RALEIGH, NC and ORLANDO, FL Feb. 27, 2024 – InnovationForce, the world’s first AI-powered Ecosystem Relationship Management (ERM) platform for innovation, today announced the availability of InnovationWorks 2.0 at DISTRIBUTECH 2024. The InnovationWorks platform accelerates innovation with a cloud-based SaaS software solution that measures, automates, scales and democratizes innovation in complex organizations so that everyone and anyone can innovate at any time.
The platform is being launched after two years of prototyping with customers in the regulated utility industry and receiving extensive feedback from the successful completion of the EPRI Incubatenergy(™) 2023 program. The results showed that innovation decisions were being made up to 85% faster, and hundreds of days could be shaved off innovation cycle time - even at the most complex and regulated organizations - saving a tremendous amount of time and operating expense.
“Imagine $2 trillion being lost each year to failed innovation and transformation efforts. Driving change into the “status quo” of a regulated or complex enterprise is not easy and can feel slow or unnecessarily bureaucratic,” said InnovationForce Founder and CEO Kim Getgen. “While innovation may be hard, it doesn’t have to be so complex. InnovationWorks breaks innovation down into simple steps that can be easily completed in minutes. Using our AI-driven SaaS platform, our customers simplify complex challenges into problem statements and test plans that can be automated in a workflow that scales across the entire organization. We help innovators save time and make decisions on ideas faster because our technology is smart, understands the importance of culture and the process is proven.”
“Central Hudson partnered with InnovationForce to tackle multiple innovation challenges over the last year, but most recently, we used the new version of the platform to down-select over 170 ideas from an accelerator program,” said Chris Gilbert, Director - Research & Development and Innovation at Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation. “We were able to engage over 50 subject matter experts at multiple organizations who worked together collaboratively to rank and score hundreds of use cases in a matter of weeks. Because the platform uses concepts you might find in popular social networking tools, it was very visual, intuitive, and fun to use. This is helping us kick off our innovation program for 2024 with a strong start.”
In the past, there was a fear that speeding up innovation would introduce more risk into the business. In today’s world, laggards who fail to innovate get disrupted and ultimately go out of business — since 2000, over half of the Fortune 500 have gone bankrupt or ceased to exist. InnovationWorks mitigates risk by adding speed and transparency through ecosystem collaboration from peer-reviewed ideas that allow organizations to innovate much faster and with less risk.
The InnovationWorks 2.0 platform is a fully automated innovation management SaaS platform that includes a number of unique features to help scale innovation inside and across organizations, including industry ecosystems. Some of the differentiators include:
Full “Idea to Value” automated workflow powered by AI: most innovation management platforms stop at the ideation after ideas complete “up/down” voting. Ideation is just the first phase in the InnovationWorks platform. Once ideas are shortlisted, they go through a full process from solution framing and procurement through to the completion of a test plan and business case. These learnings are captured in the workflow and content management system for future learning.
Proven: the platform is based on the ground-breaking book and research “Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation” from world-renowned innovation expert Dr. Linda Hill who teaches innovation at Harvard Business School.
Culture: thanks to the research of Dr. Hill, InnovationForce uniquely understands the intersection of culture and performance based on her 20-year benchmark from over 150 organizations that can be found only in InnovationWorks.
Ecosystem Collaboration: innovation does not happen in a silo or even inside a single organization. The most transformative ideas take place in ecosystems where multiple innovators from multiple organizations may need to work together. InnovationWorks creates a marketplace of ideas and leverages the wisdom of the crowd to help ecosystems solve challenges together and collaborate within the platform's workflow - safely and securely.
Reporting dashboards: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. InnovationForce has the most comprehensive data insights in its dashboard reports, so you can see how much time each step takes and how much time each individual innovator spends on their tasks. This allows organizations to pinpoint where innovators may be hitting friction or be in need of training (on-demand videos and real-time customer support). This allows managers to show how much time they are shaving off the process and how much they save by leveraging the InnovationWorks platform.
“We don't live in a world with a problem in generating ideas. Rather, the real challenge is going from whiteboard to reality and executing on the ideas. Fostering a true culture of innovation is more crucial now than ever before if we are to push the truly transformative ideas needed to keep pace with societal needs - especially in the areas of decarbonization, climate change mitigation, 5G, and infrastructure modernization,” said Jason Wild, Founder and President of Wild Innovation and InnovationForce Advisor. “After leading efforts at global companies like Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and IBM, I was excited to team up with InnovationForce because their InnovationWorks platform would have helped us solve more challenges and drive that culture of collaboration necessary to get the best ideas from the frontline into production for our customers faster.”
Availability
InnovationWorks 2.0 is currently available and can be found in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for Microsoft customers. Get started by visiting the marketplace or schedule a demo with InnovationForce at http://innovationforce.io to learn more.
About InnovationForce
InnovationForce is on a mission to create technology that enables innovators to drive innovation faster. InnovationForce builds AI-enabled workforce and ecosystem collaboration software that measures, automates, scales, and democratizes the innovation process so that anyone can participate in scaling innovation rapidly. Through the use of its patent-pending Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology platform, innovator ecosystems can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to "Innovate for Good '' to drive industry-wide transformation and solve the world's most complex climate and infrastructure problems. InnovationForce was named a "Most Innovative Company of 2023" by Fast Company; learn more at InnovationForce.io.