Slide thumbnailMaking the impossible a realityInnovation Teams

An introduction to BlueCallom for Innovation Teams

As an innovation manager, innovation team member, or innovation team manager, you are responsible for delivering a breakthrough innovation that helps the company stay relevant. You are not just working for a region, a product, or any operational function – you are building a part of the company’s future. You’ll need to be aware of that future – otherwise, you won’t be able to develop it.

Strategically any innovation has Significance for the company, the scope of the innovation, and the magnitude of the future business expectation. That should come from the CEO. If not, you should ask for it.

To give you an idea, if a company loses a dominant position because its products were built for combustion engines, it may lose 30% or more of its revenue. An innovation can only replace that, or 30% of the employees risk losing their job. If your company is in the oil and gas industry, there may be more at stake if it can shift towards renewable energy, like hydrogen, solar, or something of that order. In any case, corporations innovate for future generations, company relevancy, and expansion. The expectation of innovations is always going towards a billion in incremental revenue.

It may be the most significant change in your career – but it could also overwhelm you. Could you make sure you are super comfortable with that scenario? Otherwise, there are hundreds of different industries with equally different jobs.


Making a difference

You are making a difference by understanding the value of innovation for your company and making decisions that empower others to support the overall innovation goals without jeopardizing their own objectives and priorities. Make sure you clearly understand the difference between INNOVATION and IMPROVEMENT. Most importantly, focus on developing a breakthrough innovation. Innovation ambition in corporations comes from all corners of an enterprise. 

While the Framework, Strategy, and Methods are critical to understanding, the complexity and mainly the amount of data you will generate can only be handled meaningfully with a system. Unlike conventional IT systems, BlueCallom DEEP allows you to delegate all administrative work like time management, budget management, task management, KPI administration, and report generation to an AI-System.

The real difference is the combination of methodology and technology.


Innovation Framework Relevancy

The BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework provides the most profound Innovation Creation Know-How available today.
The “PRINCIPLE” section and its 10 groups of system or method independent principles for Genuine Innovation will help you to verify of you are aware of and integrate those principles in your thinking. They are not really “Tasks” but things to be fully aware off. It doesn’t matter whether you are going for a product innovation, business model innovation, experience innovation, or organizational innovation those principles apply.

The “STRATEGY” section shall help you understand that the CEO is typical owner of that strategy and there are several essential parts only a CEO can decide. If you are lacking such a strategy feel free to involve us and we can help the CEO to develop it. We are used to work in global enterprises on C-Level and are able to help them, help you. This is of essence as you would probably not know whether the innovation effort is in line with the overall corporate strategy and direction. You would not know for instance that an innovation in your company should bring more than 500 million in revenue and so forth

The “METHOD” section shows the BlueCallom Deep Innovation Design method that has parts of Design Thinking, Stage Gate, Trez and other methods fused to a complete end-to-end innovation process that starts before any ideas are created and finishes once the innovation is successful in its designated market.

The “ORGANIZATION” section is again an are you NEED the direction from your CEO. Depending on the Innovation SIGNIFICANCE, SCOPE, and MAGNITUDE the organization will be structured and you will only know if this is working for you or not.


Your Innovation Management Career

Innovation Management is one of the sought-after jobs. It’s definitely the most exciting, diverse, and demanding occupation in today’s workspace. It’s the place to be for those who have the necessary abilities. You will be surprised to hear that your skills are less critical than you think and that it is not an expert job. Innovation team members must have all of the eight abilities for innovators: Curious.
Courageous, Clairvoyant, Competitive, Creative, Collaborative, Communicative, and Continuous.

Unfortunately, the number of unemployed Innovation managers is currently growing. Why is that? How could somebody even get into that situation? There are two reasons:
1) You do not possess innovation-specific cognitive abilities. This is relatively rare because most business leaders have yet to learn about the importance of those abilities.
2) You worked for a few years, playing around and developing a few nice improvements, but the innovation team was resolved. Isn’t the market big enough for getting a new job immediately? It absolutely is, but what can you show? Any breakthrough you developed that got successfully into the market? No? So why should you get hired?

Ensure you are successful
Whether you care about your career or doing a fantastic job, make sure you are successfully creating any genuine innovation. If it is just an improvement, it is not innovation. And if you cannot work on breakthrough innovation, find out why. It doesn’t matter if your boss is stuck with improvements or other things – as an innovation team member, YOU need to decide the right thing for the company and you.


Knowledge Base

The BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework is critical in developing a holistic understanding of Innovation from start to finish.
The best starting point is the BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework training.

BlueCallom exists because the methodology is not working too well without a supporting system, which is BlueCallom DEEP.

The innovation education program is a good source for all available trainings.
Other sources include the Learning Videos section or under white papers.