Profits
The innovation mill helps an organization to make more profit out of its development investments. There are three main groups of development investments:
- continuous improvement investments of operations
- products’ and services’ development investments
- strategic investments (e.g. ERP or functional arrangements)
Organization requires more special competence and entity controlling. That increases the need of specialists’ interaction and discussion with each other. The demand of increasing the productivity has caused continuous hurry and it makes it harder for the specialists to find more time to interact with each other. The improvement demand of productivity has even turned against itself. Globally market economy has divided labour geographically very wide. This can lead to a situation where a project manager can be on the other side of the world and the members of the processes similarly on the other side of the world. Then the members of the project team won’t meet each other than only couple of times in a year. Despite that the development processes must be done continuously to prevent mistakes.
Rush and information problems have caused even more problems. Problems can be fixed effective but the lack of time causes new problems and preventing mistakes is getting even harder. This is very common problem to organization’s quality system auditing which requires systematic planning and implementing of actions. It is important to collect development innovations and cultivate them into concrete actions. After that the actions can be attached to common best practices. People discuss about actions and processes but these ideas will be forgotten without writing them down. There is usually a group of people that creates the best innovations.
Main idea in improving the processes is to take care of the conversation and the interaction between the specialists so that it will lead to concrete improving actions and that it can be carried out quickly despite persons’ physical location. Everyone should be able to bring their own added value into idealising and implementing processes despite time and place. Innovation implementing should be strategic and systematic action. There is about five different strategic tool and method in organizations. Only five percent of them cover organization’s innovation management and creativity improvements. (Stenfors, 2007.)
The process solutions of information technology offer possibilities for specialists to have qualitative interaction and to make innovations collective and systematic. The group of specialists can be consisted of the personnel that are implementing the project or people from the processional and functional groups. The group that uses the system can belong to several different groups when the system can be consisting of virtual groups for different themes of processes.