Spigit Innovation Summit Wrapup

Last week (August 13-14, 2009) I had the opportunity to attend the Spigit Innovation Summit from the Four Seasons Resort Aviara in Carlsbad, CA.

It was a great event with keynotes from Gary Hamel, Jeffrey Phillips, and Sean Toulon (TMAG). There were also panels on Spigit use cases (AT&T, Mitre, IBM) and best practices (Pfizer, MedPlus, Wal-Mart), along with ample opportunities for innovation management practitioners to converse and share their experiences with each other.

Some of the insights that came out of the panels and included the following:

• It is important to have a dedicated innovation team (even if they are not full-time) and discretionary funds available for funding selected ideas
• It is important to have connectors on your innovation team – people with relationships in lots of different business units and workgroups
• Whatever software you choose to use must allow for open submissions and for discrete, targeted innovation challenges
• Other things to consider when setting up an innovation management system are
• How do you allow for idea evolvement, multiple authors,tracking the evolution of an idea, and measuring value added to an idea?

One interesting question that came up at the summit that ties in nicely with August’s Innovation Perspectives is the following:

Does alignment of your innovation management system to your corporate strategy erect a barrier to innovation?

The answer is – it depends. If you do choose to align your innovation management system to your corporate strategy, the consensus seemed to be that innovation challenges are the best way to do this.

Finally, when it comes to implenting an innovation management system,it is quite typical to have the following four phases:

1. Planning
2. Launching and Engaging
3. Evaluating Ideas
4. Metrics and Proving Value

Here are two other posts from the Spigit Innovtion Summit:

Top 10 Jeffrey Phillips Insights

Top 10 Gary Hamel Insights

Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.