About the industry
Operates in a capital intensive industry, product has been commoditized over the years. One of the global leader in its industry, industry has been widely conservative
About the client
The company has been successful in the past decade by successful merger, maintaining focus, rationalization and instituting global processes and continuously driving cost efficiency. Although the client industry is becoming less stable and more competitive, it is still relatively traditional and innovation is restricted since the business cannot be transformed too quickly. There is a very strong focus on cost efficiency and incremental improvement of the manufacturing processes.
About the client's R&D and Innovation
Corporate started to initiate innovation related activities, these included the establishment of a corporate innovation for new business generation, the centralization of the R&D and the recently launched corporate-wide Innovation Initiative. The company has been holding external innovation contests and engaging in several studies of the government around innovation. The client is looking to advance its innovation capabilities
The Project:
We focused the discussion on the following topics:
- Environment: Underlying trends that affect the need to innovate, drivers for growth, inhibitors ; Characteristics such as: competitive; innovative (i.e. # of new products, %revenue from new products); complex (i.e. sponsors, collaborations, technologies, users)
- Strategy : R&D mission & strategy, strengths and weaknesses, core technologies, portfolio ; Impact: shape & enable corporate strategy, measurement and effectiveness ; Drivers for change in innovation strategy, possible directions
- Structure: Research, Development and Innovation functions, amount and type of funding ; Characteristics such as: distributed - centralized, matrix - hierarchical, open (external partners) – closed; links with marketing, engineering & manufacturing
- Process: Processes around value creation/chain, annual process, methodology ;Characteristics such as: top-down & bottom-up, multi-functional teaming, formality, robustness, flexibility, output dependent, practice-oriented, effectiveness, efficiency
- People: Capabilities, management, culture, environment ; Characteristics such as: population (i.e. % PhDs), motivation (i.e. rewards, tolerance for failures), career ladders, skills (i.e. versatility, creativity)
- Technology: Core technologies, technology edge, technology life-time, time horizon, challenges ; Technologies generating new business opportunities, technologies driving efficiency ; IT for knowledge management, innovation processes, project management
Through discussions, initial directions emerged and it became clear that the focus is on generating innovations with large impact.
Results:
The client defined three main innovation directions :
1. Avenues to explore :
- Improving client's ability to identify areas of high demand and innovate.
- Collecting ideas in a systematic way.
2. Sources for radical (bigger) innovations :
- New technologies are required and should be pursued.
- Definig the challenges around identifying new technologies
- Building the skills around them or perhaps outsourcing and networking with the outside.
3. Low Hanging Fruit:
- Changes that are easy to implement and will yield results quickly
Together with the client, we developed an approach for advancing the client’s Innovation Management Practices. |
