Where does innovation fit?
Innovation usually precedes the more structured product development process. Innovation might begin with an employee's "aha!" moment in the shower. Or it might result from the hard work of a research group actively studying a problem. Whatever the inspiration's source, the company now has an idea -- for a totally new technology, a completely new way of providing a service, or even a new way of selling.
The inspiration then enters two distinct phases. The first, ideation, is the process of filtering the idea. The company examines the inspiration to see if it makes sense and to determine whether it's a viable strategic and market fit that the company wants to back with an investment. During the second phase, incubation, the company begins to spend money to determine whether the idea is feasible. Both phases occur before the idea is incorporated into a specific product. After incubation, the idea moves into whatever process the company uses for product development, and the innovation phase ends.
PDC can assist with every phase of the innovation process.
PDC's work in the innovation area coalesces around customer value innovation, which seeks to improve the customer experience by coming up with a new solution to a customer problem or a new ending to an old and tired customer story. Our two major practice areas,
Value Innovation Portfolio (VIP) Management and
Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD), both rest on the foundation of customer value.
For every successful disruptive innovation, thousands never see the light of day. What turns some innovations into market dominators is not how cool or exciting they are to the people who came up with them or to others in the industry. Success can be defined by one criterion: An idea becomes an attractive opportunity only when it delivers a solution to customers who place value on it for the problem that it solves. This implies that any innovation must go hand in hand with activities to help the innovators understand what the market values.
Innovation Maturity Modeling
Every company measures innovation in one way or another. Most innovation metrics, however, are immature. A robust innovation maturity model needs to address both the ideation and incubation phases, as well as a critical third piece: the management system that enables innovation to be successful. Without the right controls, funding, and processes to bring an idea to fruition, a company may fail even if the rest of the innovation system is strong.
PDC developed its innovation maturity model in conjunction with IBM during 2003, using both proprietary and public research. (Read the IBM Case Study.) The model is divided into five parts and covers 30 aspects of innovation and is supported with an Excel spreadsheet that includes dropdown answers. Using this model, PDC has helped scores of companies characterize their levels of innovation maturity based on comparison with real and demonstrated practices at other organizations.
Read the Discoveries article, Making Innovation Count
Ideation
We have rarely heard a company complain of too few ideas. The challenge is figuring out which ideas are the good ones. That's where ideation comes in. While some use the word ideation as a synonym for idea generation, PDC looks at ideation as the process of filtering an idea once it has been created. With a set of well-developed tools, PDC can help you sort through the sometimes bewildering array of possible innovation ideas to find the few that are worthy of investment.
