Archive for the ‘Systematic Innovation’ Category
Friday, October 3rd, 2014
Today Codexx published the final report on a study of innovation in 35 UK and German law firms, carried out in 2013 with the support of the University of Exeter Business School and the University of Leipzig Graduate School of Management. The objective of the study was to understand the current level of innovation, the methods being applied, the results achieved and the challenges faced by law firms in these two countries. Participating firms have already received a copy of the report, including their scoring in the study, to help in their innovation activities.
Alastair Ross, Codexx Director and author of the report said “Innovation is increasingly important for law firms, particularly those in the UK faced with new ABS entrants from deregulation, new internet-based business models and price-focused clients. It is very encouraging to see progressive firms seizing the opportunities for improved competitiveness through innovation. It is also useful to understand the typical difficulties that firms are facing in their innovation activities. This will help firms in developing their innovation capabilities and assist Codexx in providing best guidance to our legal clients.”
Report highlights:
- 35 law firms in the UK and Germany were surveyed for their innovation methods and results during 2013.
- Innovation was defined as anything new to the firm that generates value.
- Overall UK and German firms, scored similarly – at a middle to low level compared to best practices.
- UK firms focused their innovation mainly on process improvement and German firms on services.
- The study showed that improved innovation practices resulted in better business performance.
- Firms’ key challenges in improving their innovation were in resourcing, culture and leadership.
Executive summary:
- A study of innovation practices and performance in law firms in the UK and Germany was performed during 2013, led by Codexx in partnership with the University of Exeter Business School and the University of Leipzig Graduate School of Management. The study involved a total of 35 firms, 14 in the UK and 21 in Germany. Firms participating from the UK were typically larger than those from Germany with a median yearly revenue of £70m compared to £17m.
- We defined innovation as anything that was new to a firm and brought value – this broad definition covered incremental as well as ‘step-change’ innovation.
- This study followed a previous one run by Codexx in 2006 with 16 UK law firms. The objective of the 2013 survey was to perform a more in-depth study of UK firms’ approach to innovation, particularly since the 2008 economic downturn and the legal services deregulation. The opportunity to perform a similar study with German firms and contrast approaches and outcomes brought additional value.
- The study found an overall similar level of innovation practices and performance in the participating UK and German firms, which was typically at a middle to low level, compared to best practices. Whilst UK firms had their main focus on process innovation, German firms’ focus was on service innovation. The difference, we believe, results from the impact of the legal services deregulation and the post 2008 economic challenges in the UK, with firms giving increased focus to efficiency.
- The study also found a good level of correlation between innovation practices and performance – showing that if these practices were put in place, it was likely that improved performance in key metrics such as revenue from new services and cost reduction from process innovation, would follow.
- Analysis of those firms who were leading in innovation performance, showed that UK performance leaders had an average level of practices ahead of the study sample in every practice area, though this was not the case for German leaders (this might indicate some practice inconsistencies in the generally smaller German firms). This finding gives support to the recommended comprehensive approach to innovation, establishing a system to cover the the key practices.
- Firms identified their key innovation challenges as in resourcing innovation, establishing a supportive culture and process and in leadership. Improving innovation resources and process were cited as common improvement priorities for firms.
- The report defined five guiding principles for law firms seeking to improve their innovation capabilities, based on Codexx experience in working with law firms in innovation since 2005.
For more information on the study or to request a copy of the report, contact Alastair Ross at Codexx.
Tags: German law firms, law firm innovation, UK law firms
Posted in Codexx News, Innovation, Law, Professional Services, Strategy & Studies, Systematic Innovation | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Report on innovation programme 2009-2013
Today we are publishing the Phase 2 report of ‘The innovation journey for technology-rich product businesses’. This provides an updated report on our study of innovation practices and performance in technology-based product businesses. The study covers a total of 43 UK and Danish companies and was supported by our academic partners, The University of Exeter in the UK and The University of Aalborg in Denmark. This study programme commenced in 2009, with a Phase 1 report in February 2011. We then extended the study with additional focus on ‘Disruptive Innovation’ adding 18 more UK and Danish companies. Our study took an ‘end-to-end’ view of product innovation as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Innovation Journey model
Practice – Performance correlation
Our study found significant correlation between the practices in place across the innovation journey processes and the resulting innovation performance (see Figure 2). Some stages of the innovation journey had more impact on innovation performance than others. In particular, innovation performance leaders were typically more user-focused across the innovation journey than other companies. Specifically the leaders (i.e those companies with the stronger innovation performance) were significantly ahead in the practices applied in the ‘Idea Exploration’ and the ‘Go/No Go to Market’ stages and ahead in ‘Development’ itself. The differences between the innovation practices of leaders and others can be seen in Figure 3. We also examined how companies seek to manage the potential for ‘Disruptive Innovation’ in their market – we found that in general few companies have robust approaches in place.
