Managing Ideas to Drive Innovation in Healthcare
How a leading global healthcare company is reaping the benefits of using Viima for idea management
Industry: Healthcare Size: 120 000 employees Location: 20 countries
In the highly complex healthcare industry, innovation is crucial for developing cutting-edge products and treatments to improve patient outcomes. Our customer, a company in the healthcare industry is at the forefront of bringing innovations to the market and constantly seeking ways to enhance their innovation processes. They develop essential products and services for key therapies used in both inpatient and outpatient care.
For the past four years they have been using Viima to streamline their innovation management process, navigate industry specific challenges and collect ideas that can turn into innovative products.
In brief, the outcomes of systematic use of Viima has led to:
- 30% Time Saved: Reduced time spent on idea management.
- Improved Transparency and accountability.
- Increased Engagement: Significant boost in employee participation in the innovation process.
- Better Decision-Making: Effective assessment of idea viability and compliance for more informed decisions.
- Effective IP Management: User roles and advanced features ensure efficient IP management and legal compliance.
Innovation in the Healthcare Sector
The healthcare sector is in constant need of innovative solutions. But innovation requires a systematic approach, the right processes and tools to go from ideas to viable and feasible solutions that not only help patients but also have a business case to support the company's progress.
Innovation management plays a pivotal role in driving progress. Navigating the complexities of the healthcare industry requires a strategic approach that balances the need for transparency, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency.
To address these challenges, many healthcare organizations are turning to innovation solutions and services. This company is leveraging Viima's robust platform to streamline their innovation management processes, foster collaboration among teams, and make data-driven decisions that help them achieve their goals.
Let’s see how they used Viima to overcome the challenges of managing innovation in healthcare, achieving greater efficiency, transparency, and ultimately, success in a highly complex industry.
The Challenges
- Unstructured Idea Management: The company used Excel sheets to manage ideas, leading to multiple versions and fragmented data. Teams often had their own sheets, making it challenging to maintain consistency and transparency.
- Balancing Transparency and Control: Intellectual property plays a crucial role in healthcare, especially when innovation is the driving force of product development. However, balancing transparency and legal requirements for IP management can be highly challenging when looking for new ideas.
- Regulatory Burden: The healthcare industry’s strict regulations makes the product development process more cumbersome and lengthy. The company needs to constantly navigate the regulatory landscape while still fostering innovation.
- Tool Overload: Employees of global companies, like our customer, are using many tools in their daily work, and adding one more for idea sharing can lower engagement and discourage participation. To encourage idea sharing, the innovation management team needed a seamless integration with existing tools to streamline the idea management process.
The Solution
To address these challenges, the company sought a solution that could integrate and improve existing innovation management processes. Viima emerged as the ideal choice due to its reliable features, ease of use and ability to align with the company's framework for assessing ideas based on viability, feasibility, and desirability.
- Seamless Idea Management: The Innovation management team replaced the fragmented Excel sheets with Viima's centralized platform where ideas and feedback could be easily submitted, reviewed, and tracked. This consolidation eliminated inconsistencies and improved data management.
- Enhanced Transparency and Control: Viima allowed the company to fine-tune access to information, providing transparency while protecting sensitive data. They set up a main Viima board for new ideas and additional boards for side projects like their annual Lab Day idea challenge. Ideas are initially reviewed by the patent department to address intellectual property concerns before they go public.
- Regulatory Compliance: Viima facilitated the assessment of idea viability by involving more people in the process, helping to identify and prioritize the most promising ones.
- Seamless Integration: Viima’s integration with Microsoft Teams allowed the team to manage ideas in one environment, enhancing user adoption and ease of use. This integration streamlined communication and collaboration, reducing the burden of using multiple tools.
The Perfect Solution to Manage Ideas and Foster Innovation
With two main admins overseeing the process and designated viewers accessing the platform, Viima has become the company's primary tool for managing ideas, easily integrating their internal IP protection process, while fostering innovation.
The Results
Implementing Viima led to significant improvements:
- Time Saving: Viima freed up 30% of the time innovation managers used to spend on managing ideas. This efficiency gain allowed the innovation team to focus more on developing and refining ideas.
- Enhanced Reporting: Viima's powerful analytics tool provides automatic monthly reports on innovation metrics, which became part of the company’s non-financial reports to shareholders.
This transparency increased accountability and showcased the company’s commitment to innovation. - Employee Engagement: Viima’s user-friendly interface, integration with Microsoft Teams and customizable access controls encouraged more employees to participate in the innovation process. The platform’s ability to move ideas between boards and generate detailed reports improved overall engagement and idea quality.
As an innovation manager Viima truly made my life easier. No matter if I need the reporting for management or the transparency for the developers Viima is the key tool to fulfill everyone’s demands when it comes to managing ideas.
The company continues to use Viima for their innovation management process. They identified other areas of use, which further simplified and improved internal processes and operations.
Did you know?
20,000+ organizations across the globe innovate with Viima.
Discover how they use Viima to innovate, grow, cut costs, and achieve their business goals.
Viima takes great pride in enabling innovation in forward-thinking organizations.
You too, can drive more innovation in your organization! Start with a 14-day free trial, or book a demo for a guided tour.