Planning innovation checklist

1. Engaging employees in concept generation

• Stimulate innovative thinking by keeping employees focused on ideas that will bring benefits to your company
• Provide your employees with a mean that helps to bring their innovative ideas to you, whether it's an online employee forum, brainstorming meeting or suggestion box
• Ask employees how they would resolve such issues as customer responsiveness, reduced waste and downtime and capturing a new market
• Collect all suggestions and innovative ideas of your employees
  

2. Choosing the right innovation project

• Note that typically with every 10 ideas, there may be only one that provides you with a return on investment of time and money
• Carefully examine each potential innovation project and determine which one is worthy of your organization's resources
• Choose the right project keeping in mind such pay-off criteria as better customer service, increased profits, long-term growth or sharpened competitive edge
• Consider to engage an external consultant that can help create a shortlist and ensure its feasibility

3. Assessing impact and feasibility

• Ensure that impact on the project stakeholders (employees, customers, sponsors, and others) is carefully assessed
• Consider conducting of additional employee training to ensure they are ready for innovation
• Provide sponsors and customers with information support on the project

4. Planning to achieve results

• Define and clearly understand the challenges in chosen project
• Outline the results you want to attain and establish realistic deadlines
• Plan for appropriate financing of the project
• Engage financial resources through such ways as public funds or grants, personal investment, external financial sources, business incubators and more
• Develop the strategy to use your human resources the best way
• Use basic project management practices that will help monitor the project execution and work within assigned budget
  

5. Team building: choosing managers

• Select the project team leader and supervisors who are able to do the following duties:
• establishing project targets, organizing brainstorming activities and managing project resources
• assigning budgets and ensuring that the team stays on target
• assigning tasks to the team members
• tracking task performance and monitoring results
• adapting the strategy to respond to new opportunities

6. Team building: choosing project team participants

• To build an effective team, be focused on the following points:
• personnel that communicates directly with clients
• specialists who can consult you about the technical feasibility of your initiatives
• researchers who can advise you on gathering vital information about markets, competitors, customer needs, and supplier
• major customers who are loyal to provide you with direct feedback
• suppliers who are concerned to the process you are changing

7. Testing and monitoring progress

• Ensure that you have clearly outlined how the initiative will be realized with measurable goals and milestones
• Launch customer pilot studies to get real client feedback and refine the project before full implementation
• Build a prototype or working model to make improvements to the project product before full production runs
• Make amendments to the project once any problems with the product are solved
  

8. Getting results

• Note that any innovation project should demonstrate measurable results, even they are intangible such as better employee satisfaction or improved business ...

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