Thought leadership is a skill to identify designated topics which will embody future innovations inside a company or industry. Such topics are sometimes marketed as the next big thing. Thought leadership is essential for driving innovation inside a company but also with partners and customers. Demonstrating thought leadership skills helps companies to inspire their employees and to build strong relationships with their customers. For customers experiencing thought leadership from their partners or suppliers helps them to create innovations into their products and to turn these innovations into competitive advantages in their industry. In the digital age, thought leadership needs also to be reflected in corporate tooling such as SAP Innovation Management. SAP Innovation Management thereby helps to deliver thought leadership across the company and to partners and customers.
In particular, SAP Innovation Management enables thought leadership through 4 mechanisms:
- Launching campaigns
- Defining customized innovation processes to reflect and demonstrate thought leadership
- Enabling expert evaluations for submitted ideas
- Measuring the success of thought leadership through analytics.
Launching campaigns. During their innovation process companies can demonstrate thought leadership by launching campaigns in SAP Innovation Management. Campaigns are heavily inspired by topics, which are considered to the next big thing. Campaigns are the tool to collect ideas from employees, partners and customers regarding designated topics. Campaigns can be configured to run for a specific time or they can run with no end date. Further they can be configured to be accessible for specific departments or across the whole organisation. So by this, thought leadership can be targeted in a lot of dimensions, such as time, locations and audience.
Defining customized innovation processes to reflect and to demonstrate thought leadership. In SAP Innovation Management the innovation process of a particular can be customized not only regarding the dimensions (time, location, audience) but it can also be tailored from a process point of view. Innovation processes help to analyse and filter submitted ideas in a structured way. At each step, thought leadership can be demonstrate by rating and selecting submitted ideas regarding their topic fit.
Enabling expert evaluations for submitted ideas. To make well-informed decisions regarding submitted ideas as part of the innovation process, expert evaluations play a signficant role in SAP Innovation Management. In fact, they are a strong tool to ensure thought leadership. Experts for specific topics who may have even been identified as thought leaders inside a company, will be asked to rate submitted ideas according to well-defined criteria. Also these criteria can be tailored to reflect the thought leadership. So by selecting the right experts and configuring evaluation criteria reflecting the thought leadership of the company helps to demonstrate thought leadership inside the company.
Measuring the success of thought leadership through analytics. Finally, to measure the success of thought leadership inside a company analytics as provided by SAP Innovation Managment can help dramatically. For instance analytics regarding the used tags assigned to the submitted ideas can give insights how well a campaign works. Moreover, you can also get insights on the average rating of experts regarding the submitted ideas. Further, customized reports can be configured using the analytical power of SAP Innovation Management.
Overall, SAP Innovation Management enables thought leadership through out the whole innovation process based on its campaign-functionality, its expert evaluations and its strong analytical capabilities. Thus, SAP Innovation Management helps companies to inspire employess, partners and customers based on great thought leadership.
This is a post of the Let´s talk SAP Innovation Management, which shall drive discussion about innovation management inside and outside of SAP. We are very keen on getting your thoughts and feedback in all aspects of innovation management.
All articles of the Let´s Talk SAP Innovation Management Series can be found here.
About SAP Innovation Management
The SAP Innovation Management solution helps companies foster innovation, capture it, and effectively and rapidly turn it into value generating initiatives that deliver continued industry leadership.
Comprising unique products, services, processes, methodologies, and governance, the SAP Innovation Management solution helps establish a sustainable creative culture that overcomes departmental silos and unleashes the power of innovation.
For further information about SAP Innovation Management please click here
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