Innovation - Innovative projects management

While business leaders are convinced that innovation is essential to establishing and maintaining a competitive edge, surveys are unanimous on one observation: the lack of steering and organization of the innovation process results in low efficiency. The necessary investments are often made, but are not sufficiently translated into added value.

In practice, innovation activities are managed on an ad hoc basis, with a marked weakness in the organization. The challenge, therefore, is to exploit the resources allocated to innovation activity as effectively as possible. Success requires a greater ability to bridge the gap between idea generation and value creation.

Innovation management, and more specifically the management of innovative projects, aims to ensure that the company transforms its ideas into innovative projects as far as possible:

• secure (risk reduction) ;

• viable (the innovation is industrializable and/or marketable);

• profitable (it creates value for the company).

In practical terms, this means setting up an innovative project management process to achieve this objective. However, such management is not easy. On the one hand, the process is not linear, but rather turbulent (numerous feedbacks, iterations, questioning). On the other hand, the many functions involved in the company and the tools to be implemented make it difficult to control the process.

It's clear that innovation is highly uncertain, and that managing it therefore requires vision and creativity, and cannot be reduced to rigor and control. From our point of view, managing innovative projects involves choosing and implementing the most appropriate methods and practices for organizing, managing and thinking about innovation, while fostering the creativity of individuals.