What is Innovation Management?
Innovation management refers to the activities, practices, processes, and decisions that an organization uses to drive raw ideas all the way to concrete value-generating innovations. For many organizations, this can be a highly complex and multi-dimensional set of processes across multiple teams, business units, divisions, etc.
When it comes to Viima, we've intentionally limited the scope of what Innovation Management means within the tool. Viima doesn't try to have a one-size fits all process or even facilitate all parts of the process. With Viima, you can easily break the process into smaller, more manageable parts by using Viima boards. Each board represents a single process within your larger innovation management portfolio.
Viima is used primarily in the very beginning of the innovation process for gathering ideas, discussing, refining, evaluating, and prioritizing them but is not meant to be used for project work or operative work as each business has its own set of operating practices which can differ dramatically. However, Viima is intended to be also used as a place where it's easy for people to communicate about and keep track of the progress of each idea in the process, which brings tremendous transparency and clarity for everyone involved.
When should I choose Innovation Management?
Innovation management is perfect when you're looking for a systematic method for gathering and managing ideas in a continuous manner. Those ideas can be related to either products, processes, services, or pretty much anything else for that matter. This is a great way to engage your employees.
When to try another use case?
If you're looking to engage external parties in your process, you might want to check out Open Innovation. If you're looking to run a focused, limited-time campaign to gather ideas, consider using the Idea Challenge.
What does it mean for the Viima board?
Access controls
For Innovation Management, we've specified the access rights on your board to "Allow listed users and users with an email from the following domains." This means that only people who have been manually added to the list of users or have an account from the domain(s) you have specified can access the board.
From the login options, we've disabled all authentication methods except for Office 365, Google and Viima. This means that your board can only be accessed with an Office 365, Google, or Viima account from the allowed domain(s).
From user restrictions, we have made it so that only those who have logged in can like, comment, or add new ideas.
With these settings in access controls, you can easily manage who can access and influence your board.
Sharing options
From the sharing options, we've enabled email and Yammer, both common channels for internal communication.
Categories & Statuses
We have set example categories and statuses for what your ideation process in Innovation Management could look like. However, these are only templates, and as such we recommend you take the time to create your own process and model that by using categories and statuses.