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Innovation Capability

istockphoto 938985212 612x612The innovation capability of your organization is not simply the ability to generate new ideas or create new products.  It is the holistic, comprehensive, and all encompassing ability of your entire organization to respond to changes in the business environment with actions that deliver real value to the organization.   

What enables or inhibits an organization's ability to innovate is an elusive dynamic entangled in the subtle complexities of the interactions and relationships between all of the functions of the firm.  Each organization contains its own individual seeds of success or failure.
Sustainable business success requires leaders to understand and nurture the right combination of innovation elements for their organization. The challenge is identifying those elements, understanding the current state, and planning appropriate improvements.
This can be an overwhelming task as the subtle complexities involved can obscure the clarity of exactly where action is needed.
 
We directly address this problem with a structured, data-driven holistic assessment of your organization's innovation capability, bench-marked against leading innovators,  that highlights your strengths and weaknesses.  The result is a clear picture of where to focus improvement efforts, what actions should be taken, and what results can be achieved.

What Drives and Limits Your Innovation Capability

InnoWheel

Our 360-degress Innovation Capability Assessment is based on the InnoSurveyTM  from Innovation360, and yields an easy to understood radar-graph that illustrates your firm's strengths, weaknesses, and areas needing improvement.   Your results are bench marked against the world's largest innovation database of 1000's of companies across 62 countries and are accompanied by a detailed report and presented in an interactive briefing with key stakeholders.

The assessment collects a compilation of insights from multiple external and internal stakeholders that arrives at a 360-degree analysis of what, why and how innovation projects came to fruition within your firm.  The resulting a comprehensive footprint provides a clear view of strengths and weaknesses from management, employee, and external (partners and customers) perspectives.  Alignment between strategy, leadership, culture, capabilities and competencies are explored and highlighted.
 
This  approach provides an iterative, data-driven and evidence-based assessment to serve as the roadmap for where you need to invest to improve your innovation capabilities.

16 Organizational Aspects

The Wheel of InnovationTM graphic (from Innovation360) provides a organized structure of 16 different organizational aspects described below which are created from examination of 66 core innovation capabilities.  The definitions are based upon "How to Assess and Measure Business Innovation (2017)  by Magnus Penker, Peter Junermark, & Sten Jacobson.
wheel of innovationClick on the individual boxes below for a detailed description of each organizational aspect.

Process (How)

In the context of innovation, the process aspect refers to the complete innovation process—from idea generation, prototyping, a system for project selection, R and D cost control, speed to market, piloting, test methodology, ramp-up mechanism, and risk assessment to analyzing and handling market regulations and management of the complete product life cycle. Typically, the innovation process is linked and adopted depending on the innovation horizon and the company’s mix in the innovation portfolio. This aspect is linked strongly to profit and is both internally and externally focused.

Organization

Here, the term “organization” is used to describe the organization’s ability to deliver innovation projects. Capabilities that are especially important to this aspect are engaging and involving people, supporting goal-oriented leadership with a clear vision, and setting a high priority on innovation in all horizons. Idea diffusion within the organization and cross-functional capabilities, together with talent management and reward systems for innovations, are especially important. This aspect is internal and typically drives profit.

Learning Capabilities

Learning is essential to innovation on several levels. Critical capabilities like being opportunistic, involving C-level management, running cross-disciplinary learning, evaluation, and a reward system are essential. Gaining insight from the horizon tree is especially crucial to succeeding in horizons one and two. Well-known large corporations operating in all three horizons and rewarded for their learning efforts include IBM, MindTree, and Verizon. In general, learning is an internal activity and is highly linked to profitability.

Supply

Supply development concerns scanning and involving suppliers and partners in order to extend the core business that you are really good at. Typically, today’s organizations go about this by defining new digital solutions, new business models, and new ways of producing and delivering offers to the market through digital trading places.  The supply-innovation aspect is internal and strongly linked to profit.

Channel (Where)

The channel aspect is one of the most important to finding new ways of building the capability to interact with the outside world. It is also one of the hardest to expand and develop, as it is not obvious during the emerging phase. Channel development is about how the offer is consumed, how it is distributed, and its delivery format. But to succeed, new channels cannot just add distribution; they also have to find new ways of consuming the products or services, maybe by adding machine learning or through new technical formats.

