The Innovation Circle

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lleerogers

Develop and implement your innovation effectively.

When you're innovating, it's easy to charge ahead enthusiastically, only to discover later that you could have been more successful if you had taken a more measured approach.

The Innovation Circle is a useful step-by-step model that defines the major steps that happen during the creation and deployment of a successful innovation (which can be a new service, product, or process).

As such, it serves as a reminder of some of the things that you should do along the way to make sure your innovation is a success.

In this article, we'll look at the Innovation Circle, and we'll see how you can use it when developing and implementing a new product, service, or process. We'll also review some of the tools and resources that you can use at each stage.

The Innovation Circle

The Innovation Circle (see figure 1 below) is a model that helps you manage the development, implementation, and ongoing use of an innovation.

 

© "Key Management Models: The 60+ Models Every Manager Needs to Know" by M. van Assen, G. van den Berg, and P. Pietersma. Published by Pearson Education, 2009.

The outer part of the Innovation Circle identifies the three main phases that you need to go through to manage an innovation effectively. These are:

1. Creation.
2. Implementation.
3. Capitalization.

The inner part of the circle then identifies the steps that make up each of the main phases. For example, the second step of the Creation phase is "Idea Generation."

The most useful feature of the Innovation Circle is that it acts as a checklist to make sure that you don't overlook an important part of the innovation process. The model also helps you ensure that your innovation adds value to customers, and to your organization....