Corporate Innovation Program

When it comes to fostering innovation in a corporation, nothing is more important than having a powerful corporate innovation program in place. These programs are designed to facilitate and encourage innovation by providing the necessary resources and support for employees to think outside the box. But what makes a corporate innovation program truly powerful? Let’s dive into the top 7 characteristics of a successful corporate innovation program!

How to build an Effective Corporate Innovation Program?

Highly successful corporate innovation programs have certain characteristics that allow them to achieve their goals efficiently. Here are a few tried and tested tips to maximize the results of your company’s innovation program:

1. Clearly Define the Goals of Your Program

The first step in creating a successful corporate innovation program is to define the goals of the program.

• What are the objectives of the program?
• What value will it add to the company?
• What metrics will be used to measure success?

Answer these questions before launching a program and use them to create a roadmap for the program and to ensure that it is aligned with the company’s overall strategic objectives.

You might be interested in: Run Low Cost Innovation Programs

2. Identify the Necessary Resources

To launch a corporate innovation program, companies need to identify the necessary resources. This includes both people and technology. The people resources include a team of dedicated innovators that are responsible for identifying, developing, and scaling new ideas. This team should be made up of individuals with different skill sets, including engineers, designers, and marketers. The technology resources comprise tools and platforms that can be used to facilitate the innovation process. For example, digital solutions for ideation, prototyping, and testing. Choose tools that are easy to use and provide the necessary data to help the team understand customer needs.

Also read: 3 Reasons to use Innovation Management Software

3. Build an Innovative Team

Once the necessary resources have been identified, the next step is to build an innovative team. Include individuals with different skill sets and experience levels. Select employees from different departments and have a mix of industry veterans and newcomers.

Empower your team to think and act creatively by giving them the space to experiment and take risks, as well as providing them with the necessary resources to ensure that their ideas can be quickly implemented. For instance, provide the team with a platform to share their ideas and collaborate. This can include using a project management system, creating a dedicated workspace, or using an online collaboration platform.

Read this next: How Intrapreneurship boosts Corporate Innovation

4. Develop an Effective Innovation Process

Now, you have an innovation team as well. It is time to develop an effective innovation process. This process should include steps for ideation, prototyping, and testing. For idea generation, you can consider deploying design thinking or creative problem-solving. Next, to create the working version of the idea, i.e., the prototype, take advantage of modern rapid prototyping tools to save time and increase efficiency. Finally, for testing, which involves gathering feedback from customers and stakeholders, you can leverage user testing or focus groups.

Also read: Corporate Innovation: 5 Ways to Run Your Innovation Program

5. Create a Culture of Innovation

For a corporate innovation program to be successful, it needs to be supported by a culture of innovation. This means creating an environment where new ideas are encouraged, embraced, and given the chance to succeed. Creating a culture of innovation involves empowering employees to think creatively, take risks, and provide the necessary resources to bring their ideas to life. Also, make sure that your employees have access to the tools that facilitate the innovation process. This includes providing access to the latest technology and offering training on the use of new tools and platforms. Finally, creating a culture of innovation involves recognizing and celebrating successes. This can include offering rewards and recognition for successful projects and initiatives.

You might find this helpful: Build a Culture of Innovation in Your Organization

6. Measuring Results and Evaluating Impact

How exactly do you know if your innovation program is successful or not? The answer is simple — by measuring. It is very important to measure the results and evaluate the impact of your program. This includes tracking the number of ideas generated, the number of successful projects, and customer feedback. Consider setting quantitative and qualitative goals and tracking the progress of the program against those goals. This way, by measuring the results, companies can adjust their strategy and ensure that their corporate innovation program is a success.

Read more about this: Are You Already Tracking These 4 Innovation KPIs?

7. Leveraging Emerging Technologies

Innovation is not just about developing new products and services, it is also about leveraging existing and emerging technologies. New technologies can provide companies with the tools and platforms to quickly develop and scale new ideas. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can automate a lot of time-consuming and labor-intensive processes. This not only allows companies like yours to increase the efficiency of the corporate innovation programs but also to stay ahead of the competition.

Curious how? Continue reading to find out!

Boost Your Corporate Innovation Program in 3 Ways with StartUs Insights

As AI continues to progress, data is playing a larger role in innovation programs. The good news is that you can use data to generate valuable insights into your target market.

Let’s explore how!

1. Trend Intelligence

We, at StartUs Insights, develop a Trend Intelligence solution that gives you access to 29 500+ trends and technologies. This allows you to:

• Anticipate Future Trends & Business Opportunities — We deploy advanced analytics to hundreds of thousands of trusted sources on startups, emerging technologies, and industry trends to provide you with accurate insights into trends impacting your industry in a short amount of time.
• Stay Up to Date — Monitoring the business ecosystem continuously ensures the identification of emerging technologies, trends, and opportunities. Our service provides you with regular updates on recent developments through Trend Intelligence Reports, Innovation Maps, and Real-time Databases.

Also read: Identify Innovations Early with Best Trend Intelligence Platform

2. Innovation Scouting

Our Innovation Scouting Platform helps companies like yours to keep a tab on the market — what’s new, what’s changing, what has the maximum scope, and much more.

Using our big data and AI-powered software, we:

• Analyze billions of data points from various startups and technologies
• Map the data with AI and expert knowledge

So, what does this mean for you?

• Discover Opportunities Before Others — Our proprietary technology enables you to discover relevant startups, technologies, and business cases early on. Hence, you can empower your business units with actionable, data-driven insights.
• Detect Pivotal Changes — We continuously monitor the startup ecosystem to detect pivotal changes.
• Map the World of Tomorrow — Our advanced data mapping process provides you with a bird’s-eye view of the emerging technology landscape. Use our comprehensive Innovation Maps for effective decision-making.

3. Startup Program Service

Our data-driven promotion, direct outreach, and storytelling reach hundreds of thousands of startups and scaleups, making sure you attract the most relevant ones for your company’s startup program. This is why 500+ companies trust us with their open innovation challenges!

We manage & promote your innovation program in two ways:

• Direct Outreach — Using the StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, our expert analysts shortlist more than 2 000 relevant startups catering to your criteria from a huge database of 2 093 000+ companies and directly reach out to them with your offer and convince them to apply.
• Promotional Activities — Our marketing ninjas produce informative SEO-driven articles promoting the program to be published in our blog and super-engaging social media copies that are posted across our social media channels.

Don’t forget to read: Benefits of Virtual Startup Programs

Apart from the core services mentioned above, we also offer:

• Setup of Conversion-Optimized Landing Page — Don’t have the time or bandwidth to create the web page for your program? Taking maximum advantage of our experience with SEO-optimized content, we set up the landing page of your startup program to attract more applicants.
• Applicant Pre-screening — Received more applicants than you can handle (because we did an amazing job, *insert wink*)? We got you! Our in-house trained analysts will analyze startup data to pre-screen the applicants with the best potential.

So, for your next Open Innovation Program or Startup Scouting requirements, work with us and take your business to the next level. Don’t forget to book a demo session of our product today to learn more about these services and everything else that we have in our store for you!