Systems and Tools

This chapter begins with a selection of supporting methods in innovation management. Here examples are presented of the Innovation Audit, the Innovation Profile, the Competitive Innovation Advantage, different creativity techniques as well as Design Thinking as a special methodology for the development of new products and services. The Innovation Audit is an important method to assess the current state of innovation and to provide a starting point for the further development of the company’s innovative capacity. The Innovation Profile provides the opportunity to present key information about an innovation in a structured and consistent way and to improve the transfer of knowledge within the relevant innovation teams. In the course of the chapter, the Competitive Innovation Advantage will be described, in which customer orientation and benefits are moved to the foreground. Various creativity techniques, such as brainstorming, as well as design thinking as a mixture of creativity and development process support the production and implementation of new ideas. Next, supporting processes of operational innovation management will be explained in detail. This includes financing as the first basic process, as costs for implementing ideas for innovation need to be prefinanced. Subsequently, the promotion of innovation and the need for intellectual property rights, such as patents and utility models, will be explained. Furthermore, the relevance and forms of product piracy, as a violation of intellectual property, are described. Following this, various marketing strategies are presented, which are primarily shown through the marketing mix represented by the “4 Ps”: Product, Price, Placement and Promotion. The importance of marketing in marketing innovation will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. Furthermore, the following subchapter deals with the correct handling of knowledge and ideas. For this purpose, both knowledge and idea management are presented. Knowledge management is regarded as the driving force behind innovations because knowledge can be used to generate ideas and, in turn, to generate potential innovations. Various possibilities of knowledge generation and storage, such as benchmarking or competence networks, are presented. Idea management is needed in the early stages of the innovation process to collect and evaluate the ideas generated. In the further course of the chapter, the implementation of ideas and the establishment of idea management in the company will be discussed. Customer communication has an increasing role on the WWW today. Therefore, the WWW can also support innovation management for the generation of knowledge and ideas. Web 2.0 applications can be used to gain customer feedback on new products and services. For this reason, the chapter ends with a consideration of how social media and blogs can be used to generate and evaluate new ideas. Also the WWW supports the ability to conduct an analysis of markets and competitors.