Innovation to keep up with the changes in technology is an imperative in nearly every industry nowadays. However, in spite of all the experience and expertise developed with regard to innovation and new product development in the past 30 to 50 years, most innovation projects still fail. It is therefore time to change how we innovate.

Why innovating innovation management?

There are industries that are notoriously worse at innovating than others. Take for example health care. While in industry generally the time to develop new products has been brought down from about 5 years to 2, in health care in the same period the trend has been the reverse. There, development timelines increased to an average of 14 years and an astonishing $1 billion for new drugs, and 3-7 years for devices. Clearly there is room for improvement regarding the current approaches to innovation, not only in health care but also in other professional services, such as law and engineering.

Improving the entire portfolio of innovation management approaches

Besides new products or services, there are other more incremental types of innovations, such as quality improvement initiatives. Although often less spectacular, these types of innovation often make up 70% of an organization’s innovation portfolio. It is thus important to manage those effectively and efficiently as well.

Given the prevalence of these types of innovations, it should not be surprising that there are many examples showcased on the innovation exchange website of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and presented at the recent Institute for Healthcare Improvement forum.

However, what incremental types of innovation seem to be suffering from, is that they have become endless lists of improvement efforts, each in a particular setting. In spite of the efforts made to share knowledge, lessons learned currently rarely carry over from one project to the next—wasting a lot of value unnecessarily.

Organizing4Innovation approach

To address the above-mentioned challenges with incremental innovations as well as new services or products, Organizing for Innovation, LLC has developed an approach that particularly addresses the innovation challenges and needs of professional service organizations, such as those in health care, law and engineering.

Providers are the most important assets of professional service organizations, not products or equipment, and therefore they are pivotal in our innovation approach. Since providers’ time is scarce, our methodology is designed to integrate seamlessly with your continuous education efforts.

Importantly, our methodology is especially suited to getting successful ideas implemented elsewhere in the organization to ensure maximum leverage out of each innovation project.

Contact Us

Interested in learning how to organize for innovation in your firm? Or interested in using an innovation management approach that is specifically developed and tailored to the needs of professional service organizations such as hospitals, health systems, law firms, and engineering contractors? Contact us at info”at”organizing4innovation”dot”com, or for more information visit www.organizing4innovation.com.

 

Links

Institute for Healthcare Improvement forum 2014

Product development association benchmark

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (innovation exchange)