I-Nova gives you the key to unlock your company’s potential.

So just how can ideas be managed? What is white space? What is Front End of Innovation? These are a just a few of the questions that you might want answered in your quest to come to grips with something that appears completely abstract at first sight. The process of converting ideas into tangible elements and nurturing them into projects with real products at the end of an assembly line or plans on a drawing board cannot only be managed, it can be optimised to provide you with the keys you need to unlock your company’s potential.

As a software publisher, how do you rate the importance of the services you propose?
The services we propose are primordial and take precedence over everything else. That is why we offer three levels of assistance: Premier, Preferred and Basic Support, all of which ensure optimal return on investment. As for our consulting services, they are designed to adapt to your needs while highlighting flaws in strategy and ways in which it can be improved.

What does white-space mean?
White space is the room between existing developments that has not yet been exploited. It can be a need that remains unsatisfied by existing products and services and for which innovation is required in order to fill a void.

What are insights? Why are they so important? How do you generate and handle them?
Insights are opinions and ideas from customers and other people about products that can be used to improve them. They can also be used to generate innovation since some insights highlight white space. They are important because they are a source of information from outside about the strengths and weaknesses of products and they show the company’s readiness to take its customers seriously. They can be generated, for example, by setting up customer clubs, similar to online Focus Groups, to stimulate long dialogues (lasting up to 6 months) with consumers.

What is your intervention philosophy?
We intervene on a 24 hour basis with assistance available by telephone, Internet and on site when necessary. As for training, it is offered to users so they can act autonomously under most circumstances and troubleshoot on their own. Our philosophy is that we have to maintain the trust that inspires our customers to purchase the I-Nova Suite.

How is I-Nova different from other FEI software companies?
The difference with I-Nova is that its core is composed of a unique correlation engine. Whereas other FEI packages merely manage data, they rarely subject it to any specific processing that can?t be done with non-dedicated software. On the contrary, the I-Nova Suite correlates ideas and themes in existing internal and external databases, producing matches, allowing you to benchmark and judge the pertinence of what you are doing as you progress in your quest to develop new and innovative products. The difference is in how you make a great idea breakthrough into reality. I-Nova knows that great ideas don?t exist alone, they usually depend on combinations. Another important asset of our software is that it is the only one which combines insight discovery, ideation and idea management.

What does FEI mean?
It means Front End of Innovation or being on the springboard of ideas upstream of the development process. Creation, to use a big word, generally occurs in an environment with sufficient information to bring about links, in the same way as different combinations of DNA strands bring about the mutations that lead to evolution.

Why it is important to speed up the meeting of ideas and the people who contribute to identifying innovations?
In today’s mercilessly competitive environment waiting for good ideas to come along is like waiting for a lift in the middle of Death Valley. Perhaps your current products are successful but you know their lifetime is limited. They will have to be replaced sooner than later. The I-Nova Suite provides researchers with a unique environment for team collaboration, idea development and screening so they can synchronize their work and stimulate each other.

How can I be sure you really know the world of R&D, and the specific characteristics of the trades practiced by the people you deal with?
I-Nova itself is a product of R&D. Its managers and personnel all have scientific and engineering backgrounds and the I-Nova Suite has been developed from the best computer science has to offer. We pride ourselves in our capacity to adapt and understand different universes, from oil to pharmaceuticals, and from household appliances to agribusiness, because the needs to stay ahead are the same and because the I-Nova Suite is a remarkably flexible tool that can be customized to your requirements, however exacting.

Why it is important to generate breakthrough ideas? How can I generate them?
Generating breakthrough ideas is vital in the fight to stay ahead. A breakthrough idea is not just a simple incremental advance, it is the kernel of a genuinely new product capable of launching a new market. The I-Nova Suite helps you to structure hundreds of items of information, correlate them and then order them so you can match and identify spin-offs, derivatives, hitherto unthinkable combinations, and much more fuel for reflection.