Linkages

The linkages aspect is a broad concept that encompasses building and utilizing so-called “eco-systems” for developing, engaging, and rewarding external parties, benchmarking, reverse-engineering existing solutions, watching and learning about new technology in order to be faster, increasing capacity, and ultimately mitigating risks to keep the speed-to-market rate high. This kind of multifaceted eco-system is one of the most efficient ways of working in parallel in all three horizons, from incremental innovation to radical technology-driven innovations, even with scarce resources. Linkages increase the size of a company’s reachable market and are built upon internal strength in identifying, collaborating, and exchanging innovations with outside parties.

Openness

Openness is not about being uncommercial; it is about setting the stage for creating together, learning together, and eventually protecting IP together through patent exchange. The openness aspect typically contributes to growth of the market and is based on internal changes and development of capabilities for opening up and sharing.

Brand

The aspect “brand” addresses the activities of generating demand, sharing through telling, and setting the stage for creating so-called diffusion of new innovations. This aspect is also used well by the experience industries, such as resorts, movies, gaming, and the music business. It is used for generating and growing the market and is built upon primarily internal activities and capabilities.

Value Proposition

Defining your organization’s value proposition is about uncovering what you are really good at—the DNA of the organization—and clearly expressing it, while at the same time attracting the right customers, clients, members, citizens, or other primary target groups. It also requires you to reinforce the offer in every single contact, from lead to sale to aftermarket. The value proposition is essential to driving and expanding the market, and finding the intersection between developing the offer (external context) and building the capability for marketing (internal context).

Platforms

In the first horizon, organizations typically work with incremental innovations, and therefore it is necessary to keep costs and the development timeframe low. By deploying organizational components, blueprints, value offers, and all kinds of documents, including a process description and other useful bits and pieces, it is possible to work with continuous improvements and bring the innovation to market reasonably quickly, while keeping the cost down at the same time. This process is what we call “developing a platform.” Typically, it is organized through the use of product life-cycle management systems and other software.
 
In the second and the third horizons, platforms focus more on architectural principles, for example in the software industry with its APIs, clean code, and bootstrapping. Technical architectural principles can be used as inspiration for creating platforms in business, driving reuse, standardization of interfaces to create common ground for fast experiments, and innovation at a fraction of the cost compared with large-scale implementations of organizational changes.

Products

The product-development aspect of an organization concerns whether and to what extent there is a systematic and working product-development process in place (specifically, the development phase of the innovation process) that contains development guidelines, evaluation of competitors’ features, and guidelines for planning the market launch. In contrast, the innovation aspect process is broader and contains all innovation-process capabilities, while the services innovation aspect refers to specific service characteristics. Unlike those two aspects, which are largely internally focused, developing products drives external transformation and market growth.

Services

The service aspect encompasses systematic development and evaluation of existing and new services based on the organization’s systematic work to gain customer insights.  Developing innovative services can cause external transformation that drives market growth. Service design is a discipline that can dramatically improve the productivity and quality of services.

Customer Insights

This is the organization's commitment to gaining customer insights studies and analyzing actual customer behavior as well as undertaking frequent independent market research and assessing market potential in order to segment the market in innovative ways. This is typically undertaken by analyzing data from sales, marketing, and customer care as well as running surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field studies. In this way, the organization generates a deep understanding of customer decision-making processes, which can be used to drive external innovation and the development of internal processes to support it.

Customer Experience

An organization innovating based on customer experience uses an anthropological approach to studying human behavior in order to gain accurate new customer insights. This data-gathering process is typically not pursued though direct interaction but rather through watching and learning. This activity builds in automatic evaluations of how customers use and experience innovations, which it can then analyze to determine its next step. It also carries out regular A and B testing of new innovations, systematically comparing customer reactions to variants of the same innovation. Customer experience drives customer loyalty and yields fewer complaints, higher utilization, and ultimately sustainable profit.

Customer Engagement

Engaging customers and stakeholders is among the most efficient ways to create sustainable relationships and gain insights on a deeper level than ordinary market research. In this innovation aspect, building a community and involving them through activities such as cocreation, ideation, and rewards is key.  These activities can range from periodic customer surveys, and user groups to open innovation processess.

Value Capture

Capturing and protecting value is essential in the first and some of the second horizons, where commercialization and market penetration are essential. Intellectual property (IP) protection is one component of value capture, but at least as important is claiming a position and visualizing the advantages of being a customer. Proper pricing is important: the organization must develop a pricing system that supports each phase of the offer life cycle, often starting high and decreasing over time.

