Fostering continuous innovation with engaging IT-assisted transparent information sharing: A case study

Continuous innovation (CI) in large, established companies aiming to both produce incremental innovations as well as to create more radical ones is complex and complicated. It is affected by many simultaneous hard and soft factors and interrelationships. One suggested way how CI performance can potentially be improved is by increasing transparency in the innovation process, through which better employee participation to the process can possibly be achieved. Modern information/knowledge management and sharing IT tools can support that in practice. In this paper, we investigate those questions in an industrial software-intensive B2B company case. The company augmented its former, formal stage-gate based innovation process with new practices in order to accelerate the business innovation decision-making with validated information. We collected empirically rich qualitative and quantitative data and analyzed it to extract a set of statements grounded on the data. Those statements suggest that it is central to engage and connect right people and key information for effective and efficient idea generation, idea development, and business incubation. However, in different phases various stakeholder feedback and expert knowledge are critical for successful innovation progress. Increased transparency supported by integrated and versatile innovation, and knowledge management IT tools can intensify them. In effect, the clock speed of the organization for connecting people, ideas, knowledge (even tacit), and business decisions is accelerated. Overall the CI process should be flexible but at the same time it should frame the central direction. Consequently, it is hard to measure CI performance fully decisively with traditional KPIs.