The good news is that companies that have not given proper attention to systematic innovation management are now in the position to change course for the better with relatively little effort. A new category of software, which we term 'Rapid Business Implementation Software', makes the game-changing factor. It implements an Integrated Composition and Execution Environment (ICEE) that effectively and efficiently supports enterprise lifecycle management underpinned by enterprise architecture and enterprise engineering.

Innovation engineering is an enterprise engineering discipline. The term 'innovation engineering' covers all processes and activities required for planning and managing the collaborative engineering aspects of transforming ideas into output (new or improved products, services, processes, organizational structure, business model).

Viewing innovation engineering as an enterprise engineering discipline leads to tighter process integration, resulting in productivity gains through better collaboration, faster detection of process failures, and improved reporting capabilities.

Software products that have reached an acceptable degree of maturity are only now emerging on the scene. They support dynamic, unstructured, collaborative ad hoc processes, which are typical for case management, as well as repeatable, structured processes. Innovation engineering relies heavily on case management processes. Ideation, the process of creating new ideas, represents a typical example.

Now, innovation engineering can be viewed as an integral element of enterprise engineering. Instead of having to use multiple task-specific software products with users playing the role of process and data integrator, and translating between different semantics, the entire enterprise engineering lifecycle is now supported by a homogeneous and powerful software environment. It is meta data-driven, model-driven, and component-based, and can thus be productively used by non-IT experts.