Easy Innovation Capture and Storage of Innovation Records
Capturing innovation records is an essential component of a successful IP management program. If the innovation capture component of an innovation management system is ineffective, many important innovation records will be essentially lost to a business. The underlying technology will languish in desk drawers, paper notebooks, PCs, laptops, and servers throughout an organization. Valuable ideas will be lost because they never reach IP decision-makers.
The biggest obstacle to implementing a new system that secures all innovation records is a requirement for behavioral change on the part of innovators in the uploading process. It is difficult to gain adoption of a system that alters an innovator’s approach to his or her daily routine. In general, people do not like to change the way they do things. If a new system requires them to add or change steps in any meaningful way, that system will probably fail to be adopted and used. A failed innovation management system leads to failed innovation management.
The closer a document upload process fits within the usual work patterns of employees, the greater the chance of gaining adoption throughout an organization. The problem is that employees do things differently from one another. A document upload system that works well with one employee will not necessarily work well with another. This fact of life requires that an effective document capture component include multiple, easy methods for capturing invention records from inventors.
What does that mean? Well, it means that the upload process must allow for several types of manual upload mechanisms, automated upload mechanisms, and batch upload options. In addition, rather than requiring specific formats for documents (which, again, leads to the requirement for behavioral change), the upload and document processing components of the system must allow for the automated or manual upload of virtually any electronic formats.
This is the second in a series of articles on this blog about Best Practices For Successful Innovation Management. For more in this series, see:
