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Tuesday 19th March 06:45 (UK)

Archive for the ‘Best Practices Assessment’ Category

How to be a leader in the innovation journey

Friday, March 25th, 2011

There has rarely been a time when innovation has been more important for businesses. Today’s challenging economic conditions allied with global competition provide a business landscape that is hostile to companies that stand still. The dramatic and seemingly incessant development of technologies – particularly those allied to the internet – provide opportunities for new products, new services and indeed new ways of doing business. And lastly, today’s market is truly global, offering an unparalleled opportunity for businesses.

For businesses to survive, let alone grow, they must be effective at innovation – at converting ideas to products and services in the market that deliver value to users and income to their creators. The journey from ideas to value is not a simple one. There are many steps along the way and many opportunities for good ideas to be lost, poor ideas to reach the market or for the journey itself to take longer than it really should.

Working with our academic partners, Exeter University Business School in the UK and Aalborg University in Denmark and with Gill Jennings & Every during 2010 we examined the innovation journey for 25 technology-based businesses operating in the UK and Denmark. We sought to understand which aspects of the innovation journey were of most importance to eventual market success; and also to understand how well businesses typically make this journey today. We saw that whilst much research had been performed in various elements of the journey (in idea generation, in development, in selection for example) little research had been performed across the entire ‘end-to-end’ journey. We decided to study this journey for new products and in sectors where time to market is a critical requirement. We developed a model and questionnaire and used these to examine the innovation practices and performance of 25 product-based businesses across this innovation journey. The participating companies had revenues varying from around £10 million to more than £2 billion. We made the following key findings from the study which was published on the 28th February 2011:

1.Overall our study found significant correlation between innovation journey practices and ultimate innovation performance (see scatter chart below). This showed that improving practices across the nine steps of the innovation journey will result in improved innovation performance. To further enhance innovation performance, businesses need to address the other innovation practices in areas such as Leadership and Culture.

2.The biggest gaps between Innovation Leaders and the others, in innovation journey practices were in Idea Exploration, Market/Launch Preparation and in IP Strategy & Management (see chart above that maps innovation practice scoring across the 9 steps of the innovation journey). This suggests that these three areas are the most critical in determining innovation success. It is interesting to note that Idea Exploration and Market Preparation are at opposite ends of the innovation journey – one determining the quality of the new ideas that go into the ‘innovation pipe’ and the other preparing the market resources and partners for new product exiting the ‘innovation pipe’. This is an issue for many businesses whose existing New Product Development processes rarely cover these key front and back-end activities.

3.Leaders had a noticeably higher level of user focus across the innovation journey than did other companies and we would conclude that this is a key enabler to their higher innovation performance.

4.In contrast, practice areas that might have been expected to have high importance – such as Product Development – show little difference in practice between Innovation Leaders and the others.

5.When we examined the individual lower level practices that together comprised the nine individual steps through the innovation journey and their level of individual correlation with overall innovation performance, Intellectual Property (IP) management practices had the highest correlation with overall innovation performance. We believe that this is as much an outcome of being an effective innovator as an enabler to becoming an effective innovator.

6.Overall, there was generally little overall difference between the UK and Danish participants, (see chart above) other than in Idea Exploration and in IP Strategy and Management, where the UK companies were a little further ahead. There were more differences at the detail level with different priorities in areas such as Learning and IP Management.

7.The study also confirmed that those companies practicing significant Open Innovation today were more likely to have higher innovation performance than those who were not.

8.The study sample was too small to enable valid comparisons between individual business attributes such as sectors and size. We hope to address this by expanding the database with further participants.

In the detailed study report provided to participating companies, we identified key learning points from this study and made recommendations for businesses who are seeking to improve their effectiveness in their own ‘innovation journeys’. Participating companies were also provided with their performance score against the other participants – on an anonymous basis.

We propose to extend this work by growing the sample of companies assessed against this model, through use of the model in consulting work and in research to help businesses improve their innovation performance. For more information on the study, on how to have your company assessed against the innovation journey model or  to request a copy of the complete report, please contact us via www.codexx.com.

The innovation journey for product businesses – new study results

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

What’s critical in the innovation journey?

What are the critical practices that businesses need to apply in their innovation journey from ideas to products generating value in the marketplace? This is the question we decided to try and answer at the end of 2009.  For it is a key question for businesses wanting to improve their innovation effectiveness and therefore their ‘hit-rate’ for creating successful new products. We have now completed our initial study on 25 medium to large technology businesses based in the UK and Denmark. We were greatly aided in this work by our collaborating partners: The University of Exeter Business School, Aalborg University Denmark and Gill Jennings and Every (GJE).

Studying the Innovation Journey
Our study used our three phase model of the Innovation Journey, an end-to-end conversion of ideas to value (see diagram). The model explores the three phases of  ‘Initiation’ (Idea generation, Exploration, Selection), ‘Implementation’  (Prototyping, Development, Go/No Go) and ‘Into Market (Prepare, Launch & Support, Learn).  We developed a detailed  80 question assessment to explore these practice areas and compare them against the participating companies’ innovation performance. This enabled the individual practices with the strongest correlation with innovation performance to be identified.