Lenses of Innovation

The arrangement of the 16 organizational aspects on the Wheel of InnovationTM (from Innovation360) are deliberately structured to provide 8 different lenses on the innovation capabilities of the organization.  The wheel is divided into quadrants defined by a horizontal axis defined by a focus on internal vs. external transformation, forming the left and right hemispheres.  The vertical axis define the focus on profit vs. market share which form the top and bottom hemispheres.  The quadrants then align with four types of innovation: market, offer, sales, and organization.

Web Slides
rightThe right side of the wheel is about external innovation which is focused on how to organize for efficient customization of market deliverables. This includes designing intelligent building platforms able to deliver customized products and services together with understanding how to create a superior customer engagement and experience.
 
 
leftThe left side of the wheel is about how to organize for knowledge creation and sharing, production, process development and redesign, supply and cross-border learning.  Artificial intelligence will most likely be a driving force in the development of internal innovation over the coming years.
 
 
u leftThe upper left quadrant (MI) is where market innovation takes place. Typically, this is where you use external resources in an open co-creation process to achieve a larger accessible market through building value nets and growing the total market.  An example is Tesla and how Elon Musk gave away patents to grow the electrical car market instead of fighting against all car manufacturers and eventually ending up in a declining and/or price-pressured market.  This quadrant is next to "offer innovation"  (see below) and "organizational innovation" (see below) and there is an interaction between those actions.
 
upper rightThe upper right quadrant is where offer innovation takes place.  It is typically based on sales innovation (see below) and market innovation.  There will be a structured innovation process for products and services organized in platforms for product or service lifetime management and product or service document management. Examples are all the companies with a structured new product development (NPD) process. Superior companies are often found in, for instance, the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer electronics industries.
 
lower leftThe lower left quadrant is where organizational innovation takes place. Typically, professional services firms (PSFs), and high-tech and pharmaceutical companies put a lot of effort into this area, creating superior structural capital and knowledge processes and a nest of suppliers. This quadrant is next to sales innovation (see below) and market innovation, making it possible to develop the market and sales.
 
lower rightThe lower right quadrant is where sales innovation takes place. Typically, it is where you create something new and exciting based on customer insights. This drives sales and loyalty, generating recurring revenue and high lifetime value. One very good example is the App Store in Apple, which creates superior experiences and is constantly used to understand patterns and behavior at the same time as dragging you into an echo system that is hard to leave.  Sales innovation is based on the work of organizational innovation and offer innovation, but it is centered around the experience and engagement itself.

66 Core Capabilities

The assessment utilizes a survey instrument comprised of 95 psychometric questions that measures 66 core innovation capabilities as listed below. These capabilities are correlated and mapped to 16 core aspects of the organization. Hover over each capability for a description of what that capability entails.

DNA Focused
Real Need Focus
Offer Reinforcement
Design for Reuse
Common Platform & Standard Creation
Evaluation of Competitor's Products
Product to Market
Product Development Process
Systemic Service Innovation
Service Improvement Tracking
Experiential Customer Insights
Understand Customer Decision Making
Customer Behavior Insights
Market Research
Social Science
A/B Innovation Testing
Automated Experience & Usage AnalysisConsumption Development
Channel Develpoment
Format Development
Linkages for Development
Talent Management for Innovation		 Community Approach
Customer Co-creation
External Rewards
IP Protection
Pricing System
Advantage Visualization
Idea Generation
Prototyping
Project Selection Decision Making
R&D Cost Control
Speed to Market
Ramp-up
Risk Assessment
Market Regulation Insights
Product Life Cycle Management
Pilot Testing
Efficient Test MethodologyExternal Innovation Engagement
Reverse Engineering
Technology Watch
Innovation Benchmarking
Open Innovation		 Goal Orientation
General Involvement
Clear Vision
Innovation Priority
Cross Function Collaboration
Idea Diffusion
Innovation Reward System
Relationship Building
Opportunistic
T-Shaped
Evaluative
Cross-Learning
Innovation Measuring
Knowledge Rewarding
Value Chain Analysis
Core Focus
Partner DevelopmentPatent Exchange
External Knowledge Sharing
Demand Generation
Sharing through Telling
Setting the Stage


