Time Commitment Estimates by Role for Innovation Management

Delegate, create, and innovate.

Boost innovation program efficiency

The table below describes the time commitment you need to make to rollout and maintain an innovation management system, and will greatly support the overall efficiency of your innovation management program. By ensuring proper task distribution, you can maximize productivity and improve synergy between roles and departments, while also providing participants with an engaging and empowering employee experience.

Time commitment estimates per role

Time estimates stated below largely depend on the level of involvement and type of innovation activity being pursued.

Role	Description	Hours/ month	Notes
Innovation System Administrator	Resource in charge of the overall administration of the system on an ongoing basis	5-10 Hours	Maintain the overall system and manage any admin requests to key areas such as user profiles, system security, communities,workflows, forms and business rules. Effort will be impacted by how much responsibility and ownership is passed on the challenge owner(s).
Sponsor	Executive sponsoring challenges, securing the investment to launch challenges, and leading the transformation of the best ideas into winning solutions	2 to 3 Hours	Time required to plan, select key resources, define responsibilities and communicate plan, and assess progress and results.
Innovation Manager	Individual responsible for overall community and challenge success, engagement, tracking key metrics and program results	10 to 20 Hours	Time associated with follow-ups, meetings, discussions and review sessions to get resources to participate in challenges, completing evaluations, creating reports and analyzing data.
Challenge Owner	Individual who runs the challenge, promotes it, encourages engagement, may be tasked with first pass review of ideas, tracks key metrics and reports results	10 to 15 Hours (for up to 2 challenges)	Is the person who has the most passion and highest impact on a specific challenge(s). Time is allocated to challenge formulation, promoting the challenge, reviewing activity and collaborating on ideas and solutions.
Innovation Advocate	Team assigned from appropriate functional areas to monitor challenge activity and support participants	3 to 5 Hours per member	Meetings to reach agreement on challenge mandate, track and communicate status, progress and tasks, provide training, answer any questions, and support innovation activity.
Subject Matter Experts (SME)	Individuals responsible to review, provide expertise and help evaluate ideas	2 to 10 Hours per SME	Number of SMEs required and the effort varies by the number of challenges launched simultaneously and the complexity level of the ideas/solutions being proposed.
Moderator	Individual responsible to facilitate discussions, remove obstacles to enhance user engagement and idea development	4 to 16 Hours	Actively communicate focus areas, key insights, and uncover bottlenecks during innovation jam sessions, internal business competitions, and innovation days.
Communication Manager	Individual responsible to develop content and execute communication plan set by the innovation manager	16 to 32 Hours	Develop the right messaging and implement communication plans to ensure high engagement and productivity.
Participants	Individuals invited to submit, comment, vote, develop and collaborate on ideas	1 to 4 Hours	Time spent in meetings brainstorming, feedback sessions, doing surveys or filing documents.