Planning for innovation
In order to plan the investments to be allocated to innovation, it is necessary to follow a well-defined outline that is articulated in three phases.
A) Analysis phase, where it is necessary to:
- study the enterprise, its identity and its potential;
- analyse customers, their needs and future market scenarios.
B) Design phase, where it is essential to:
- generate and select ideas that seem to be more consistent with customer needs;
- examine in depth the most promising ideas, through a study of technical and economic feasibility.
C) Assessment, in which it is appropriate to:
- estimate the costs and revenues of the innovation plan;
- look for sources of funding for the new idea.
The Innovation Plan is a tool that can support the entrepreneur in identifying the steps that the company needs to take, to actualise and quantify in terms of content and investment the innovation strategy:
The Innovation Plan is a tool for:
- learning, as it accompanies the entrepreneur in the identification of relevant information, which can provide insights and reflection on their innovative project, the ability to achieve, how to implement innovation in relation to the overall objectives of the enterprise;
- assessment of the degree of risk of innovation, which brings out the risks associated with the planned innovative activities;
- communication and presentation of the innovation project, in all its parts, in order to persuade those who read it about the quality of the business research and development plan;
- monitoring of the course of the company’s activities, by analysing the discrepancies between what was planned and what actually took place.
By completing the Innovation Plan, a realistic, concise and easily readable document is obtained that will prove to be a useful self-analysis tool that will allow the innovative idea of a company to be submitted to potential partners and potential investors.
It is a process based on three macrophases:
- Corporate Self-analysis: which has the main objective to represent the business situation before the start of the innovative project;
- the Business Development Plan: with the data acquired in the first phase of corporate self-analysis, the innovation strategies are identified through the definition of tangible and intangible investments that you want to achieve, for the production and marketing of innovative products/services;
- the industrial research project: once the company’s self-analysis phase has been completed and the business development plan has been defined, the industrial research project is ready to be defined, which aims to account for research and development activities carried out in the past and to identify the contents and resources necessary for the development of its innovative project.
For more information, please visit the website Sardegna Ricerche