Corporate innovation

The vision and objectives of your program must be in line with your strategic challenges and take into account the concerns of your target audience: reducing your environmental impact, generating new business, improving your operational performance, etc. To engage your participants in the long term, make sure you communicate these elements clearly and transparently.

Defining the key indicators for your program in advance will enable you to monitor the success of your program in real time. It will also help you focus your efforts on the most promising initiatives for your business and identify the roadblocks that need to be overcome.

Centralized or managed autonomously by several entities, the governance of your corporate innovation program is a key element in the success of your approach. It will depend, among other things, on how your company is organized, your history and the challenges you face. To ensure that your program runs smoothly, don't forget to involve the relevant stakeholders in your program and clearly define their role in the process.

To build an effective operating model, you need to have the structure of your program in mind. Define the different stages that will make up your approach: gathering and evaluating ideas, setting up teams, and the milestones that will mark your process. You'll certainly need to adapt your model along the way; for greater agility, don't forget to include a continuous feedback system throughout your program.

Idea submission made easy, duplicate ideas identification, content enriched... Innovation management softwares offer a range of benefits to support your corporate innovation program. Voted 'Best Ease of Use 2023' by Capterra, the Yumana Suite includes a host of new features to boost idea generation, such as integrated brainstorming and the intelligent creation of multi-disciplinary teams.

Innovation is a concept that can impress the audience you want to engage, and some people may be reluctant to participate for fear that their idea will be rejected. To avoid this, actively promote your approach and emphasize that your program is a safe place for them to express their ideas. You can even go one step further with Darwin, the intelligent assistant built into Yumana, which provides live advice to your participants and helps them enrich their ideas with value-added contributions.

It can be difficult for your target audience to get involved without a little help. To increase participant engagement in your corporate innovation program, launch ideation campaigns on engaging topics. The Yumana platform makes it easy managing your programs and challenges on a single platform.

These three selection tools are typically used in stages. First, your contributors self-assess using scorecards that you customize to reflect your strategic issues. You can then make a preliminary selection before putting the various submissions up for a public vote, giving decision-making power back to your communities. If the issues you're addressing require a certain area of expertise, don't hesitate to bring in experts to help you select the best ideas.

Some innovation management softwares offer additional selection tools to help you choose the initiatives with the greatest potential. Yumana's solution includes Darwin, an intelligent decision assistant. Powered by AI and enriched in real time with data from your platform, it assigns a score out of 100 to the ideas collected, allowing you to quickly identify the initiatives most likely to address your challenges.

Before you start managing projects, you need to define the different phases that make up the process of turning your ideas into projects: this is called a workflow. To move from one phase to another, validation is usually required. This allows you to get additional information when you need it and track the progress of selected projects. The Yumana Suite allows you to develop customized workflows that are fully aligned with your defined acceleration process. To facilitate the transition from one stage to the next, the progress of projects through the workflow is transparent to users.

Transforming the ideas you select into projects that add value to your business requires collaboration among the various stakeholders. To ensure the success of your developments, it is essential to have a workspace where your teams can share ideas and plan the stages of their project.

Yumana provides your teams with a complete collaborative workspace, including numerous tools dedicated to project management:

• A private conversation thread for your teams,
• A planning tool,
• A task manager (private and public),
• A document sharing system,
• Budget tracking to compare costs and value generated by your program, etc.

Once turned into projects, some ideas have the potential to deliver significant value to your entire organization. The project review provides a detailed summary of the actions taken from idea to project completion. It should enable your teams to analyze the added value of the ideas developed, the obstacles encountered during development, and the potential applications of the project. With this tool, employees can learn about successful projects in your organization and choose to implement them locally. For even more control over the content shared with your teams, the Yumana Suite allows you to manage your project reviews directly from your platform, customize their content and display to suit your needs.

The easier it is to scale a project, the easier it is to deploy. To accelerate industrialization in your organization, your teams need to have all the required tools. The Yumana Suite allows you to publish deployment kits: designed to highlight project challenges and facilitate implementation, they are available directly on your platform and accessible to all. Teams that want to deploy projects can gather all information and then communicate directly with the experts about the resources they need, ask for their feedback, etc.