3 Practical Solutions to Common Innovation Challenges

The process of efficiently scouting, assessing, deploying, and managing innovation involves multiple phases and many stakeholders. It’s essential for companies that want to last: 75% of organizations find that innovation plays a critical role in handling today’s complex business landscape (Capgemini). A number that is even higher when it concerns sustainability objectives.

On the road to innovation success, corporate innovation leaders run into common challenges that slow them down. Often, they have difficulty getting access to innovative new ideas and they lack intra-company collaboration.

Thankfully, there are proven, practical solutions to overcome the challenges companies face today.

Challenge 1: Lack of Time

PepsiCo improved its go-to-market time from 24 to an unprecedented 9 months after rallying its entire workforce on a single platform to collect, assess, and select innovative product ideas.

One of the most common challenges to innovation success is a lack of time. A practical solution to tackle this problem is accelerating the innovation process by building an efficient funnel and measuring innovation outcomes in the process.

Efficient Time Management

Between starting an innovation program and deploying solutions lie a number of (time-intensive) steps. Reduce the project team’s and other stakeholders’ time spent on these steps by building one centralized innovation funnel leveraging the following opportunities for efficient time management:

1. Pre-defined workflows and templates: Designing and building programs should be the quickest step in your entire process. Opt for proven templates instead of building from scratch.
2. Automation: Moving large volumes of talent or ideas through a funnel can be efficiently managed with automation and AI. Program each step and let the bulk of the work be done for you. Automation can be done for filtering, labeling, and scoring talent and ideas.
3. Analyze outcomes: Data analysis informs you on how to spend your team’s time. Create access to data analytics to optimize workflows and allocate resources in the right places.
4. Centralization: A patchwork of complicated spreadsheets, long email threads, and tools to manage innovation can be easily upgraded by centralizing the innovation management process on a single platform. Provide the entire company with a one-stop shop for all their innovation management needs.

Challenge 2: Connecting to Innovative Talent

Innovation starts with connecting to the right people. While it can be challenging thanks to fierce, global competition, there’s a way to get it done.

Organizing a Call for Ideas or Innovations has helped countless enterprise organizations connect to employees, students, and startups across the globe. Each of these groups forms a unique category of talent catering to a specific corporate innovation need.

A Call for Ideas or Innovations provides a concrete gateway to innovators. It leverages a framework of clear problem statements, criteria, and incentives to scout and activate innovative minds inside and outside organizations.

Reveal Hidden Talent: Employees

Nobody knows a company’s processes and customers better than its employees. Give hidden talent inside your organization a voice to reveal new ways to create value and improve your customers’ experiences.

Majorel needed to improve its processes to keep up with client expectations so they asked customer-facing agents for ideas using an idea box. As a result, they improved processing time by 50% and skills transfer time by 67%.

Build Your Future Talent Pool: Students

Today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce, customers, and solution providers. Engaging early talent in your company’s innovation efforts will help cultivate a large pool of qualified, innovation-forward talent and establish your brand in the next generation’s minds.

Schneider Electric organized the Go Green student innovation competition to expand its talent pipeline. As a result, they attracted 25,000 students who submitted nearly 2,800 innovative ideas for the development of sustainable energy.

Build, Partner, Buy: Startups

The scale and speed at which innovation needs to take place require external parties to support in-house teams. Build a startup ecosystem around your company by organizing a startup program to scout technologies and identify solutions that can expand your organization’s capabilities or help break into new markets.

Japan’s NEC wanted to create new businesses so they called for startups to work with them in a global innovation challenge. As a result, they now collaborate with 4 startups from South Korea, Germany, the UK, and France.

Challenge 3: Siloed Working and Thinking

Innovation leaders call siloed working and thinking a key challenge to successful innovation (Harvard Business Review). It is probably as much of a common corporate occurrence as it is a hindrance to innovation. It blocks collaboration and slows innovation management processes down, ultimately leading to missed opportunities and a waste of resources.

Break down siloed working by equipping your entire ecosystem with effective collaboration tools. To maximize the value gained from your innovation management process, empower collaboration across these four layers of your operations.

1. Innovation project team: Get your full team onto a platform that helps them co-create and co-manage a Call for Innovations or innovation funnel, no matter the team size.
2. Company-wide stakeholders: Involve people beyond the innovation project team. Invite co-workers to take part as judges, mentors, and topic experts in your innovation management process for assessments of innovations. Increase the chance of successful implementation. Open up the innovation database to other departments, to unlock the value of rediscovering and working with innovators beyond the original project scope.
3. Innovators and idea providers: Empower your innovator communities to work with peers beyond their own network to improve the feasibility of their ideas. Promote diverse innovator teams by allowing them to find each other and co-contribute solutions.
4. Ecosystem: Truly foster the power of co-creation by enabling communities in your ecosystem to cast votes and share feedback on ideas.

Collaborating at Scale

A prime example of successful collaboration is L’Oréal. To organize the student competition Brandstorm, they leveraged to coordinate project management and innovation assessment tasks by L’Oréal teams in 40+ countries and regions.

Three Birds, One Stone

Each innovation challenge we’ve addressed has a practical solution to overcome or avoid it. Lack of time? Speed up with the right software. Need innovative talent? Launch a Call for Ideas or Innovation. Working in silos? Simplify collaboration throughout your entire operation using one platform.

Ideally, you catch these three birds with one stone.

Thousands of companies have done it before. They’ve launched a Call for Innovations to work in collaboration with innovative talent, and then deployed solutions in record time. You can do it too. Find an innovation management platform connected to a community of innovators and you will no longer be held back by the most common challenges leaders face today.