Why is it important to optimize your NPD process? How can you do this?
Without optimization, the NPD process is a shot in the dark with random launches of new products most of which are destined to die quickly. So the process is often costly, non-productive and disappointing. However, your NPD process can be optimized by using the I-Nova Idea Bank offer, the most complete and efficient solution for capturing, reviewing and selecting ideas. It consists of an Innovation Database, links with internal customer feedback and scientific databases, dedicated tools for capturing ideas from employees, partners and customers and automated processes for developing and reviewing ideas.

Why is it important to stimulate innovation by campaigns? How can you manage them?
A good idea can come from anywhere, anyhow, anytime… as long as employees, partners and customers know they can submit it to you. By launching innovation campaigns you keep an open door for your employees, partners and customers to contribute to your corporate innovation strategy. Campaigns can be managed by using the I-Nova Suite´s easy to implement advanced campaign set-ups; dedicated spaces for each campaign where participants can submit, vote and comment on ideas; a reward and recognition system; communication tools for increasing employee involvement; and a dashboard for monitoring campaign performance.

Why it is important to consider the voice of customer? Understanding and detecting unmet customer needs?
Voice of customer means declared and non declared customer needs. These have to be understood in terms of what functions and what fails to work, what has to be improved, and what could be done if only something not yet invented existed. These needs can be detected and understood by using I-Nova’s FEI tools to capture customer opinion and feedback, then analyze and prioritize it.

How does correlation favor innovation?
Nothing exists alone, everything can be linked, especially ideas. When analyzing innovations they can practically all be seen to be derivations of already existing inventions or ideas. A major oil company seeking to optimize a distillation process will run a data mining campaign on every available databank to obtain the information needed. I-Nova’s correlation engine will help it to organize the thousands of items on the subject by category, statistically and semantically. It will do the same for a household appliance company seeking to develop a breakthrough concept. So thousands of “what-ifs” can be judged and eliminated automatically. The human brain is constantly correlating, consciously and unconsciously triggering streams of suggestions, but 99% is forgotten.

What does I-Nova do?
I-Nova manages, organizes and deploys your upstream innovation process, allowing you and your colleagues to correlate ideas, suggestions, customer feedback, scientific articles, patents and other types of strategic information. It allows you to communicate and dialogue on breakthrough ideas and speed up the entire creative process that forward thinking corporations require in order to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive environment. It orders, classifies and targets ideas by priority, achievability, pertinence, relation to core activity, potential and cost, and you can use it to benchmark your competitive inspiration. This is achieved by its four offers: a strategic process for managing disruptive upstream projects; link CRM with across the board dialogue from research, marketing and sales; the bottom-up approach for capturing, reviewing and selecting ideas; an event-based approach for capturing ideas from large numbers of employees, partners and customers.

How can you facilitate communication between the I-Nova Suite and the company’s different trades and sites?
The I-Nova Suite offers a customized intranet platform with a dedicated environment for sharing knowledge on each solution for managing upstream projects (insight), brainstorming, idea development and reviews. Thus engineers in a maintenance department can feedback on regularly encountered problems, sales staff can feedback customer opinion, R&D can gauge reaction to development concepts, and much more.

Why should it be possible to link an FEI package to internal and external databases?
Because it can explore both flexibly and come up with the answers you are looking for faster. Imagine a tool that not only takes into account the inner universe of your corporation and its information, but goes further afield to delve into external databases to mine information you never knew existed on a subject vital to your interests.

What are the benefits of structuring the Front End of Innovation?
By essence, research and development rely on ideas before the least test can be performed. The idea could be hunch, a wager that something will happen under certain conditions, a strongly based conviction, etc. But ideas don’t just come from scientists; employees and customers have them too. This means managing large amounts of data that have to be structured to make sense. Managing ideas is not just a vague concept, they have to be ranked, classified, prioritized and made available for further analysis