Figure 2: Practice v Performance for innovation
Learning points
We have identified key learning points from this study and made recommendations for businesses who are seeking to improve their effectiveness in their own ‘innovation journeys’. Our report is intended for a broad audience of business practitioners as well as academic researchers and we have especially sought to provide clarity and application for business readers. All participating companies were sent a copy of the report together with their unique code to enable them to review their performance on an anonymous basis.
Figure 3: Differences between innovation leaders and others
Improvement recommendations
We made a number of recommendation based on the study findings:
- Increase user focus throughout the innovation journey with the ‘voice of the user’ represented throughout the end-to-end innovation process.
- Keep flexible to enable late changes from users – a key practice of innovation leaders.
- Focus on users not customers. When it comes to product innovation, it is the users who are key.
- Examine your New Product Introduction/Development) process – to ensure it is covering the front end Idea Generation, Exploration and Selection steps and the back end steps. All too often these areas are not covered.
- Give sufficient emphasis to the management of Intellectual Property in your innovation processes. IP can offer key strategic benefits if managed effectively.
- Review your overall innovation system. Whilst the innovation processes as reviewed in this study are a key enabler to innovation success, there are other key factors such as Leadership, Culture and Strategy within the business that are major determining factors in innovation success. Businesses that wish to become successful at innovators need to improve their overall innovation practices.
- Consider the opportunities and threats of Disruptive Innovation. With the rapid development of technology and the ability for new start-ups to quickly enter a market and receive venture capital funding to support rapid growth, established businesses need to actively look out for the opportunity/threat of disruption.
Overall we believe that companies would benefit in taking a broader ‘end-to-end’ view across their innovation journey to enable improved innovation performance.
If you would like further information about this study or would be interested comparing your company’s innovation practices against this model, then please contact Alastair Ross.
Tags: Disruptive Innovation, innovation journey, New Products, NPI, product innovation, Technology Innovation
Posted in Best Practices Assessment, Innovation, Strategy & Studies, Systematic Innovation | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
What are the key challenges that lawyers, accountants, consultants and other professional service firms face when they seek to innovate? As part of our work on helping professional service firms improve their innovation capabilities, we ran a recent study to find this out. The attached report summarises our findings: Innovating Professional Services – Study of key challenges 2013
Tags: accountancy, Innovation, Law, Professional Services
Posted in Innovation, Law, Professional Services, Systematic Innovation | No Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2012
Standardisation has a bad name in the professional service community. It is seen as another name for ‘commoditisation’: the de-skilling, devaluing and ultimately the de-profitisation of services. So it is typically a four letter word in a law firm, accountancy or consultancy seeking to provide high-value services. But is standardisation really such a bad thing?
Standardisation certainly shatters the work paradigm in place at most professional service firms, where the individual ‘craft’ approach to work is applied. Experienced (and highly paid) professionals deliver services such as due-diligence, audit and business improvement using methods which are typically highly individualised. From a client perspective, professional excellence is of course valued. But inconsistency in service delivery between offices and between partners is not helpful. And in today’s tough economic times, high prices have to be justified.
I would contend that standardisation is actually a key stepping stone to raising service value. On the surface this seems counter-intuitive. But bear with me. Many professional services are repetitive in nature – e.g. commercial due diligence, audit, probate and are simply tailored for the client. Others have significant repetitive work elements in them – e.g. ‘discovery’ in litigation, ‘data gathering’ in management consulting projects. Repetitive work is is the rich soil in which standardisation can flourish. By codifying and standardising repetitive elements of work, it can then be effectively performed by a less skilled person (e.g. a paralegal or administrator). Of course this has benefits in reducing service cost – aiding service firms as they seek to respond to severe price-down pressures from clients. And of course it then frees up the most valuable (and expensive) employees to work on more complex (and profitable) activities for the firm – raising protitability. But it also has major benefits in two areas of service innovation:
1. It frees up the time for high value employees to spend on innovation – to enhance existing services and develop new services to add more value to clients and differentiate their firm from rivals. Service firms are waking up to the need to become more innovative, but are challenged in finding the available time from their fee earners.
2. Standardisation of a service (or service element) is the first step to enabling effective continuous improvement of that service using Lean techniques (which are increasingly on the agenda of professional service firms).
So standardisation is not a word that should be feared by service firms. It is simply one of the key methods which firms need to embrace as they streamline themselves for the emerging new era of highly competitive, deregulated, globalised and internet-enabled professional services.
