Innovation management
How universities and businesses in the East Midlands turn ideas into tested, working products.
What innovation management covers
Innovation management is the discipline of finding, assessing, testing and scaling new ideas inside an organisation. It covers the way a business decides which problems are worth solving, how it allocates time and money to experiments, and how it decides when an experiment should become a product, a service or a process.
Our partner universities, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Derby and the University of Nottingham, support business innovation backed by EU funding. Their work in this area helps small and medium-sized businesses build the routines that make innovation repeatable rather than accidental.
Why structure matters
Many firms have good ideas but no method for choosing between them. Without a shared process, promising projects stall, and staff stop proposing changes because they cannot see what happens next.
A managed approach sets clear criteria for progress, records what was learned from each test, and makes it obvious who is responsible for each decision.
Side note
Innovation management is not only for research laboratories. Service businesses, manufacturers and food producers all benefit from a clear route from idea to launch.
Who it is for
The approach suits any organisation that wants to improve its products, services or ways of working on a continuing basis. It is particularly useful where teams are small and staff must balance daily operations with development work.
Support is shaped around the stage a business has reached, whether it is still defining a problem or preparing to take a prototype to customers.
A typical route through the process
Stage 1
Define the problem
Set out the customer need, the cost of the current situation and the evidence behind both.
Stage 2
Generate and screen ideas
Collect options from staff and partners, then score them against agreed criteria.
Stage 3
Test with small experiments
Build low-cost prototypes and measure how users respond before committing budget.
Stage 4
Scale or stop
Use the evidence to decide whether to invest further, redesign the idea or close the project.
Examples of working methods
The methods below are commonly used in practice. Each one suits a different stage of the process, and most organisations combine several of them.
- Regular idea reviews with a fixed agenda and clear decision owners
- Short prototyping cycles that test one assumption at a time
- Written records of experiments, including results that did not work
- Shared criteria for deciding when a project moves to the next stage
Looking at the work in practice
Questions we are asked
Not always. Smaller firms often assign innovation responsibility to an existing manager with protected time. What matters is that someone owns the process and reports on it.
Most tests are designed to answer one question in a few weeks. Longer projects are broken into stages so that each one ends with a clear decision.
The services offered by our partner universities are backed by EU funding. Eligibility and terms depend on the programme, so we recommend discussing your situation directly.
Next steps
Explore the wider range of support on offer, or get in touch to talk through your own plans for developing new products and services.
For ongoing updates, read our blog.