Best Practice: Roles for a Successful Innovation Process
At BrainStore, we believe that in order to create successful innovation, the process of coming up with ideas and the decision about which ideas will be implemented has much to do with the right roles and the right process. Today, we would like to look at the roles in our Idea Factory Process. The role model of our process has always been the classical production factory. In a factory, clear roles are assigned to different people in order to guarantee the quality of the resulting product. When it comes to great ideas (that will also be successfully implemented), we believe a similar system of checks and balances is helpful.
Firstly, we are convinced that there is a difference between the people who are steering the innovation process and the ones participating in it. We call them Innovation Team (the ones who steer the process) and Creating Community (the participants). By making this distinction, it becomes possible to steer an innovation process in a more systematic way, because the people who are responsible for the process are not producing the ideas themselves, and the people participating in the process do not need to worry about how the process is actually run. This way, the process is more efficient and the results are more broadly accepted.
Now let’s have a closer look at the people who are responsible for making an innovation process successful. There are 5 different roles. Two of the people (Head of Innovation and Innovation Promotion) are more auxiliary to the innovation culture and the relationship with clients (whether those clients are internal or external clients is not important), and three roles (the ones we will describe in more detail right now) are responsible for the whole process of developing ideas and bringing them to the point of implementation.
The first role is the Process Manager: He or she is responsible for steering the process, for ensuring the communication between the project owner (client) and the other members of the innovation team, and for making sure that the quality of the content is exceeding the clients expectations.
The Content Manager is responsible for setting up the search fields and methods for the idea generation and idea compression process, for monitoring the content, working together with internal or external people who ensure the process is running smoothly and for doing editorial work on the content that is generated in the process.
The Community Manager makes sure that for each process, the right community of participants is coming together to work on the project question. He or she is responsible for a balanced mix of participants, for their motivation and remuneration and for communicating the results (in accordance with the client) to the community.
At each process step, one of the innovation team members has the lead, while the others check the results. This way, quality is monitored and there is no risk that the content or the process deviate from the project objectives.
