Microsoft Announces Enterprise Innovation Management Initiative

We issued a press release today about our innovation management initiative.  I have blogged about this a few times in the past in one form or another.  Our innovation management initiative is a cross-industry initiative and is really aimed at how our customers can use the Microsoft platform to accelerate the innovation process, and ultimately produce better returns.  Today was the formal launch of the initiative as a follow on to our presence at last week's Front End of Innovation conference in Boston.

For many of my chemical customers, this is a relevant solution area.  Some customers will look at it strictly as an R&D scenario, while others will look at it as a manufacturing & engineering scenario.  Those rare few will even look at it as a cross-company scenario, where everyone in the company is a source of innovation and ideas.  The difference is usually one of business strategy, culture and process.  Regardless of your deployment model, the ability to capture ideas, collaborate on them to make them stronger, rate and prioritize them, and then track funded ideas through the pipeline is an important capability of many innovative companies.  We've built our model to extend throughout the organization (and even to partners and customers if you choose) using familiar tools (Office, SharePoint, etc...).

Our primary case study for innovation process management in the chemical industry is Ampacet who used our partner, DataLan, for their implementation.  I have a few other case studies I am trying to lock down, but customers can be understandably hesitant to share any details of their innovation and R&D scenarios.  I appreciate all of you who are willing to do so.

I've just kicked off some work to do a more formal write-up of innovation process management for chemical companies.  That will be posted on our https://www.microsoft.com/chemical site.  I will post to this blog to let you know when I complete the work.  You can take a look and give me feedback.