Category: Innovation

Developing a Network for Your Innovation Environment

An innovation network exists inside and outside your organization. Inside, certain individuals will characteristically have the traits necessary to form strong innovation teams. Outside your organization, the function is called open innovation, sourcing innvotive ideas, intellectual property, products, services, and processess to augment and leverage your internal resources.

To outsource your innovation efforts, your organization could seek resources in areas that complement your product or service portfolios. Opening a web portal for vendors to solicit your business whereby you decide your needs.

Mapping your innovation environment is the first step. Determine the products and/or services you need that complement those in your organization. As part of your map, look at the scope of the work in which your organization has been involved and develop a tragectory of where your organization is going. Then populate the map with potential vendors and partners your organization needs. Rank the partners and vendors based on your priorities. Once the innovation environmental map is developed and several in-sourcing and outsourcing tasks have been accomplished, evaluate their value in terms of performance, mutual benefit, complementary and respective core competencies, and respective needs and expectations.

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Jan 27, 2012 | 0 comments View Post

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and R&D

Ever wonder why the R&D function has trouble “sync-ing” with the Marketing department. Marketing should drive most innovation because marketing has the pulse of the consumer and a sense of consumer trends, and R&D can introduce new technologies that can justify some new product development. Just based on differences in timing alone, Marketing historically can develop product concepts faster than R&D can formulate them for commercialization. It isn’t surprising Marketing and R&D often act as separate silos.

In the bigger picture, Marketing and R&D each have responsibilities towards other parts of the whole corporate organization. For example, Marketing, with feedback from the sales force, has to inform the manufacturing function which products to make and R&D needs to formulate the products in a manner that enables the manufacturing function to make the products efficiently. So common responsibilities to other third-parties within the organization should provide them some common ground.

Sharing essential information between R&D and Marketing and understanding respective needs goes far to “de-silo” Marketing and R&D. For example, R&D will understand pricing and profitability,value identification and maximization, and differentiation and positioning, and Marketing will understand regulatory constraints, product quality, and processing and stability issues. This common understanding of separate needs will help provide syncrony between these functions.

Effective coordination is putatively viewed as a key success factor in competitiveness. For successful companies, new product development represents incremental sales of at least 10% or more depending on the product sector.

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Jan 30, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

How come innovation make CEOs uncomfortable

Essentially, it’s fear. Fear of the uncertainty and unknown. What is the pay back, the ROI? Their bosses and shareholders need a defined path to future profits and sales.

Innovation is not an exact science, nor will it ever be. We can assemble the information about the consumer needs, develop and maintain the skill sets required to implement a development program, and manage the efforts according to Gantt charts toward product launch; however, it is the soft stuff, the art, the loss of control when instilling responsibility to others in the organization that truly enables innovation.

Jeffrey Phillips blogs on http://innovateonpurpose.com (January 4, 2011) that the Brownian motion of innovation that makes executive uncomfortable because it is easy to manage and control, requires a belief system, and risk taking that organizations are often willing to support or reward.

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Jan 09, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Innovation in consumer products

Kevin Roberts, President of Saatchi & Saatchi, suggests that each manufacturer should develop “lovemarks,” those feelings of an irresistible need for a branded consumer product.

Think of the following brands of consumer products: POST-ITs, Splenda, Starbucks, iPods, Gerber baby food, and many others and how they resonate with their consumers. The use of these products establish an emotional archetype with a fond and trusting memory of their past history.

What are the elements needed to be developed surrounding a new consumer product that can help establish these lovemarks?

Please feel free to comments about your experience(s)…….

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Feb 04, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Facets of Innovation

Leading to the Marketplace

Success looks like having an integrated, collaborative, accountable innovation process that leads to a diversified and full pipeline, as repeatable, sustainable, and with speed to concept.

There is a need to establish an approach and process to innovation. Success can also be attained with the presence of dedicated and focused resources including the need for a cross-functional core team. They provide oversight that culls all elements and identify areas and opportunities: marketing, R&D, packaging of consumer insights, claims landscapes, emerging science, previous conducted research/evidence/ideas, discovery/bioactives, health professional insights, global landscape, external marketplace/health trends.