Study findings
Our study found that the innovation practices in our defined innovation journey correlated significantly with the innovation performance of the 25 participating companies – which means that those companies that had superior innovation practices achieved higher innovation performance.

We also selected the top 1/3 of the participants based on their measured innovation performance and defined them as the ‘Innovation Leaders’ and compared their practice scoring with the others, so that we could determine which areas of the innovation journey were of most importance.

Critical practices for innovation leaders
We identified three areas where this Leader group were significantly superior to the others in their innovation practice, indicating that these areas were more critical to the achievement of superior innovation performance than the others. These were: Idea Exploration, Market/Launch Preparation and Intellectual Property Management. Those areas which traditionally are considered most important – such as the Development step – showed little difference between the innovation performance leaders and the others. It is interesting to note that it is the ‘front and back ends’ of the innovation pipe which seem to be most critical i.e. the exploration of ideas prior to entry into the pipe and the preparation of the resulting product exiting the pipe for market. IP Management was shown to be strongly correlated with innovation performance. We believe that this is primarily an outcome of being an effective innovator – you need to effectively exploit your IP.  One other marked overall difference between the leader group and the others, was that the leaders showed much more user focus throughout the journey. We believe this is key to ensuring that developed products are strongly user-influenced, rather than simply technology-driven. To enable a successful user-focused innovation approach, but also to create significant innovation, effective techniques need to be applied to determine user value (such as ‘user anthropology‘ or ‘lead users’).

Moving forward
We will be publishing the study report by the end of February. Participating companies will receive a copy of the report and their individual (anonymised) scoring against the other participants and the innovation journey model. We are seeking to expand the study database size and also intend to use the assessment tool developed from this study to help businesses improve their innovation effectiveness.

For more information
For more information or to request a copy of the study report when it is published, go to https://www.codexx.com/contact-codexx.php

Maintenance – Cinderella shall go to the ball

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

In many (most?) manufacturing businesses,Maintenance is very much a ‘Cinderella’ function – it works away in the back-room of the business and never gets to go to the Ball unlike other more glamorous business functions.  Maintenance is not somewhere that ambitious young managers typically seek a career in as it is often seen as something of a ‘backwater’ in the business. Maintaining and repairing equipment is not something seen as difficult or even that important to the business. The image of the spanner, the hammer and the oily rag are what many people envisage when the subject of maintenance comes up. Maintenance is somewhere out of sight where grubby stuff goes on that senior managers don’t spend much time thinking about.

But hang on a moment. Aren’t most factories these days filled with machines? Aren’t these machines expensive and complex devices like CNC machine tools, laser and water-jet cutters, presses and robots? And with Lean being a dominant way of working in most factories, isn’t equipment availability critical to achieving on-time delivery and high OEE? And isn’t RONA (Return On Net Assets) a key financial metric for any review of a company’s effective use of key assets such as production equipment?

Well, yes, indeed.

So what’s wrong with this picture? It’s simple: The view of maintenance as a non-critical function is out of date and a serious impediment to factories achieving high performance manufacturing. Maintenance must be brought into the 21st Century, along with management thinking. A key result of this old thinking on maintenance is the return on production equipment being lower than what would be possible with high equipment availability and also impacts on on-time delivery performance. Simply put, low equipment availability results in poor delivery performance and unnecessary purchasing of new equipment to provide additional capacity.

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Has your Lean programme stalled (or never even started)?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Lean manufacturing techniques enable companies to dramatically improve their customer service, reduce their costs and improve their quality. The origins of Lean Manufacturing are over 50 years old, Toyota first started developing the new thinking and methods that became Lean in the 1950s. Toyota has used Lean to help it  become the largest automotive company in the world, overtaking Ford and GM in the process. (more…)

Codexx Manufacturing client achieves World Class practice

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Codexx is pleased to announce that Grundfos A/S, the world leading pump manufacturer, has achieved a World Class level of manufacturing practices in its Danish factories according to the PROBE model. Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, who led the recent benchmarking assessment at Grundfos said: “I have led regular best practice benchmarking assessments, at Grundfos since 1996 and have witnessed first-hand the major improvement effort and results achieved by their people. Their focus and sustained resourcing of improvement activities should be a lesson to all manufacturers. It has been a pleasure to work with Grundfos and apply methods such as benchmarking, world class manufacturing and Lean, to gain measureable and major improvement.” Grundfos A/S won the EFQM award in 2006 and continues to drive improvements across its manufacturing operations.

Codexx launches Foundations for Innovation (F4i)

Friday, April 21st, 2006

Codexx Associates Ltd announces ‘Foundations for Innovation’ following the successful pilot of key components in an Industrial company and a Professional Services firm. F4i is a modular solution providing innovation auditing and the implementation of key foundations for an innovation system and supporting environment in an organisation. F4i was developed with the support of Professor John Bessant at Imperial College London. It enables organisations to assess their innovation practices and performance against world class standards and so focus improvement activities.

Energizing Change

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