How We Do It

EinFrame is a SaaS framework that captures and organizes everything necessary for making innovation systemic, systematic, and sustainable. From the articulation of purpose to ensuring talent optimization and alignment, from identifying concepts and strategies to mapping monetization, it simplifies concept-qualification and tracking. It manages knowledge and enables adaptive project planning. It mitigates risk. And it provides live tracking of projects to market.

To accomplish all that and more, EinFrame engages everyone across the enterprise, like an ERP or a PLM system. But unlike ERPs or PLMs, it considers the future as well as the present state of development for products, services, and business models. The information architecture aligns product specifications, project progress, talent, and knowledge with strategy and the competitive landscape.

What’s in a Name?

Gartner defines innovation-management tools as software that enables organizations to:

manage the flow of ideas from initial concept generation to final realization or commercial exploitation. They support different ways to generate ideas, internally or externally, through trendspotting, crowdsourcing, brainstorming or hackathons; stage-gate automation for idea evaluation and selection; and ways to manage a portfolio of active ideas (including idea execution to bring ideas to realization via project or product management).

With numerous innovation-management tools now available, why do you need another tool? You don’t. You need just one: EinFrame. EinFrame connects all the tools requisite for achieving consistent innovation. It also contains novel tools, concepts, and methods, assimilating all of them in a matrix that enables organizations to innovate systemically, systematically, and sustainably. EinFrame enables organizations to move up a hierarchy that looks like this:

From concepts to capitalization, from ideas to ISO 56000 conformance, from talent assessment to organizational alignment, from qualification criteria to funding, from market strategy to market delivery, from ideas in the present to success in the future, EinFrame helps ensure sustainable innovation.

capabilities

Market Insight. To take a new product, service, or business model to market, you need to know the opportunities and the competition that exist. EinSource enables you to define a problem worth solving. Then it allows you to determine what already exists or is in the works to solve the problem you’ve identified, a prospective solution encountering resistance, and the new competitors that may see a similar opportunity.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are CEOs and those in charge of new business and new products.

Strategic Planning. Map out a network of suppliers, distributors, competitors, and customers to advance sales of news products, services, or business models. Accordingly, it allows you to start from things you know or think you know and to consider things you need to learn to solve new and important problems and to bring new products, services, or business models to market.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are members of the C-Suite.

Ideation Management. Conduct ideation sessions — in person or virtually — connecting ideas to strategy and capturing, sorting, and evaluating those ideas democratically and transparently. Categorize ideas by themes, which can then be prioritized to define their value propositions.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are Chief Innovation Officers and ideation facilitators.

Business Case Development. Convert value propositions into business canvases, engaging diverse teams across the organization to collaborate at the level of the concept to assess market viability. Move qualified concepts through a series of qualifying gates. And allocate resources to approved concepts that become projects.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are heads of new-product development.

Portfolio Management. Optimize and prioritize a list of projects based on potential business value and available resources. With talent-mapping, you can deploy talent across your portfolio most effectively, sharing high-competency people to review projects with quantifiable transparency. EinFrame then rolls up progress to the dashboard for reporting and decision-making.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are members of the C-Suite.

Project Management. Convert qualified concepts into reality. Adopt a phase-gate process to reduce risk. And because the ability to learn, adapt, and shift directions when necessary is the key to successful innovation, you can reiterate and evaluate each concept’s value propositions, as well as the options for its successful operationalization and execution.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are Project Managers and project teams.

Innovation Operations. Define goals within a +/- band of tolerance, identify individuals responsible for tracking and controlling each metric, and establish predictive analytics for concept management with secondary dashboards to provide leading indicators. Because EinFrame lets you manage cost, you can reward people for well-executed attempts that fail — and teach — rather than punishing them.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are COOs and business-unit heads.

Risk Management. Capture risk elements at the levels of projects, business units, and the enterprise from anyone in the organization. Prioritize projects based on a single quantifiable number derived from the likelihood of occurrence, the potential impact, and early warnings. Then mitigate those risks by assigning action items.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are CEOs, business-unit heads, and project managers.

Talent Optimization. Determine the skills and competencies required to fulfill your innovation portfolio. Assess the skills and competencies of the people presently in your organization, to map them by particular disciplines, and to identify the disciplines for which you should train, hire or outsource. Eliminate the loss of unrecognized or under-utilized talent and prevent duplicated skills or competencies.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability business-unit heads, project managers, and HR.

Knowledge Management. Management is the key word; that is, the way in which information is stored, secured, interpreted, and applied. EinFrame enables you to manage and codify tacit knowledge (expertise by virtue of experience), explicit knowledge (in books, on the web, etc.), and program and collaborative knowledge (projects and business performance) and transfer that knowledge systematically.

The primary beneficiaries of this capability are everyone in the organization.

EinFrame’s effective power derives from four things:

1. Each capability is optimized for innovative growth, with a focus on forward-looking outcomes.
2. The capabilities enable strategic planning and execution at the enterprise level, innovation planning and execution at the project level, talent optimization to support innovation projects and strategic requirements, and the flexibility to connect all three to meet specific requirements.
3. The capabilities exchange data from a common data base, keeping everyone on the same page to eliminate confusion.
4. The framework was designed and developed by someone who lived the pain of innovation management from the time he was a young engineer to the time he was an R&D executive in a Fortune 100 company.

If you’re ready to make your business a resilient presence, please contact us today.

The cost of lost time and opportunity is too high.

EinStory is a flexible, collaborative planning tool. For any undertaking, EinStory lets your teams:

• Articulate and document an objective
• Generate ideas or concepts for a product or service in alignment with the objective using a guided workflow
• Identify and articulate value propositions and differentiators
• Quantify the ways in which the concept will be financial and operational success
• Identify resource requirements
• Define the market strategy
• Identify the break-even point
• Determine if the outcomes achieve the objective
• Validate that the undertaking is right for and valuable to all parties and concerns; e.g., the environment or society
• Download a report of everything your team has captured that will serve as a business model canvas.