Managing Innovation Strategy
1. Innovation Types
1) Product Innovation
è The process of bringing to life a new product/service to solve the customer’s problem benefits
2) Process Innovation
è Process innovations increase bottom-line profitability, reduce costs, raise productivity, and increase employee job satisfaction.
è The customer also benefits from this type of innovation by virtue of a stronger, more consistent product or service value delivery.
3) Strategy Innovation
è Strategy innovation is about challenging existing industry methods of creating customer value in order to meet newly emerging customer needs, add additional value, and crate new markets and new customer groups of the sponsoring company.
2. Innovation Models
1) Model 1: The Suggestion System
Suggesting programs provide employees an organized system which to submit ideas an to have those ideas considered by a panel of dispassionate reviewers, who accept or reject them depending on pre-established criteria from management
2) Model 2: Continuous Improvement Teams
- Unlike suggestion programs that focus on motivating individual contributors to come forward with their ideas, continuous improvement model systems rely on team collaboration.
- Sometimes called Kaizen Teams, they mostly focus on incremental, rather than substantial or breakthrough process on product improvements
- Nevertheless, when these seemingly small, continuous tweaks produced by firm’s rank and file workers are added up, they can be substantial in their bottom-line impact.
3) Model 3: New Venture Teams
- The goal of the new venture team model is decidedly not cost-saving ideas, not incremental improvements, and not process innovations.
- Rather, the goal is more apt to be surfacing (and funding) unconventional product, service or strategy ideas that have the potential to be breakthroughs.
4) Model 4: The Incubator Lab
- The incubator model of idea management gained popularity along side of dot-corn bubble of the late 1990s and lost favor just as fast.
- Beneath the hype, the basic idea of incubators was not too different form the skunkworks approach pioneered by Lockheed during World War 2 to rapidly develop and launch new aircraft by forming small, dedicated teams separate from the bureaucracy.
5) Model 5: Innovation Teams
The gist of the approach is to set up a company-wide network of people with demonstrated sills in innovation and give them very clear marching orders: Go out an find some new ideas that have promise.
3. Innovation Strategy
- Scan and monitor the sources of innovation opportunity
- Create a personal future-scan system
- Integrate future scanning with your company’s idea management system
- Assault industry assumptions.
- Broaden your company’s vision
- Strategize your place in the first mover, fast follower race
▶ Producing innovative products
- Study previous breakthrough products.
- Focus relentlessly on value creation throughout the development process
- Design and implement a new product development process
- Use a learning strategy for more radical ideas
- Use cross-functional team
- Use rapid prototyping