It has been my experience that every so often, I run into people who just know what to say at the right time, luck into the right situations and figure stuff out from a far less complicated plane than the rest of us when they happen to get into a tough spot. In the world of the daily grind, these folks as are rare as Moon Rocks…and represent the exception rather than the rule.

For the rest of us mere mortals, we need intellectual leverage to consistently achieve the same vaunted outcomes.

Lucky for us in the innovation management space, there is a ready-made solution to tap into: It’s called collaboration.

Now as obvious as that sounds, the application and practice of collaboration can sometimes be miss-guided or simplistic; in other instances, it is downright miss-managed. Like with so many other endeavors, the forces of collaboration need to channeled in order to achieve the desired result. This means:

• opportunistic ideation
• purposeful engagement
• relevant workflow routing

To get the right parties together and doing the proper things at the optimal moment is almost akin to JIT procurement logistics; but with many elements of variance thrown-in with the constants to add a layer of complexity. That is why one of the CSFs called for is a highly configurable platform that covers the content, development phases, communications, actions, timelines, follow-ups and measurements of every idea, participant and deliverable in the process. Because the collaboration picture can fast get convoluted, keeping a grip on all the activity so that things happen in the order they were meant to, at the right time and with the proper stakeholders is the glue that hold the innovation process puzzle together.

Having participants engaged based on interest, availability, expertise and serendipity of conversation is a huge accelerator that the right innovation platform can deliver; driving motivation levels, execution and innovation results up in a uniform pattern.

With speed, scale, diversity and complexity as demanding task-masters, the platform is the air that keeps the wings of collaboration aloft.