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Planview Customer Success Center

Developing a Collaborative Innovation Practice

Developing a Collaborative Innovation Practice involves four key steps: 

Discover and align on the business opportunity that will serve as the challenge's focal point

Prior to engaging your community, it's critical to understand the problem your organization is focusing on. Leveraging what innovation expert Doug Collins calls the "Axis of Intent" during the challenge planning process helps sponsors and stakeholders fully align on the business opportunity that will serve as the focal point for a challenge. 

Select a format and a participant community

A practice leader chooses the format in which collaborative innovation occurs (open vs. enquiry-led) and selects the participant community. 

Plan the idea lifecycle

As practitioners of collaborative innovation, we must envision what a "day in the life of an idea" might look like. In other words, planning the idea lifecycle.  

Manage the outcomes

When managing outcomes from a collaborative innovation exercise, it's important to be aware of the business forces that can sometimes kill disruptive ideas. Understanding these these forces and selecting the right resources to incubate new concepts is key. 

Additional Resources

Doug Collins.jpg

Doug Collins serves as an innovation management consultant. He focuses on helping clients realize their potential for leadership by pursuing and perfecting their practice of collaborative innovation.

As an author, Doug explores ways in which people can apply the practice of collaborative innovation in his series Innovation Architecture: A New Blueprint for Engaging People through Collaborative Innovation. His bi-weekly column appears in the publication Innovation Management. Doug serves on the board of advisors for Frost & Sullivan’s Global community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL).

Doug's latest book is Great Question! Generating Effective Questions for Successful Outcomes. The book serves as a practical guide to the art and science to question formation for innovation challenges.

https://www.amazon.com/Question-Generating-Effective-Questions-Successful/dp/0985437456/