If you are just launching a new External Innovation program or you have a more mature program that has been running for several years, engaging stakeholders to realize their business problems is an important activity in your innovation strategy. Organizational stakeholders understand their situations within the business and can provide clear guidance on challenges and where they are seeking solutions. You consult stakeholders to surface new and emerging ventures of relevance to the business. When you have a method of exploring this effectively within your organization you are able to have a steady stream of use cases to engage in and pursue.
A good practice when first engaging stakeholders is to qualify that they have a clear business problem where they are seeking solutions. This qualification process can be a simple interview with the stakeholders to go through a set of questions to understand their needs, opportunities, if they have a budget and clear timeline to execute a pilot. This process can help determine if the Innovation team should engage further with a stakeholder to create an action plan to move through the innovation process.
There are times where you have an engaged stakeholder who wants to participate in the innovation process, as they realize opportunities through reading the market landscape and understanding the need to stay competitive. They appreciate that in order to maintain a leadership position in their industry they have to continue to explore and innovate within their organization. Yet they may not know how to define a clear business problem within a specific domain area. In these situations, Innovation teams need to work with stakeholders to help them outline a business problem statement that addresses the solution they are looking to explore.
Relationship building with organizational stakeholders is a key element in the use case knowledge exploration process. An Innovation team that is able to build effective relationships and produce complete business problem statements are on their way to creating accomplishments through successfully launching pilots within the organization.
N³ Innovation’s mission is to help corporate clients create measurable enterprise value by inventing the future. Clients have generated millions of dollars of revenue in new markets, with new products and new technologies.
Want to learn more about how to effectively engage stakeholders with in your organization to produce outcomes for your Innovation program...