Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Fast tracking innovation

In early 2007, Induct’s founder and chairman, Alf Martin Johansen, heard a lecture on open innovation at UC Berkeley followed by discussions of how Web 2.0 promised to open up social networking technologies to the corporate world.

The web-savvy Norwegian, part of the team that headed the enterprise search outfit Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), acquired by Microsoft in April 2008, quickly glimpsed the contours of a new and revolutionary way to overcome today’s obstacles in innovation practice.

“After interviewing hundreds of Scandinavian companies,” says Johansen, “it became apparent that the innovation process needed to be professionalised.” He was also convinced of the validity of his hunch: the key management system lacked by 21st century business was an end-to-end innovation management platform that could be fully tailored to user needs and requirements.

Open innovation architecture

Most of today’s innovation solutions are simply software versions of the old corporate suggestion box. They do a good job of supporting idea submittal, evaluation, ranking and decision making, but they stop there. However, the toughest and most critical phase of corporate innovation is implementation, which represents the weak link in many innovation processes.

Partial innovation solutions force companies to use disparate project management programmes to manage the back-end of the innovation process. They can’t capture the rich front-end history of the innovation process, and they don’t support customisation of ranking or implementation processes for different innovation types. Induct’s solution, Innovation Community™, does it all.

Innovation Community gives a unique opportunity to interact with peers and to exercise creativity in a way that creates considerable benefits for the company. The portal encourages personnel at every level of the organisation to contribute to the innovation process according to their interests and abilities. It also helps maximise employee talent and contributions, and supports development of a corporate culture that values and rewards participation in the innovation process.

Appeals to innovation leaders

“Induct will appeal to companies that want to transition to open innovation, and to in-house innovation experts or innovation consultants that need tools and processes that can be customised to fit their own innovation process,” says Dr Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for “Open Innovation” at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and author of the book “Open Innovation”. “Induct has created a highly useful, end-to-end innovation tracking process and wrapped it in a very distinctive business model. Induct’s unique offering allows companies to create Innovation Communities™ in which the entire innovation process, both inside and outside, can be custom designed and managed.”

HAWTLW

“Hello And Welcome To Last Week” sums up Johansen’s discovery that many companies have a random approach to innovation management and use products that track only internal ideas and projects, ignoring the expertise, knowledge, and experience of the external world; others are intrigued by the promise of open innovation, but don’t know where or how to begin the transition.

“We built Innovation Community to facilitate the need for managing the entire innovation process in companies wanting to embrace open innovation,” he says, adding, “It allows you to capture the insight needed to develop new products, processes, and business models, and to align your innovation processes with company strategy.”

Induct Software AS
Rosenkrantzgate 4
NO-0159 OSLO
E-mail: kontakt@inductsoftware.com
Tel: +47 4158 0000