Frameworks

The organizational assessment, analysis, and report, are based upon the application and integration of several leading-edge frameworks.  These frameworks include:
  • Innovation Framework (Penker)
  • 3 - Horizon Framework (McKinsey)
  • Innovation Strategy Profiles (Booz and Company)
  • Innovation Leadership Styles (Lowe, Williamson, & Wood)
  • Innovation Personas (Ideo)

Innovation Framework

A core framework underlying the assessment process are the six core innovation questions listed below.  (Click on each box for a detailed explanation).
 
why what how where when who
 
(Click on each title to expand the box)

Why

Why

The simple question “Why innovate?” leads us to examine the strategic nature of innovation. We know innovation is a strategic necessity, because the purpose of innovation is to ensure that your organization survives, and the evidence overwhelmingly shows that any organization that doesn’t innovate probably won’t stay in business for long. Hence, the innovation process should be aligned with the organization’s strategy, and innovation should be a key factor that defines how the strategy will be realized. The relationship between strategy and innovation, and the condition that they are enabling and driving each other, is an essential cornerstone of the Innovation360 Framework. The why questions cover whether the organization aims for profit or growth. In the case of NGOs and NPOs, profit can be interpreted as utilization, for example citizen/member advantage or usage. The why questions also address the degree to which the organization focuses on small, incremental improvements or radical innovation, whether the organization is pursuing both at the same time.

What

What

When we ask the question “what to innovate,” we recognize that the unpredictable nature of change requires us to prepare for many types of innovation options for a wide range of possible futures. Therefore we use the typology introduced by Trott (2008) to gain greater specificity about the kind of innovation that is applied. The seven types of innovation are the following:

  1. Product Innovation: the development of a new or improved product.
  2. Process Innovation: the development of a new process, for instance a manufacturing process, talent-management process or supply process; typically driven by digitalization, automatization, robotics, artificial intelligence, and new man-machine interfaces such as tablets and smartphones that can be integrated in managing and optimizing processes.
  3. Organizational Innovation: a new venture division, a new innovation center, internal communication system, and introduction of a new accounting procedure are some examples.
  4. Management Innovation: examples include TQM (total quality management) systems, BPR (business processes reengineering) and Agile Development for software engineering.
  5. Production Innovation: quality circles, just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing systems, new production-planning software as well as new, more advanced and technology-related areas such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) used to connect machines to each other as well as to producers, operators, and even customers.
  6. Commercial/Marketing Innovation: can be new financing arrangements, new sales possibilities, pricing models with low-entry process levels, market approaches (e.g., direct marketing); this can also be referred to as business-model innovation, meaning the development of new or improved business models and value propositions.
  7. Service Innovation: examples include Internet-based financial services (typically referred to as FinTech), user-experience-based service innovation using new interfaces like virtual reality and augmented reality.

By linking why with what, we delineate the strategic rationale of the innovation-management work within the organization.

How

How

In the Innovation Framework, we divide how into four components: Leadership, Capabilities, Personas, and the Innovation Process. The leadership styles in the Innovation Framework are based on the work of Loewe, Williamson, and Wood (2001), who describe five types of leadership such as the following:

  1. The Cauldron: an entrepreneurial style where the business model is frequently challenged.
  2. The Spiral Staircase: a style where you climb upward without losing the overall goal.
  3. The Fertile Field: a style where the organization tries to use existing capabilities and resources in a new way.
  4. The Pac-Man: a style where you invent, outsource, and finance startups.
  5. The Explorer: a style where you explore possibilities and invest time and money in them without demanding short-term profit.

The Innovation Personas in the Innovation Framework is based on the Ten Faces of Innovation described in the work of Kelly and Littman. Kelly and Littman divide the ten personas into three categories: learning personas, organizational personas, and building personas. The learning personas are individuals digging for new sources and knowledge; the organizational personas are the ones structuring, challenging, and orchestrating the work; the building personas are typically the intellectual architects, the storytellers, and the caregivers, as well as the ones setting up a proper environment. The ten Innovation Personas are as follows:

  1. Persona: The Anthropologist (Learning)
  2. Persona: Cross-Pollinator (Learning)
  3. Persona: Experimenter (Learning)
  4. Persona: Hurdler (Organizational)
  5. Persona: Director (Organizational)
  6. Persona: Collaborator (Organizational)
  7. Persona: Experience Architect (Building)
  8. Persona: Set Designer (Building)
  9. Persona: Storyteller (Building)
  10. Persona: Caregiver (Building)

The sixty-six capabilities in the Innovation Framework are organized into sixteen aspects to simplify the analysis, all decribed in the Wheel of Innovation®. The Innovation process, consisting of the phases ideation, project selection, and commercialization.

