Michael Heiss: Balanced Innovation Management and Its Global Implementation

Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference-Europe 2008

Balanced Innovation Management and Its Global Implementation Within Siemens IT Solutions and Services
Michael Heiss from Siemens IT Solutions and Services shared his experience with Siemens’ comprehensive approach to Innovation Management. IM activities are part of the Portfolio Management Department, which also takes care of knowledge management. Their balanced innovation management combines top-down and bottom-up activities.
Innovation within a services company has specific characteristics, as Michael Heiss pointed out: There is no in-house development of products which are afterwards delivered to a customer. Production takes place at the customer site instead. Innovation has to be customer-specific and should answer directly the customer’s business issues. Also testing of innovations prior to roll-out is rarely possible.
To support informal and social networking across more than 500 fields of expertise in the company, Siemens has set up tools called TechnoWeb, TechForum, Learning Network, among others. Support Centers focus on internal coaching and consulting.
Quite interesting was an analysis of the results achieved by the various tools. Michael Heiss shared his insights as follows: Firstly, the internal network almost never spotted new technologies early. More often, an innovative customer project started first, afterwards the technology was covered by the internal network. The network helped to speed up dissemination of the respective knowledge.
Secondly, the network supports customer intimacy and technology forecasting. The presenter showed results from an Innovation Radar tool and from an Innovation Roadmap tool. Such results can be shared with top-level management of customers at common Innovation Workshops. This generally is appreciated a lot by customers.
The internal network also augments the Service Portfolio Lifecycle Management Process, as characterized by the four main phases Define – Realize – Commercialize – Phase out. In the definition phase, if new business ideas are proposed by members of the network, there is a chance that they get support even if their feasibility is not yet proven.
This presentation nicely showed the links between innovation management, knowledge management and portfolio management.

by Ulrich Spalthoff

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