Innovation Security in the Age of Hacking

In September 2016, Verizon was in talks with
Yahoo! about their anticipated acquisition when Yahoo! was obliged to announce
that it had been the victim of the biggest data breach in history (that we know
of) in 2014. In the course of several announcements, they revealed that over
three billion user accounts had been compromised including the real names,
email addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers of people around the
world. In addition to the PR storm following that announcement and the cataclysmic
impact on the individuals who have experienced identity theft as a result of
it, it also had a financial impact on Yahoo!. The breaches knocked an estimated
$350 million off Yahoo’s sale price when they eventually did close with
Verizon.

Because of this story and other data breaches
(Marriott, Equifax, Target), more and more companies are paying attention to
security in their innovation management systems. Considering our history of
closed research and development best practices, this might make sense. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, research and development was a highly
secretive and elite practice (think: white lab coats, password protected
doors). And this worked. After all, it gave us electrocardiography, DNA
fingerprinting, many Apple products, and more. So the expectation that innovation management
software systems would be secure seems like a natural
one.

Now, the general consensus is that innovators and great ideas can come from anywhere and companies are building programs that facilitate this as an ongoing practice. I know, because IdeaScale has built its business around this. Almost 30% of our customers are sharing ideas in a fully public format so that everyone (from their customers to competitors) can view ideas that are going to be the future of their business. So if that information is public, why do we require our software to meet such rigorous security certifications?

Because secure innovation management isn’t
protecting what you might think.

It turns out that ideas are cheap. Innovation
management security doesn’t (necessarily) exist for the ideas that individuals
share. We’ve built IdeaScale to be a secure innovation management system,
because we need to protect what those ideas become.

In a recent survey, we asked our clients why
they purchased an innovation management system, expecting that they would tell
us that they needed more ideas or better quality ideas. But neither of those
were the top reasons our customers purchased an idea management system. They
needed a system that created alignment around existing ideas, that reduced work
redundancies on new test projects that built ideas into projects or minimum
viable products. Ideas, it turned out, were easy to come by. But taking those
ideas and turning them into fully-fledged projects, products, and concepts –
that’s where these systems truly deliver value.

It’s very unlikely that an idea that’s submitted
in the early stages of problem-solving ends up looking the same once it’s fully
launched. Ideas change when they are combined with other similar ideas, as
resources and constraints are assigned to the solution, and a value chain of
suppliers, partners, and researchers build it into something new. It’s one of
the reasons that we have the ability to link to an original idea from our
success stories page in IdeaScale, because oftentimes you can see how far an
idea has traveled to become a fully-launched concept.

The work that goes on after inspiration is
actually what will define this next generation of innovation. Not who has the
best ideas, but who can deliver and improve on those ideas… as quickly
as possible. This private and company-defining ability is that part that
requires security and that’s what innovation security in the age of hacking is
going to protect: your process, insights, and the ability to act.

The post Innovation Security in the Age of Hacking appeared first on Biznology.