Case description
You have been recruited to be an innovation and creativity manager in a high-tech start-up company, called TECHSOL, which is based in Brighton. These are very early days of this company. Pedro Gonzalez – the CEO and founder – plans to launch soon the company’s first service – a social media monitoring and analytics platform for businesses that want to understand how customers talk about their brands online. Pedro and his friends developed a technology that collects mentions from millions of online sources (news articles, blog posts, tweets, Facebook statuses, among other), analyses the mentions and presents the results of the analysis in a simple format. The companies that will use TECHSOL’s platform will be able to get instant access to customer conversations from every corner of the public web.
Pedro wants to make sure that the company captures value from the innovative brand-watching service and also continues to innovate in the future, for example, process innovation to improve the brand-watching service as well as some new innovative services. He asked you to prepare a plan for managing creativity and innovation processes in TECHSOL.
Preparation
? Task: Please read the short description of an innovative start-up company and apply concepts and tools from ‘Management of Innovation’ module to prepare a management plan for ONE of the following:
A. Collaborations with external actors that will enable TECHSOL to innovate in the future
B. Capturing value from the existing brand-watching services by protecting relevant intellectual property
C. Stimulating adoption of TECHSOL’s innovative brand-watching service
D. Creating an innovative climate in TECHSOL to encourage future innovation
Your management plan should (1) suggest what tools/methods/practices the start-up could adopt, (2) justify your suggestions by referring to the strengths and weaknesses of different tools/methods/practices, case studies, research results and other reliable evidence.
Given that the case description is very brief, you are free to make assumptions about TECHSOL (e.g. what markets they target, what companies they work with, etc). Please make your assumptions explicit.