Your company's innovation goals are an important part of your innovation strategy. They set quantitative targets that innovation management is meant to deliver.
Innovation leaders face a wide range of demands in their work, and high expectations rest on their shoulders. They are idea finders and idea managers, trend scouts, futurists, product strategists, project managers, organizational developers, and trusted points of contact—as well as role models for many other colleagues throughout the company. Their innovation goals are equally multifaceted.
Where innovation initiatives once took place at individual levels within a company, today innovation happens across a wide variety of processes. Solid innovation management—whether in the form of a decentralized team or as an Innovation Lab / Innovation Hub embedded in the company—makes a major contribution to managing and monitoring the various innovation activities and thereby strengthening the future viability of the company.
Goals in innovation management
If you ask innovation managers about their innovation goals, you typically hear answers like:
- Develop innovation strategies
- Define growth fields
- Trend management: identify, interpret, and bring trends into the company
- Kick off innovation processes
- Drive digitalization and transformation
- Idea management: generate, collect, and process ideas
- Increase stakeholder management and acceptance
- Promote a culture of innovation
This list makes clear how much innovation management is rooted in strategic work. It therefore takes clear innovation goals that lay out a concrete timeline for your innovation efforts and define the resources required for success.
To move from theoretical strategy to practical processes and projects, you need clearly defined innovation goals.
Innovation goals vary from company to company and can be very broad. In the past, companies focused primarily on profit and efficiency. Today, questions such as customer value and corporate purpose play a key role in setting strategic direction.
Fundamentally measurable goals within a company can be grouped into:
- financial goals (e.g., improve break-even)
- competitive goals (e.g., increase market share)
- cultural goals (e.g., increase team satisfaction, boost diversity within the team)
- sustainability goals (e.g., extend a product's lifecycle)
- convenience goals (e.g., improve customer centricity)
Innovation management can contribute at all of these goal levels, launch projects, and introduce methods—enabling the relevant departments to help achieve these goals.
Using innovation KPIs (innovation key performance indicators), you can turn innovation management into concrete goals, concrete successes, and concrete weak points in your current innovation process.
Reach innovation goals more rigorously with KPIs in trend and innovation management:
Whitepaper: Innovation is Measurable
The TRENDONE whitepaper "Innovation is Measurable" lays out the 10 most important KPIs in trend and innovation management.
Innovation KPIs help you evaluate your success, serve as a strong communication tool, and demonstrate the importance of trends and innovation within your company.
Setting innovation goals: 4 tips for innovation managers
- 1Align your innovation goals with your corporate strategy.
- 2Use models such as the Balanced Innovation Card to plan and monitor your innovation management projects.
- 3Tap into your network and try to benchmark your KPIs and innovation goals against comparable companies in your industry.
- 4Don't get lost in the details. The qualitative impact of your work still matters more than quantitative metrics.
