Innovation Management in uOttawa’s Startup Ecosystem
Overview
The Entrepreneurship Hub at the University of Ottawa is dedicated to cultivating an entrepreneurial culture, supported by a university-wide initiative that harnesses unique partner capabilities. This involves active collaboration and strategic planning across diverse stakeholders. Here, Impactor App has become a valuable solution, particularly in gathering insights and enabling group-led decision making to guide strategic operations and enabling innovation.
Impactor App was a great support for our annual planning process, allowing team members to note their ideas over time and see their colleagues’ perspective. I appreciated having a tool to centralize our thoughts, which allowed for our meeting time to be spent more productively based off the ideas generated using Impactor App.
Kathleen Kemp
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Challenge
Kathleen Kemp and her team wanted to explore a new solution to support managing the eHub’s strategic planning processes, specifically:
- Coordination across teams. Ensuring all team members are aligned and informed before strategic meetings.
- Efficient idea management. Collecting and organizing ideas from various team members in a centralized manner.
- Time management. Reduce meeting time and still providing each team member the space to share their ideas and perspectives.
- Continuous input and updating. Allowing for ongoing contributions to planning documents and discussions.
I was thinking of different things and I had one central place to log all of it.
Kathleen Kemp
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Outcomes
Impactor App has provided valuable benefits to eHub team members to guide their strategic planning activities. These include:
- Effective asynchronous collaboration. Team members can contribute ideas and share their priorities, whether they’re working from home or at the office and still collaborate effectively.
- Central source of information. Impactor serves as a single-source where team members can share ideas and build on them with other members of their team over time, and maintain continuous engagement.
- Better meeting preparedness. By using Impactor to gather inputs before meetings, team leads are able to discover team perspectives ahead of the meeting and be better prepared to facilitate in-person meetings and improve decision making.
- Prioritization made easy. The eHub team already uses a value-effort matrix to prioritize. Impactor’s prioritization algorithm makes it easy to determine the prioritization and make decisions faster.
- Intuitive user experience. The app’s intuitive design means that the team can get started quickly and easily with Impactor App without needing training, reducing onboarding time and confusion.
For us and our team, I think Impactor was very intuitive. No one was confused about how to use it or no one came to me with any questions about it.
Kathleen Kemp
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Assistant Director, Entrepreneurship Hub
Summary
Through collaboration, team inclusion, and strategic decision making, eHub sets an example for, both the startups in its ecosystem and the university at large. Impactor App provides a unique opportunity to eHub to simplify collaboration, create a shared space for ideas, and guide decisions. Extending beyond the core team, eHub has introduced Impactor App at hackathons where teams of students leverage Impactor for ideation and solution brainstorming to discover new opportunities and quickly prioritize the winning idea. With growing capabilities, Impactor App will soon deliver deeper insights and the ability to transform ideas into strategic plans faster than ever before.
