Too many managers think innovation is just about brainstormed ideas. Esther Baldwin of Intel Corporation explains how measurement, rigor, and IT tools, applied to the innovation process, can fuel business growth.
Too many managers think innovation is just about brainstormed ideas. Esther Baldwin of Intel Corporation explains how measurement, rigor, and IT tools, applied to the innovation process, can fuel business growth.
Innovation, like “quality,” is one of those notions that’s fuzzy to a lot of managers. If it’s hard to measure, it can be hard to think about. But Esther Baldwin is out to change that.
In her 20+ years at Intel Corporation, Baldwin has launched the Innovation Center in Shanghai, China, and built global data centers in Japan, the UK, and US. Now, as research proliferation manager in Intel’s future technologies research organization, her focus is on introducing ways for companies to use information technology more smartly in filtering, capturing, and analyzing innovation ideas. She argues that innovation can be comprehensively managed as an organization-wide discipline and that companies that who succeed at it will find unexpected opportunities for growth.
2 Comments On: Innovation Isn’t ‘Creativity,’ It’s a Discipline You Manage
Despite attention to Open Innovation, few organisations have set up the processes and infrastructure to proactively manage the idea ‘generation to implementation’ process and more importantly, to exchange and share ideas with their eco-system (WEdeas not just Ideas).
Most organisations are not short on new ideas, but they lack ways to manage the process. The solution, very often, is simply a matter of creating an (people, process, technology based) environment conducive to idea “management”.
Over 2007 – 08, I had done a survey of Executives from Global organisations (most companies were those with Headquarters in The Netherlands)
The survey showed that organisations have different maturity levels in the way they create, implement and sustain Innovation / Idea Management.
Based on these observations, I had created the “Capability Scale for WEdea Management©” to help managers understand where their organisations stand currently and where they should move towards.
Had presented a paper on this Capability Scale at the December 2008 conference of the Strategic Management Society.
@ashisdharap: You paper sounds very interesting I will certainly look for it. There is actually an innovation capability maturity matrix in our book and also a management tool for measuring a persons maturity with innovation skills. It sounds as if you took one area of the innovation process (ideation) and went deeper. I look forward to reading it.