Where

Where

An innovation process is realized through the tools and infrastructure that support it and the people who are involved in the process. Today’s innovators need to determine whether their innovation processes will be purely internal or will take some form of open innovation, where stakeholders external to the company or organization are involved in the process. These decisions will determine the innovation infrastructure provided by the company as well as three related elements such as the following:

  • The type of innovation (e.g., open innovation, engaging people internally and externally)
  • Collaborative platforms to support agile and fast value creation
  • The physical workplace (where people are engaged and motivated)

When

When

The simple answer here is “All the time!” However, every activity in a business needs to be assessed to fully understand its impact, and this is especially the case for creative work such as innovation. It is imperative to fully understand what is driving value and to measure the work effort and the end results in order to optimize the outcome of the innovation work. In the Innovation Framework, we therefore assume that innovation will take place constantly and at a high pace and that it will be guided and monitored by metrics and coached for value and results.

Who

Who

The one innovation refers to all people participating, internally and externally, in leaving ideas all the way to testing them, prototyping, developing to launching them. Typically, you organize people into innovation board, innovation task force, sponsors, project leaders and process owners.

Three Horizon Framework

The 3 horizon framework was originally developed by McKinsey and was published 20 years ago in the book The Alchemy of Growth.   It has become a sustainable model due to the insights and gudiance it provides when looking at a firms portfolio of innovation efforts and how they relate to susutainable growth for the enterprise.

3 horizons
Our assessment incorporates this model as we recommend best practices for assigning Innovative development projects across three horizons.

Horizon one covers immediate and incremental improvements that return measurable impacts and keep the IT infrastructure at peak performance.

Horizon two introduces workable concepts that offer the greatest promise for expansion or market capture, assuring revenue for the future.

The third horizon is the most creative and expansive, commercializing applications from the second horizon in original and unpredictable ways. Although these ideas present the most significant potential, it will take precise and intelligent deployment of technologies from the first two horizons to get there.

Innovation readiness analysis should concern itself just as much with internal processes as with external offerings. Your InnovationIQ score will indicate which areas could profit most from new approaches, both in terms of profitability and market share.

From there, you can go on to reimagine the interactions of your high-performance teams, as well as, test business prototyping sessions. There are many pathways that lead to streamlining workflows and ensuring stronger revenue streams. Initially, they all begin with an assessment to evaluate how ready you are now to seize new ideas and make them work.

Innovation Strategy

The Innovation Capability Assessment examines the innovation strategy present in the firm according to the framework developed by Booz & Company and published in The Global Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning. This framework defines 3 different approaches to innovation:
 
10408 ex02b
  • NEED SEEKERS – actively and directly engage current and potential customers to shape new products and services based on superior end-user understanding and strive to be the first to market with those offerings.

  • MARKET READERS – watch their customers and competitors carefully, focusing largely on creating value through incremental change and by capitalizing on proven market trends.

  • TECHNOLOGY DRIVERS – follow the direction suggested by their technological capabilities, leveraging their investment in research and development to drive both breakthrough innovation and incremental change, often seeking to solve the unarticulated needs of their customers via new technology.
 
All three strategies share a set of core critical capabilities, while each of the three strategies also have a distinct set of critical capabilities associated with it. The Innovation Capability Assessment examines alignment of the  innovation strategy present in the firm with core capabilities and business strategy.

Leadership Styles

The Innovation Capability Assessment evaluates the presence of different innovation leadership styles according to the framework defined by Loewe, Williamson, & Wood (2001).  In this framework, the choice of innovation leadership style depends on where the firm thinks opportunities lie.  While many successful companies practice several styles, each style represents an internally consistent approach to innovating that mobilizes a wide variety of people and involves a coordinated package of management techniques that nurture it.  The levers management can utilize to differ dramatically depending on which style is being practiced. Levers that are perfect for one may actually block another. Thus, companies that utilize several styles must generally separate the pursuit of one style from the pursuit of another, because the management systems that affect each have to differ.
 