Alastair Ross
Director
Codexx Associates Ltd
Tags: Innovation, Professional Services, standardisation
Posted in Innovation, Law, Lean, Professional Services, Systematic Innovation, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2012
Professional Service firms are increasingly seeking to improve their innovation capabilities – to raise their competitiveness in today’s tough business conditions. However we find that firms are challenged in this, with questions such as:
What are the benefits of increasing innovation?
What are the ways in which we should innovate?
How should we organise for innovation?
To help in answering these questions, we are producing a series of whitepapers on ‘Innovating Professional Services’. Part 1, published in May, covered the opportunities for innovation for professional service firms. This week we published Part 2 – how to establish a system for innovation in your firm. Part 3 will deal with managing challenges in innovation and is planned to be published in October. These papers are based on our 10 years’ experience of working with service firms to establish effective approaches for innovation and the latest thinking from our academic partners. To help maximise the value of this series of whitepapers, we are taking a collaborative approach to writing, working with our clients and colleagues in professional service firms.
If you would like to apply for a complimentary copy of one of these papers, please contact us via the website.
Posted in Innovation, Law, Professional Services, Systematic Innovation | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, is speaking on ‘Making law firms more innovative’ at the ‘6th International Innovation Lab Conference: Updates from the Frontier of Innovation’ in London on Friday 8th July 2011. The conference is run by the Advanced Institute for Management and hosted by Professor John Bessant of the University of Exeter Business School. For more information go to: http://www.aimresearch.org/calendar/61/232-Updates-from-the-Frontier-of-Innovation-Innovation-Lab-2011
Tags: Innovation, law firms, Re-engineering
Posted in Codexx News, Innovation, Law, Professional Services, Re-engineering, Systematic Innovation, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
What’s critical in the innovation journey?
W
hat 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
Posted in Best Practices Assessment, Industrial Sector, Innovation, Strategy & Studies, Systematic Innovation | No Comments »
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Today Codexx launched a study on ‘The Innovation Journey for High Technology, High Speed Businesses. We are working with Professor John Bessant at the University of Exeter Business School and Gill Jennings & Every LLP (GJE), leading UK Intellectual Property Attorneys. The ability for high technology businesses to bring their new products to market quickly and successfully has never been more important. Being late to market with a product offering that is simply a functional ‘me-too’ will never compete with rivals who have captured the hearts and minds of the customers. It is the effectiveness of the innovation journey that businesses make from the initial idea to their product in the hands of the customer that is key.
Alastair Ross, who is leading the study programme, said “We are aiming to bring new insight to this important aspect of innovation. Those businesses that take part in the study will gain the opportunity to review their own innovation journey against best practices. They will also receive a copy of the final study report which will allow them to compare themselves against other businesses – on an anonymous basis of course. Since participation is at no charge, I think this is an excellent opportunity for businesses interested in improving their innovation.”
We are studying the innovation practices and performance that hi-tech businesses have in their innovation journey, from ideas to market. The study questionnaire is based around a nine stage model of the innovation journey, developed for the study. Whilst good practices in innovation are generally understood, we are aiming to determine best practices for these particular types of business across the end-to-end innovation journey. If you are interested in taking part, contact us at innovation@codexx.com.
Tags: Codexx, GJE, innovation journey, John Bessant
Posted in Codexx News, Industrial Sector, Innovation, Strategy & Studies, Systematic Innovation | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
Codexx has been certified as a training partner for the ‘Managing Innovation’ training course developed by Dr David Francis of CENTRIM (Centre for Research in Innovation Management) at the University of Brighton and Barnes & Conti Inc. This unique course provides training in key skills across the innovation cycle. It is based on research conducted by Dr Francis with over 100 innovative organisations world-wide to identify common skills that were key to effective innovation. Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx said: ” I am pleased that we are able to offer this excellent course to clients – as far as we know, this is a unique course, and complements our other innovation solutions. ” Codexx has worked with CENTRIM on a number of innovation projects since 2002.
Posted in Catalyse & Train, Codexx News, Innovation, Systematic Innovation, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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.
Posted in Best Practices Assessment, Codexx News, Innovation, Systematic Innovation | No Comments »
Today Codexx published the final report on a study of innovation in 35 UK and German law firms, carried out in 2013 with the support of the University of Exeter Business School and the University of Leipzig Graduate School of Management. The objective of the study was to understand the current level of innovation, the methods being applied, the results achieved and the challenges faced by law firms in these two countries. Participating firms have already received a copy of the report, including their scoring in the study, to help in their innovation activities.
For more information on the study or to request a copy of the report, contact Alastair Ross at Codexx.
