Shark Tank Your Gate Meetings
A gated product development process is often implemented by organizations to assist in scrutinizing projects throughout their lifecycle to ensure only the fittest survive. Unfortunately, many of the checks and balances lack the teeth required to kill doomed projects before they squander resources. How can a TV show provide valuable insight into your gate meetings? Stay tuned to learn more.
Mourning the Dead: Why You Should Have a Funeral after Killing Your Product
Pulling the plug on an in-flight project is hard. No one wants to be the person calling it quits, offending team members and admitting defeat. It is this mentality, however, that ends up sucking the life out of resources and budgets and setting the organization up for continued failure because the process is broken. How can you ensure only the right projects survive, wrong ones are killed early and lessons are celebrated after an appropriate mourning period? It’s going to take courage.
Informing Innovation Planning through Product Line Roadmapping
Innovation is about moving an organization forward. But many companies are trying to get there without an execution plan; without any way to assess the how, why, where, what and when, and to adjust when the unexpected comes along (as it always does). Those involved with innovation planning are increasingly understanding that the answers are found in product line roadmapping – a critical front-end process that has finally come of age.
Measure the Maturity of Your Idea-to-Launch Process
We know that innovation capability is a critical driver of strategic growth targets. We also know that innovation success is not a one-time occurrence, but the result of an organization’s ability to conceive, develop and commercialize new products and services on a sustainable basis. In this article Dr. Scott J. Edgett discusses a model for measuring if your organization has a mature innovation process with well-internalized innovation capabilities.
The Results Are In: Product Leaders Report a Need for Speed and a Roadmap to Sustainable Innovation
Findings from the Fourth Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey
Imagine sailing in the World Cup race without a strategic plan or a map. It is a sport where speed is of the essence, decisions (and perhaps more importantly the timing of those decisions) are paramount, and team talents must be optimized at any moment. With competitors abound displaying their impressive spinnakers and advanced technology--only the risk takers advance. The will to win is apparent, yet without a strategy and a map, a team would drift into execution mode and lose the race.
Your Consumer and the Innovation Equation – Why They May Not Be Involved Enough
Identifying (let alone creating) a new innovation that will dramatically grow your business is difficult. Line extensions and product / package refreshes will keep the business moving forward and engaged with consumers. But what about the breakthrough innovation that executives are expecting? Transformational innovation requires significant investment, risk taking, and preparation which can be a challenge to coordinate.
Linked Innovation: 5 Keys to Success in Open innovation Challenge Management
Open innovation crowd sourcing methods, when applied to the right problem, can effectively extend the solution provider search beyond the boundaries of an industry. This article presents the application of a targeted broadcast crowd sourcing method to identify unobvious solution providers for a German chain-drive industry consortium. The majority of solutions submitted through this method were previously unknown to the consortium. This evaluation demonstrates the power of open crowd sourcing to provide solutions from discontinuous industries and how effective crowd sourcing can be in open innovation.
Why Product Lifecycle Management Should Be On Every Executive’s Agenda!
Product lifecycle management (PLM) initiatives often miss their true potential and make projects unnecessarily costly. Not understanding how to optimize these investments can have long-term effects on both the top and bottom line, while companies that realize how to use PLM as a competitive weapon can capture significant market advantages. In this article we give you insights into how to take an approach that addresses the true potential of a PLM investment.
How to Create Products that Your Customers Will Love
How to create innovations that customers do not expect, but that they eventually love? How to create products and services, which are so distinct from those that dominate the market and so inevitable that make people passionate? A major finding has characterized management literature in the past decades: that radical innovation, albeit risky, is one of the major sources of long-term competitive advantage. But is that really the case? Read more in this article by Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation and author of the book “Design-Driven Innovation.
Balancing Innovation Via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 1
Organizational ambidexterity is becoming a Key Factor for Success in many industries. With a proper ambidextrous set-up, firms can optimally balance radical and incremental innovation.This is part 1 of a 3-part article co-written by innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Ralph-Christian Ohr from Integrative Innovation. In this article we are showing the need for organizational ambidexterity, introduce the concept, show how it can be implemented and provide two case studies from leading German firms
Improving Time to Innovation: Process is Not the Enemy
While most companies see innovation as a competitive advantage, the ability to take an idea from concept to delivery is truly what sets one company apart from another. Achieving this level of operational efficiency is not a simple feat and without processes around resource management and capacity planning, it is unlikely to succeed. The fact is, no matter how brilliant or timely an idea, if the right resources are not available to work on it, the idea simply remains an idea.