The Innovation Capability Assessment examines the organizational alignment around the different innovation leadership styles listed below.
 
cauldren
The Cauldron - This style is perhaps the most entrepreneurial and demanding; leaders catalyze the entrepreneurial energy of the entire management team so the group repeatedly challenges everything about the organization. The team constantly rethinks its business models and rapidly creates new models for both existing and new businesses. This approach results in rapid change throughout the organization. Enron and Lucent Technologies’ networking businesses (especially during the period when it was being spun off from AT&T) are each examples of boiling Cauldrons of innovation.
 
 
spiral
 The Spiral Staircase. Here managers innovate so consistently and so often in their existing business that, over time, they repeatedly change its very nature. Just as a circular staircase takes you upward without much changing your latitude or longitude, a Spiral Staircase innovator rises dramatically in its chosen business while seeming to stay in the same place. Charles Schwab & Co., Toyota, and (sometimes) British Airways.
 
fertilefield
 The Fertile Field - In this approach, managers focus on finding new uses for existing strategic assets and competencies, sowing them across a wide field that extends far beyond the company’s existing operations. Emerson Electric, the St. Louis electrical equipment manufacturer, is an example, and so are GE Capital and NiSource, the holding company that includes Northern Indiana Public Service Co. in the US.
 
pacman
 The PacMan - In this model the company effectively outsources much strategy development and R&D to the marketplace, investing in startups and gobbling up those that prove themselves. Effective PacMan investors are not just gobbling up entrepreneurial startups to enjoy the fruits of their labors, however, but assembling coherent competencies for the future. Examples include Cisco in computer networking and WorldCom (now MCI WorldCom) in telecommunications.
 explorer
 The Explorer. Here a company sets out work in a big, poorly understood field where it knows it will take labor for many years before seeing profits. It keeps its investments small at first, but achieves its goal through a series of relatively low-cost probes that progressively solve the problems that had prevented the innovation from happening. Examples include Motorola’s development of cell phones from 1973 through 1984 and Monsanto’s pursuit, from 1978 through 1995, of the technology that underlay its push to apply biotechnology to agri-business.

Personas and Prespectives

The innovation capability of an organization is grounded in the capabilities of the employees and enabled by the presence of specific perspectives known to enable and drive innovation.  The assessment evaluates the presence of these key personas within the organization.  The personas are categorized into learning personas, organizational personas, and building personas and based on the model from Ideo and published in The 10 Faces of Innovation, Kelly & Littman (2005).
 
gear brain
Learning personas gather new sources of information to expand knowledge and challenge established worldviews.
  • The Anthropologist – Ventures into the field to bring new learning and insights into the organization by observing human behavior and developing a deep understanding of how people interact physically and emotionally with products, services, and spaces.  Extremely good a re-framing a problem.
  • The Experimenter - prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by a process of enlightened trial and error. The experimenter talks calculated risks to achieve success through a state of experimentation as implementation.
  • The Cross-Pollinator – explores other industries and culture and then translates those findings and revelations to fit the unique need of their situation. Draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts.
 
organizing
Organizing personas know how to move an idea forward withing the structure and confines of an organization and serve to transform raw concepts into executable plans, supported programs, and delivered products and services.
  • The Hurdler – knows the path to innovation is strewn with obstacles and develops a knack for overcoming or outsmarting those roadblocks.
  • The Collaborator – helps bring eclectic groups together, of often leads from the middle of the pack to create new combinations and multidisciplinary solutions. Works across boundaries to focus on shared objectives.
  • The Director – gathers together talented cast and crew and helps to spark their creative talents. Helps set the stage, set priorities, and focus efforts.
 
building
Building Personas – Apply the insights from the learning roles and channel the empowerment from the organizing role to make innovation happen.
  • The Experience Architect - designs compelling experience that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customer’s latent or expressed need.
  • The Set Designer – creates a stage on which innovation team members can do their best work, transforming physical environments into powerful tools to influence behavior and attitude.
  • The Caregiver – builds on the metaphor of the health care professional to deliver customer care in a manner that goes beyond mere service.
  • The Storyteller – builds both internal and external awareness through compelling narratives that communicate a fundamental human value or reinforce a specific cultural trait.

