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ElizabethZhang
Associate
Associate
863


Continuous innovation plays a vital role in the success of any enterprise. But how are innovation campaigns to be systematically managed in a flood of new ideas for products or services?

I’m Elizabeth Zhang, the Product Owner of SAP Enterprise Product Development, product innovation management, and excited to introduce this new capability to all of you. It will offer a platform to help you manage ideas and feedback to generate a positive business outcome, and foster an innovation culture and ecosystem.


Find out if Product Innovation Management is right for you!


Product Innovation Management is the one-stop shop where you can capture promising ideas, evaluate ideas with merits, and define new product requirements.

Before the solution is put into practice by end users, the administrator should set up a few configurations, including evaluation questionnaires, phases, and tags.


Business Process Flow


 

The innovation process involves different personas and consists of several steps.

Initially, the Product Manager builds up an innovation campaign based on a topic. The campaign acts as the ecosystem where managers enable internal and external parties to submit ideas and choose an appropriate evaluation questionnaire.

Next, the capability provides a platform for idea submitters to share their ideas and feedback. They can view ideas from others and comment on them in a basic form of community.

Then it is time to into ideas and distills them down into promising points that can bring value. The Product Manager assigns Experts for each idea who evaluates them from different perspectives and also scores them.

These evaluated ideas can be grouped to form so-called needs.


Getting Started


Let's introduce the functions in Product Innovation Management to visualize the process flow mentioned above.

You will find the section for Product Innovation Management in the launchpad.


EPD Launchpad


 

The Product Managers set up campaigns, manage submitted ideas, and control the whole lifecycle of the innovation process with the 'Manage Campaigns' and 'Manage Ideas' applications.


Manage Campaigns



Manage Ideas


 

Idea submitters are enabled to participate in the campaigns, share their ideas, and discuss various topics.

Also, they can go through ideas from others and leave their comments in the 'Innovation Homepage' application.


Innovation Homepage


 

Experts can evaluate these ideas with various questions, submit evaluations, and provide professional feedback.


My Evaluations


 

After evaluation and analysis, valuable ideas can be grouped to form needs.

A planned enhancement of the solution is to enable the Needs to be integrated into requirements in the EPD Requirements Management application, and so initiate a digital thread from the first idea to the consumed product.


Needs


 

That was a quick overview of EPD product innovation management, including where to find the specific content for users, the business process flow, and the functions of each application.

If you want to learn more, go to the help portal, or check out the newest updates on this solution here.

Also, you can find the User Guide for Product Innovation Management here. And find the Admin Guide for Product Innovation Management here.


Call to Action


Your questions and comments are welcome! Please share your feedback and thoughts in a comment.

Follow me on the SAP Community to stay up to date!

If you are interested in PLM's other services, I recommend you read other PLM posts, and your questions will be answered here.