Welcome to Innovation Framework Technologies

Your fast track to Innovation Excellence

Innovation Growth Initiatives

Two complementary approaches can be used to leverage your internal organizational talent to uncover new customer insights and breakthrough ideas. The first is to bring together experts in your organization to focus on specific ‘growth initiatives’, which go beyond incremental innovation to identify adjacent opportunities to your current customers and products. The second approach to leveraging internal talent is to build a systematic ideation performance process to capture insights and ideas from across your organization as a day-to-day business process.

When to use Innovation Growth Initiatives

Growth initiatives are more likely to generate radical and potentially disruptive innovation ideas than systematic ideation performance in the following situations:

Specifically IFT’s solution enables you to create an open innovation process to:

Employees fully dedicated to the realities of day-to-day operations do not have the time or focus to think ‘outside the box’ about radical innovations that go beyond serving your current customers with your current products.

Innovation capabilities are not spread evenly in your company: you have creative experts in several parts of the organization that need to be connected

You want to focus innovation efforts on the most strategic areas for the company

Your organization has a cultural bias against anything that could affect direct operations and profitability.

Business units cannot be expected to risk a large proportion of its R&D investments on long term or high risk, radical and potentially disruptive innovations.

Growth initiatives generate more radical innovation – to enter new markets and redefine existing ones.

IFT’s Solution

IFT’s Innovation Growth Initiative solution greatly increases the creativity, productivity and follow-through of your growth initiative teams and cross-functional councils participating in your growth initiatives. These teams use our solution to rapidly capture market insights and new ideas, collaborate on correlating and developing those ideas, and finally evaluating, prioritizing and routing those ideas to start funded research and development projects.

Specifically IFT’s solution enables your growth initiative teams to:

Define strategic arenas for the growth Initiative

Identify specific ideation challenges for each strategic arena that the growth initiative team should work on

Define straightforward workflows and alerts for how insights and ideas should be captured, developed and evaluated

Quickly capture insights and ideas related to ideation challenges

Support collaborative development of ideas and communication between team members.

Capture structured idea information (risks, value proposition, competitive intelligence, etc.) and unstructured information (comments, expert advice, documents, links, etc.) as the idea develops

Retain all ideation information in an Ideation Bank, which can be used for manual search and automated correlation and clustering

Automatically identify and connect team members who share common areas of interest and similar insights and ideas

Automatically identify correlated insights and ideas and prompt team members with stimuli to improve creativity and idea development

Automatically cluster ideas by correlated content to further develop ideas, and consolidate ideas to make the evaluation process more efficient.

Evaluate ideas using pre-defined business criteria and weighted scoring

Enable employees to track the status of ideas submitted, and facilitate communications between submitter and evaluator

Generate performance metrics and dashboards for team members for feedback and to enable ideation reward and recognition mechanisms

Generate performance metrics and dashboards for Growth Initiatives to evaluate their effectiveness

Integrate the FEI system seamlessly with your Stage-Gate product development process

What are your looking for?

Example Solution Capabilities

Correlation Maps
The correlation map enables you to visualize useful connections between insights, ideas, commonly used terms and team members. These are represented as nodes on the map, with the intensity of correlation displayed as a series of contours. Mousing over each node displays the key connections and a description of the node itself. These correlation maps help team members identify and connect critical information and individuals to help develop and collaborate on insights and ideas.