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Jan 26, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Global Steps in Innovation

Many folks liken the process of innovation to a baseball diamond:

First base – Vision

Second base – Strategy

Third base – Ranking priorities

Home – Alignment of resources: people, places, services.

We need the relevant people who share a common understanding of the vision and the strategy, accept the validity of that direction, and have a passionate commitment to make it work. We also need senior executive leadership support, a comprehensive, adaptable communication plan, a contract for buy-in to goals & direction, a creative focus on the few highest priority initiatives, as well as a governance process for investment (priorities), aligned pay-for-performance metrics, group leadership development, values-based goals, milestones & metrics.

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Jan 15, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Innovation environments: Conflicts affect performance

Conflict is inevitable in environments in which more than one opinion is need to be successful. Managing conflict is a major component for optimizing innovation environments. Individuals attracted to engineering and the sciences are often not those who know how to cope easily with conflict and often seek to avoid confrontation. Moreover, when conflict occurs individual performance and that of the team are diminished. Two-thirds of perceived performance issues are actually conflict related rather than to actual performance or skills competencies. In the book Crucial Conversations, strategies and processes are presented to identify and resolve conflicts.  Rapid conflict resolution greatly speeds innovation.

Several other observations are notable regarding conflict resolution, performance and the nature of innovation: those that score highly on active constructive behaviors and perceptions of leadership are promotable, potential creativity among team members is ubiquitous, a moment, an attitude, or a belief. The most pertinent point: there is more than one right answer. Sometimes we stop at the first right answer and we need to break our pattern of instant focus by letting the idea percolate. One way: try reframing the idea, change the lens, and triangulate with market needs.

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Jan 07, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Creating Creativity: Diverse associates stur the pot of new ideas

Having trouble with getting thoughts of creativity?

Identify a problem, and  and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem. To build your observation skills, identify a busin ess, customer, supplier, or client, and spend a day or two watching how they work so you can better understand the issues they have to deal with. In a recent CNN interview, Marc Ventresca, a lecturer in strategic management at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, agrees that innovation is not an inherent trait, but a set of skills that people can learn.

He says the goal is not simply knowing lots of people, but knowing people from varied backgrounds, who work for different companies, in different industries, have different skills, and deal with different issues, so that you are exposed to varied ideas.

When it comes to developing your ability to innovate, Ventresca recommends simply setting aside 30 minutes a week to talk with a contact you wouldn’t normally talk to — for example someone you met at conference six months ago. Ventresca says about 10 of those members yield something interesting, and two of those 10 let you do something new and valuable — by investing just 26 hours a year you’ve come up with something pretty remarkable.

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Dec 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

R&D Scenario Planning will Enable Adaptability

Scenario planning is not something done only in the executive suite or in the marketing department. R&D needs to conduct their own scenario planning based on executive and marketing counterparts. Consider resource constraints, adequate supply of scientists in the specialty disciplines that augment your core competencies, additional parameters that drive scenarios, global implications, and evolving regulatory environments when developing your scenarios. Using these considerations often facilitate developing your near- and long-term scenarios and make your R&D more adaptable to changes.

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Nov 18, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

The Pace and Cadence of Innovation

Surges can be anticipated

Surges can be anticipated

Let’s face it, innovation is not like a finely-tuned engine operating at optimum capacity all of the time. How do you anticipate the ebbs and flows that invariably crop up with the pace of innovation, let alone the workload (which is often independent of innovation)? How do handle the inevitable slow periods of innovation? How do you spark the team out of an innovation slump? What metrics beyond gut feel do you use to measure the current pace of innovation?

To start, let your team see the big picture, to remind and spark their intuitive skills and abilities. Seeing the big picture allows your team to make insights and set directions whereas everyday working events tend to keep their attention.

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Oct 18, 2009 | 1 comment View Post
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