Innovation Management Framework for Service Company

Digitalization is changing the industries rapidly and the demand for enhanced capabilities to innovation is increasing as well as the speed of change. The customer expectations are evolving fast and their expectations for services are not anymore only arising from a company’s own industry but also across the industries. The objective of this thesis was to provide a proposal for innovation management framework to support the case company to step up its innovation capabilities. The case company is now seeking for methods to enhance its innovative capabilities especially in terms of getting the best ideas productized fast. The research was carried out using qualitative methodology. A current state analysis was performed by interviewing the key innovation, development and people development experts within the company. The interviews pointed out the challenges in the case company’s innovative capabilities in terms of innovative culture and innovations being processed as projects with requirement for hard business cases from the very beginning. In addition to the financial controls, hierarchical decision-making structures and low empowerment in teams were identified to create inefficiency to innovation. The interviews suggested that the case company’s strengths lie in the strong development focus across the company, cross-organizational capabilities and in employees having plenty of ideas coming up. The conceptual framework was then built on top of these findings to provide insight to potential toolset for enhancing the innovative capabilities. The proposal was built through co-creation methods using the knowledge and vision from the small working group. The author recommends the case company to implement the proposed innovation management framework which defines innovation as a separate process and a way of working in this way providing fit-for-purpose methods to drive innovation more efficiently. The proposed framework clarifies the roles and responsibilities and puts the innovation process in front of the existing development processes which in turn enhances the clarity over the development process landscape and process integration. The validation of the proposal showed that the proposed model fit the case company well. The main feedback highlighted the importance of the thorough implementation of the model, especially considering the clear communication of the new roles and responsibilities as well as the footwork for selling the model across the business units by rightly formatted value propositions