7 Tips to Speed Time to Innovation
This article delves into the goals every organization should work toward to boost product development performance, looks at how these goals further a product organizations ability to bring innovative products to market, and outlines the ways that a Product Portfolio Management (PPM) Solution helps companies reach these goals.
From Chaos to Control: New Research Reveals the Global State of Resource Management and Capacity Planning
In the newly released Resource Management and Capacity Planning Benchmark Study, research is identifying best practices to avoid wasting resources on the wrong opportunities, leading to profit loss and missed market windows. Read more about the results from the study and how you can assess your company’s maturity level, determine what challenges you face, and leverage best practices shared by mature, successful companies.
Be an A-Tension Seeker: Why Good Ideas Stem from Irritating Problems?
All too often we see companies coming to us with a new technological advancement that they are very excited about. Sadly, having a new technology does not guarantee a winning innovation. One needs to work hard at the front end to understand what the consumer needs and how the current market offer isn’t meeting those needs. Only against this backdrop can we hope to bring an idea to market that will be truly disruptive. The following article explains.
Getting Out of the Commodity Trap – Part 1
Has your product lost competitive advantage? If your customers cannot differentiate your product from those of your competitors, most likely you have fallen into the “commodity trap”. The following article explores how this harmful phenomenon can be better understood and ultimately avoided by studying the dynamics within flocks of birds.
Using a War Room to Create Pervasive Innovations
Your teams did their market research. They ran an array of consumer insight sessions. They found the customers’ real Need. They ran professional ideation and storyboard sessions. They created prototypes and performed market tests. They developed their go to market strategy. They executed their plan. Product sales fell dramatically short of expectations. Why? What did they overlook?
Creating Innovation Value: Four Key Drivers to Success
The ability to increase business value through innovation is a critical success driver for most organizations. The markets that we operate in provide both opportunity and risk from an innovation perspective as they are rapidly changing. This article takes a look at a useful framework; The Innovation Diamond™, that examines the complexity and addresses some of the challenges in product innovation.
How to Improve the Innovation Pipeline and Process
Can an organization dramatically improve the quality, speed, and profitability of their new product projects while driving down the risk of failure? Absolutely! Organizations that rely on new products, technologies, and platforms to create customer value, grow market share, enter new markets, increase their profitability, and even alter market and competitive landscapes. In this article Chester Baker, Head of Global Innovation for Abbott Nutrition shares the winning formula for driving innovation in his company.
Harnessing the Power of Insight: Customer-Centric Innovation in a Changing World
Anyone has the raw capability to think of a great idea, but not everyone has the ability to bring ideas to fruition. It’s a process that requires vision, a strong handle on industry trends (both present and future) and risk takers willing to champion seemingly impossible feats. Most companies have innovators or teams of innovators with these qualities, but many don’t incorporate both customer feedback and customer observational research as key components for designing the next generation of product development. This article will explore the benefits of leveraging a customer-centric model to create more innovative, user-friendly devices that provide the support customers really need.
Get a Taxi – Anatomy of a Process Innovation
With over 400 million Google hits, “innovation” may be considered a buzzword, some entrepreneurs may even avoid talking about it, but they’re certainly practicing it! This article takes a closer look at an example of process innovation in the service industry. Understanding it better offers the possibility of spotting a large range of opportunities and converting them into business successes.
Jugaad Innovation
Studying how companies in the emerging markets innovate can offer Western engineers and designers important inspiration, and challenge them to develop products that are much cheaper. Such “frugal solutions” will become increasingly important in order to stay relevant in the stagnant markets of the West – as well as for the upcoming global middle class of developing countries. This study focuses on the “jugaad” innovation of India.
Partnering with U.S. Universities in the Era of Open Innovation
Today’s University is a rich resource for companies seeking game-changing technological breakthroughs. In this in-depth article Melba Kurman looks at the benefits of open innovation partnerships between companies and American university researchers.
The Dynamic Duo of Innovation: Ethnography and Big Data
The combination of Big Data and ethnographics can be a potent toolset for uncovering innovation opportunities, as a growing number researchers are discovering.
Creating Networks of Interest
Previously, we told you about a research project where we examined more than 60 companies considered to be vanguards in their respective fields. From this group emerged five “serial innovators:” companies that habitually detect where markets are going, and use innovation to meet new customer demand. These companies share a handful of characteristics, the first of which is leadership’s empowerment of innovation, which we addressed in depth last month. The second of these shared characteristics: They leverage interest networks.