Case Study: Engagement in Innovation for Professional Member Network

About

Piloting an innovation engagement approach in a global membership professional network.

Deploy strategic roadmapping into a large and global network of professional scientists to position a membership institution as a visible innovator.

Assignment

A Society of professional scientists with over 40 000 individual and corporate members worldwide wanted to enhance its reputation and embed the processes to be seen as an innovation catalyst.

Other approaches had been tried before but were not satisfactory.

Strategic roadmapping provided an approach that brings together people to solve an innovation problem and sketch our solutions. The focus and intensity mean that industrial companies can quickly get into creating new solutions, generate specific projects and be able to communicate needs and vision, therefore, creating momentum.

The project piloted the approach. Focussing on an untackled and valuable innovation topic industrial companies from large firms to SMEs and startups workshop on developing a roadmap. To support the Society for other future topics, training on strategic roadmapping was delivered to key staff so as to become self-sufficient.

Process

With a topic firmly decided an innovation process was designed to,

  1. Invite knowledgeable and interested participants to the roamdapping process and prepare their expert inputs.
  2. A one-day strategic roadmapping in-person workshop developed an innovation landscape, identified high-potential solutions and develop a suite of individual project roadmaps.
  3. A final workshop was facilitated to produce a roadmap for the topic area
  4. A dissemination event helped to communicate the outcome and initiate innovation projects.

Outcomes

  1. A strategic roadmap that enables a communication exercise for the society to position before its members and potential new members.
  2. A small team was trained in strategic roadmapping.
  3. An approach for all future innovation topics, cementing the society as an innovator in the eyes of its membership and collaboration with universities, networks and government agencies.

 

This project was produced and delivered through association with IfM Engage.