WBIX Business Talk Radio - Mark Turrell on "Formalizing the Innovation Process"
Boston, MA (15 June 2004)
Mark Turrell, the CEO and co-founder of Imaginatik, was interviewed by Dave Anthony, co-host of the Early Exchange on WBIX, a business talk radio station in Boston. In a wide ranging discussion, Mark highlighted the most important aspects of Idea Management and the reasons why Imaginatik become a driving force in the area of Innovation Management.
The following are excerpts from the discussion:
We help companies formalize the innovation process. We help design and build strategies and processes to handle innovation needs, and most importantly, we provide the software to support the human and business process.
Many companies are dependent on happy accidents, but firms cannot rely on accidents. We have to put processes in place that are repeatable, sustainable, and are less dependent on a few good inventors.
When we started working on Idea Management and Innovation in 1998, we realized that the best ideas come from individual employees, and we wanted to provide them with a channel to communicate these ideas to management in a focused, timely way. We then investigated the suggestion box these nasty boxes full of cobwebs and the occasional great idea that could have been. We set about applying advanced collaborative techniques and workflow to create a modern process that would turn this old-fashioned box into a source of innovation and competitive advantage.
A lot of the PLM solutions (Product Lifecycle Management) are process-driven, regimented ways of handling the project management side of the product lifecycle. What is missing is the work on the front end the source of original, unique ideas that feed the lifecycle process. It is easy to frog-march a concept to implementation. It is a lot harder to manage the business process and human nature to get the good ideas in the first place and Imaginatik has been very successful in achieving this with clients such as Sun Life, Georgia-Pacific and Wyeth.