Marc Gasser
Korea’s economy provides ideal conditions for innovation management and is now taking big steps towards its own innovation culture. Innovation management software can provide valuable assistance, on condition that the software products consider the cultural attributes.
content evaluation by the software. For Koreans, age and hierarchy come first, so it is essential that this fact is also mapped in the software.
Korea is ready
Korean companies offer high-quality goods, which has gained market share worldwide and now has the prerequisites for further economic growth and prosperity. The innovation culture in Korea differs from the Western innovation
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Well-trained workers, a structural and developed infrastructure as well as the resulting high degree of innovation for products, processes and services in a diversified economy characterize the South Korean market. In order to enable companies to continue to grow so rapidly, a combination of the given economic situation or the existing Korean traditions and values with intelligent innovation management software is a good idea. This represents a great opportunity for all those companies that are currently creating a culture of innocation.
Sharing and linking knowledge
Innovation management means the syste matic planning, control and control of innovations in organizations. Thus, in addition to the development of ideas, this process also includes their conversion into economically successful products in terms of services. It is important not to (only) rely on hoarding knowledge, but above all to promote the distribution and linking of knowledge. A fruitful culture of innovation should allow an organization to respond equally to internal and external opportunities.
Innovation management can be supported by specific software that clearly sets out guidelines and processes and processes are prepared and categorized. It enables the mapping of objectives, clear structuring of data and linking it. Compared to the traditional methods in innovation management, which are largely done manually, the innovation
nagement software above all the advantage of automatic support. This allows routine work, controls and evaluations to be carried out automatically and ideas can be intelligently linked (clustering). The individual process steps are also coordinated with each other. In addition to an accelerated process with transparent control, this automation also brings spatially distributed innovative
networks, the possibility of working together regardless of location or time.
In addition to the specifics of the Korean language, the software must also be able to take into account the cultural aspects of an organization. In the spra- che, for example, the time or the casus are expressed by individual affixes – this is particularly important in the case of an automa-
that Korean companies still strictly live the top-down approach. The boss is therefore an important person of respect who is not contradicted. By opening up the structures of the organisation, the companies now have the opportunity to get creative and contribute to innovation. Thanks to the high technology affinity of the Koreans, it is easy for employees to
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to live out their creativity with new tools. Such tools are already available on the Korean market, but most tools are associated with a lot of manual work and are therefore only suitable for an over-the-top user group. In a large company in particular, there is enormous knowledge that could be compiled in a structured way.
This foundation, together with the great will of the Koreans to move the country forward quickly, cries out for innovation management in order to pool the forces of a company.
Collect & evaluate feedback from social networks
The Korean product KKO KKO MYUN (꼬꼬면), a kind of noodle soup with chicken, has recently demonstrated the potential of social net users (SNS) that are very active in Korea. For example, comedian Lee Kyung-kyu (이경)
is not a soup specialist, with the help of users on social networks developed a soup pen recipe, which was subsequently implemented. Based on feedback from social networks, the soup was refined, advertised in the networks and thus positioned solidly in the market at low cost.
This potential can also be applied very well in other areas. For example, the Korean product Crowdea promises to collect around 50,000 feedback from social networks, with the aim of answering specific problems. These inputs can then be processed and evaluated auto-matized by Astina’s Cassiber innovation management tool. The management then only has to deal with the best ideas and can continue to work with them.
Coca Cola Korea is currently aiming to raise money to promote its energy drinks. In concrete terms, the market share of the drink is to be increased. To this end,
collected, evaluated and linked to thousands of feedback from Korean SNS channels such as Cyworld, Facebook, Twit-ter and Nate. For successful ideas, the contributors receive a reward in the form of drinks. A detailed report then shows the ideas clusters and forms a concrete basis for management to make decisions.
Roche Korea also relies on employee innovation and launches an Inno- vations Award for outstanding ideas. Astina’s software manages the numerous, valuable ideas of the employees and evaluates them with the help of an “innovation funnel”. Concrete questions could also be discussed efficiently internally or with the help of SNS and customers. Each idea receives a so-called “IdeaRank”, comparable to the Google PageRank, which indexes important pages on the web.
Marc Gasser is Managing Partner of Astina AG.
