Mission-Critical Executive Innovation Reports
If an innovation management system captures not only the innovation records but also information about the engineers, automated innovation reports can be generated for executives, managers, and in-house counsel enabling them to sort, slice, and dice information in many different ways. For example, company leaders can drill into all innovation activities of each employee on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. They can quickly analyze document uploads, downloads, previews, searches, etc. With embedded concept clustering tools, leaders can rapidly view activity by product/project to balance resource allocation with business goals.
R&D Executives
One of many challenges facing R&D managers is monitoring the day-to-day innovation activity of their employees. This challenge is exacerbated when their employees are spread out across states or countries. These managers typically do not have the advantage enjoyed by sales managers who can virtually walk in the footsteps of their reps simply by reviewing weekly sales activity reports. At a glance, a sales manager can determine number of calls, sales meetings, contracts sent out, contracts closed, and all the important detail associated with each of those activities. Typically, R&D managers cannot.
With innovation reporting, R&D managers can essentially walk in the footsteps of their employees and have significantly more knowledge about their innovation activities.
Chief Patent Counsel (CPC)
An important function of CPC is to provide guidance to the business units as to patenting and other IP matters. Under ideal conditions, CPC or in-house patent counsel will perform invention “scans.” This typically involves face-to-face meetings with engineers to discuss innovation activity. From these meetings, the CPC can proactively assist the business units in IP decision making. The challenge most CPCs face is that they are so busy responding to the needs of many business leaders or business units, they do not have time to be “proactive” and are often reduced to a more reactive role. It’s all about time, and there is only so much of it each day. A CPC must be highly efficient to get far enough ahead of innovation to add strategic value.
Innovation reports are an outstanding tool for CPCs. With these reports, a CPC can actually conduct invention “scans” from their desk. With a few clicks, they can review the innovation activity of each engineer of interest. They can literally click through from the inventor to actual uploaded invention records or from relevant categories of documents to the necessary inventors. Without leaving their desks, they can glean more information about inventors than they could being face-to-face. Innovation reports can bring CPC closer to the inventors and move them from a reactive/tactical role to a proactive/strategic role.
This is the sixth in a series of articles on this blog about Best Practices For Successful Innovation Management. For more in this series, see:
