How do you ensure that you take a broad and structured approach to product and service innovation – that is customer focused and simple to do?
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Wednesday, November 20th, 2019
How do you ensure that you take a broad and structured approach to product and service innovation – that is customer focused and simple to do?
Monday, October 14th, 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:
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.
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