According to a recent Booz & Co Global Survey of the top R&D spenders,
“A full 46% of respondents say their companies are just marginally effective or average at generating ideas and converting them to commercial products.”
This is a somewhat surprising result given that many leaders I talk to always argue that there are plenty of ideas around, the issue is execution (they say).
To these leaders I always ask them what fresh, new ideas has your team come up with lately?
This often leads to an embarrassed silence.
But now there is some research to support my observation.
This led me to imagine what might the perfect front end innovation process look like?
Here are my thoughts — how does your organisation stack up?
1. The voice of the consumer, client or user are captured and involved in the design of new products or solutions.
2. There was a continuous flow of big, new ideas and these were captured and shared across silos.
3. There was an explicit and well understood way of evaluating new ideas and suggestions.
4. Every individual and every team could play or be involved in the front-end innovation process not just the innovation, marketing or NPD teams.
5. There was a measurement system in place e.g. the number of ideas, time to market, conversion percentage, the number of people who play, the originality of the ideas generated etc.
6. The process was quick.
7. Leaders consistently talked about the value of innovation generally and the front-end in particular.
8. Generating, capturing, evaluating and actioning ideas was taught as a skill across the entire business.
This would involve the use of an appropriate tool — our Blitz tool might be the perfect solution for this requirement.
9. The culture and values of the organisation support the testing of new and different solutions, ideas and processes.
In summary:
This as I said is an ideal list but one way of moving forward on any challenge is to try and imagine the ideal solution and work back towards the current situation.
How does your organisation rate?