Format Matters! And People do, too! Tools and Insights from an Innovation Network

Communication is one important key to successful innovation culture within companies. We developed three lightweight formats to support innovation communication – future personas, describing the needs of future customers, anchorvideos, for giving technological trends “a face” and anchoring them within a company, and the InnoDeck for efficiently spreading innovative methods and inspiration in practice. In this work, we extend previous work on the three topics by describing how the three artifacts work together and can be combined within a company or in innovation networks. We show this in three case studies. Two describing how companies use the artifacts internally. A third case study from an innovation network shows concrete visualization of the combination of the three concepts. Additionally, we provide new evaluation results for the innovation communication within the network based on a questionnaire. Concluding, we illustrate how we will extend and interleave the concepts for supporting communities of practice in the future.