Creating and Managing the Flow of Innovation Ideas
The Corporate Foundry Innovation Mission is to accelerate and manage the flow of Ideas within the corporation. This process builds the queue for commercializing new products and services, as well as creating new process and supply chain efficiencies.
OUR APPROACH
The issue is what aspect of the corporate innovation strategy does Corporate Foundry address? We define corporate innovation beginning with the creation of an IDEA to the commercialization of a new product/service, or production of a new process improvement.
Corporate Foundry, nor any others, cannot address the Innovation womb-to-tomb scenario. Therefore, today corporations must assemble the "best of breed" from in-house and external providers.
Corporate Foundry does address a critical element in the Innovation food-chain. That is the curation and processing of IDEAs and driving them into the Innovation decision hierarchy to qualify them for entering the client current business process for deploying commercial products/services, or internal process improvements.
OUR PREMISE
The Corporate Foundry Strategy is based on a simple proven premise. Today's Innovation success, measured by the number of internal improvements and market success, is a function of the number of IDEAS entering the pipeline. Studies have shown that it takes upward of 500 ideas to produce one (1) innovation.
Clearly, when the flow of ideas dry up - so do the innovation results. Now, this is contrary to 5 years ago when the solutions were to create an innovation mastermind group that could "think" outside the box for what's new and needed in the competitive landscape.
THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE
When in fact, the people who know what is needed are in the trenches. They are employees and affiliates on the factory floor, in the supply chain, and on the front lines in the market. They see and know what is happening and have tremendous insight into what is needed. Corporate Foundry is focused on the mining and curating these ideas. As a by-product of that strategy, migrating the current culture to be more innovative. The goal is to create an environment where "my idea" and "my opinion" really counts.
THE COMMERCIALIZATION CHALLENGE
This is NOT to dismiss the challenges of commercialization, or developing modern process control improvements, or supply chain efficiencies to run a lean organization. This is not to marginalize the efforts of Master-Mind Groups, remote innovation centers, R&D, or Biz Development Groups - but just the opposite.
The Corporate Foundry goal is twofold. First, provide a digital infrastructure to "connect" departments and second keep the flow of IDEAS coming from the trenches. It is that SIMPLE. To achieve this supporting role, Corporate Foundry has created a solution suite of 21st Century Innovation programs and platforms called FastTRAK
FastTRAK BENEFITS
The TOP TEN Reasons for Implementing the Corporate Foundry FastTRAK 21st Century Innovation Program
1. Provide programs and platforms to promote the generation of ideas from employees and affiliate
2. Provide a platform to collect and manage the submission and curation of ideas submitted by employees and affiliates
3. Evaluate, curate the ideas, build teams adding value and responding to the submitter
4. Disseminate the ideas downstream to corporate resources for their evaluation and commitment to complete the Biz Development process
5. Promote the idea within the corporation using the Innovation website, Awards Platform, and voting mechanisms
6. Reward teams and individuals for their contributions
7. Birth new products, services, plus deploy new in-house and supply chain efficiencies
8. Provide the CINO and team with quantitive analysis of the innovation pipeline statistics
9. Prove an on-ramp to innovation culture change
10. Create a pro-active competitive organization that is both lean, but driven to be a leader and reactive to today's market leaders.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The modern day Corporate Innovation Program must extend beyond the corporate firewall and into the outside world. FastTRAK and i-LAB promote internal corporate innovation, but also provide a path for connecting the corporation to the broader open 360 global innovation marketplace, as well as protecting corporate customer resources.
