How Digital Whiteboards Help Innovation Managers

Being an innovation manager means you’re constantly having to evaluate not only how you can improve the projects you’re working on, but also how you can improve your personal and shared workflows.

Innovating your workflow is not just about changing your mindset; it also involves adopting new and innovative tools to help evolve the way you work.

Using cutting-edge tools is of huge importance for innovation managers, and online whiteboards are some of the best tools to evolve your workflow both individually and with your team. They provide a space where you can integrate data at any time and infuse collaboration into any activity. Here are some of the ways that innovation managers can benefit from integrating a digital whiteboard.

Benefits of Integrating a Digital Whiteboard into Your Innovation Strategy

Seeing as we recently posted about the key skillsets an innovation manager needs to succeed in their role, we thought it would be important to show how these skillsets are benefitted when using a digital whiteboard.

If you aren’t familiar with them, digital whiteboards are defined on Fresco as “A shared, online workspace where teams can utilize visual elements in order to express ideas and collaborate together.”

They’re a space where people can gather and collaborate in realtime with the freedom of a whiteboard. After your collaboration session, you can export your results to a different platform and make asynchronous changes. They can be incredibly helpful for innovation managers.

Innovation managers are required to carry out some administrative responsibilities, implement innovative frameworks inside and outside their business, and help build a culture of innovation for everyone in their company. They are mainly responsible for shaping an innovative mindset for the business, which will affect everyone’s individual processes.

These tasks are extremely connected to the advantages of online whiteboards, which allow you to gather entire teams and involve everyone in collaborative exercises that can be tracked across projects. Keeping track of tasks, integrating new activities, and promoting innovative processes are all big strengths of online whiteboards and benefit innovation managers greatly.

Let’s look at the specific skillsets required of an innovation manager, and how digital whiteboards address and improve them.

Organizational Understanding

Innovation managers need a clear overview of the organization they work in so they can make important revisions to its structure. Using an online whiteboard can help diagram the workflows that exist in the organization and better understand how they operate.

When these flows are visualized, it becomes very easy to notice bottlenecks or issue areas and address them—something that is critical when trying to navigate a challenging situation.

Project Management

One of the more critical roles of an innovation manager is also that of a project manager. Innovation managers usually oversee multiple projects at once, which requires elite communication and organization skills.

These projects can all be made easier, however, through the use of a digital whiteboard. Whiteboards allow you to track projects and tasks through to completion, and you can share this organization with multiple team members.

Keeping everyone informed and involved is a great way to take a step forward as an innovation manager and tackle any challenges that arise.

Communication

A skill that branches across all of the tasks an innovation manager must handle is communication. Without practicing and honing communication skills, innovation managers will always struggle to get ahead.

One of the biggest problems with communication in the workplace is people having different understandings of the same idea. Especially in a virtual workspace, where there isn’t a physical reference for people, they can get confused about the context of the material they’re using.

This is where online whiteboards are yet again crucial for innovation managers. Having a constantly accessible source that’s shared with everyone means there will never be a question about what was meant and how it’s interpreted. You can instantly access the context of the situation and avoid painful miscommunications entirely.

This shows how using online whiteboards makes communicating as an innovation manager much easier than ever before.

Detail-Focused Management

As a follow-up to project management, innovation managers are also required to keep their eyes on the results and use them as a metric for success. Detail-focused management means they must tune everyone to the same north star so everyone knows exactly what details to focus on.

Building team alignment in whatever direction is most helpful is a way that online whiteboards allow innovation managers to organize their teams.

Regardless of the task at hand, innovation managers are able to create a structure, introduce an exercise, or conduct a collaboration session with their team to point them in the right direction. This helps them gain the trust of their team and prepare everyone for anything in the future.

Operational Flexibility

One of the most critical parts of innovation is being able to pivot quickly. Whether it’s before a project is started or right at the end, understanding what’s most important and moving forward on it is critical for innovation managers.

Digital whiteboards are a toolbox of templates and trinkets to help innovation managers organize their projects, and this also means they can reorganize them whenever necessary.

Online whiteboards allow you to quickly pivot and visually reprioritize items in a flash while communicating these changes in real-time. This makes them extremely valuable to innovation managers.

Innovation managers are required to be a jack of all trades, and in order to do their job effectively, they need a tool that is a versatile as they are. If you are interested in learning more about the intersection between innovation and online whiteboards, check out this article about brainstorming techniques and get started on your innovation journey!