Product Innovation Process

Driving growth through innovation requires the ability to continuously adjust market offerings in response to changing market conditions.  The capability is powered by an efficient and robust product innovation process that consist of four general steps.   The first step is the generation of new ideas based upon market opportunities and trends, competitive landscape, and customer needs.  The second step is the process of selecting which ideas merit investment of resources for development and commercialization.  Here decisions need to be made in alignment with business strategy and organizational capabilities and require a portfolio management process.  In the third step,  the selected ideas are transformed into deliverable products and services through a development process.  The fourth stage is commercialization which includes market innovation and launch practices as well as sales  management.  The process then repeats with the input from customer feedback and competitor reaction to new offerings.
 
The assessment process includes examination of core capabilities related to this product innovation process along with examination of the alignment between strategy, market conditions, and three key innovation process parameters: speed, bandwidth, and risk,
 
devprocess
 
HIGH SPEED
Key Competencies:
  • Risk management
  • Business model Innovation
  • Customization
  • Modularization
Key drivers:
  • High level of competition, disruption and shifting market logic.
  • Rapidly changing technology such as Internet of things
LOW SPEED
Key Competencies:
  • Market knowledge
  • Governance and compliance
Key drivers:
  • Long production cycles
  • Market barriers
  • Regulations
 
 HIGH BANDWIDTH
Key competencies:
  • Active portfolio management
  • Brand knowledge
  • Modularization
  • A and B testing
  • Prototyping
Key drivers:
  • Uncertain market. Hard to predict trends.
  • Risk spreading.
 LOW BANDWIDTH
Key competencies:
  • Market knowledge
  • Customer insights
Key drivers:
  • Short-term cash flow, no room for failure and no need for jackpot.
  • Expensive and inflexible production system, meaning you cannot easily adopt a new kind of production.
 
RISK MINIMIZATION
Key competencies
  • Risk management capabilities
  • risk affection/attraction rather than risk aversion
Key drivers:
  • Optimization in a red ocean
  • Optimizing what you have optimize with low short-term risk
 OPPORTUNITY MAXIMIZATION
Key competencies:
  • Customer intimacy
  • Measurement
  • High-speed iterations
Key drivers:
  • Blue Ocean strategy initiatives.
  • Higher risk short-term

The Assessment Process

The general assessment process is comprised of the five general steps explained below executed over an average time frame of approximately six weeks.
 
Assessment Process w
 
1 – Scope Meeting – This is a face-to-face meeting with key executive stakeholders to discuss company’s perspective of their current situation and challenges as well as their goals and aspirations.  The discussion covers the process and information requirements for the assessment, defines timeline, touch points, and responsibilities.
 
2 – Data Collection – Collect the survey data from participants. Also includes collection of market, industry, and macro data from client firm, and interviews with select individuals.
 
3- Data Analysis – Analyze the survey data to produce innovation profile of firm and provide insights. Incorporate information collected from interviews.
 
4 – Data Interpretation – Interpret results of analysis in terms of company and market data, conditions, and aspirations. Outline key findings and develop recommendations.
 
5 – Presentation of Results – Presentation of final report, finding, and recommendations.

Consulting and Advisory Services

consulting2Our innovation capability consulting and advisory services are grounded in three offerings.
 
(1) Our executive briefings provide an update on the need for innovation, current innovation best practices, and an update on emerging technologies that have the potential to disrupt current practices and industries.
 
(2) Our Innovation Capability Assessment provides a data-driven, 360-degree analysis of your current capabilities.  This means we examine perspectives from all levels, functions, and aspect of your business, both inside and out, to not only get a snapshot of your current situation, but also identify hidden areas of misalignment that can limit your capabilities.  The results provide the foundation for planning interventions and actions to improve your overall innovation capabilities. 
 
(3) Based on the findings of the Innovation Capability Assessment, we can work with you to plan and implement needed change and actions.  Depending upon the specific issues identified, we can engage directly or connect you with one of our affiliates that provide expertise in specific topics.   For example, we provide expertise in the areas of value proposition and business model design, as well as portfolio management and governance processes.  Examples of areas serviced by our affiliates include agile process transformation,  or commercialization and sales process improvement.  Whatever the case, we can provide guidance on the next stage of improving your innovation capabilities. 

Contact us contactustoday (281.858.3271) for a free no obligation discussion of your current needs and situation.

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