Everyone wants faster and continuous innovation. But innovation isn’t a cut and dry process or linear, for that matter. It’s a series of steps, processes, and collaboration that must be built among stakeholders and teams. Only then are your innovations future-proof.

We have five best practices for achieving faster and continuous innovation: idea management, product portfolio management, product development, supplier management, and collaboration and transparency.

Here are five best practices for faster and continuous innovation

Organize your ideas in one place with idea management

Ideas are a natural part of the innovation process. And they come from all the teams across your organization. Often, these ideas aren’t all housed in one place.

To solve the lack of organization, you need an idea management system to keep your ideas and priorities in one place so everyone can see what is on the future roadmap.

Manage your product library with product portfolio management

You probably have thousands of SKUs that you need to manage (not to mention more in the development process).

Innovation involves creating new products or ideas, but you can’t do that unless you know what you already have and how they are performing. Hence, you need a proper product portfolio management process.

When you have a system like this in place, you and other stakeholders can easily see your current product offerings and identify opportunities to fill the gaps. You never know; filling a product gap could lead to your next great innovation.

Create a system for agile product development

As the need for innovation becomes faster, the shorter product development cycles become.

There are many steps involved in new product development that need to be managed. To cultivate more rapid and continual innovation, you need to look to a PLM software that supports agile product development.

This system needs to encompass every part of the product development process and give you a way to track your progress every step of the way to make sure your costs are kept on target, you’re in regulatory compliance, and specifications of the brief are met.

Keep your suppliers in check with supplier management

Chances are, you are probably working with suppliers as a critical part of your innovation process.

These suppliers provide vital services to the product development process. But often, it’s hard to keep track of which supplier is supporting what aspect of the process. This can lead to higher costs, duplicated efforts, and inefficiencies if they don’t provide actual value to the company.

To keep innovation thriving, be sure that you’re effectively managing your suppliers so that they are benefitting you, not hindering you.

Break down silos and replace them with collaboration and transparency

Silos kill innovation, but collaboration and transparency can revive it.

The best innovations come from team members from across the organization—but only if everyone has access to the same information.

When data is shared across internal and external teams, innovation happens faster, and ideas are more inspired. For innovation to truly thrive, siloes across the organization need to be taken down and replaced with transparency

Faster and continuous innovation is within reach

Innovation process management doesn’t just happen because of one set of steps or actions. Several moving parts enable innovation to happen faster and continually. That said, these systems aren’t going to set themselves up overnight, but once they are in place, you’ll swiftly get to market and with products that provide value to your customers.