There is an undeniable business mandate for continuous innovation. It is estimated that by 2012 over seventy percent of products will be obsolete. This situation is made more problematic by the aging of the workforce. Much of the expertise and creative experience that created today’s products will leave the workforce soon. The mandate for innovation is strong and felt in boardrooms globally.
Yet when it comes to acting on the innovation mandate, there is a clear disconnect. When asked to embrace new disciplines of innovation, many on-the-ground innovation practitioners will say, “I don’t have the time to look at new ways to innovate.” This sentiment is evidenced in Langdon Morris’s recent “Innovation Champions and Networks Survey,” which cited that 72% of respondents say they should be given more time for innovation if the state of their companies’ innovation programs is to improve.
Unfortunately when you are knee deep in alligators, it is easy to forget that your goal is to drain the swamp. The current situation reminds me of the early days of quality management initiatives. As workers were asked to change their work practices to achieve higher quality standards, they complained about not having the time allocated to support these initiatives. But in the end we learned that the cost of implementing sound quality systems was more that compensated for by the efficiencies that these systems yielded.
The same is true for innovation initiatives. Companies that embrace High Performance Innovation as a goal will find that the implementation of the innovation best practices and support systems that lead to success will also yield huge returns in time, bottom-line savings, and top-line revenue generation. Here is a short partial list of examples of why innovation is free.
Faster Research
Thanks to Langdon Morris again for his recent post: “How to Save Time”. In this post, Jack Hipple is quoted as saying, “Six months in the lab will save at least an hour in the library.” This coincides directly with my own experience in talking to companies that are deploying properly constructed innovation initiatives. Very recently, one senior research engineer told me of how a research project that traditionally would have taken six months to complete was done in only five hours now that she is using state of the art innovation best practices. The time-to-market benefits of this type of research acceleration are obvious.
Less Prototyping
One clear lesson to be drawn from successful High Performance Innovation Organizations is the integration of innovation practice throughout the product development lifecycle. This integration of function pulls concept validation practices earlier in the cycle, thus allowing concepts to be more thoroughly vetted before they go to prototype. The result is fewer prototype cycles which equates to lower costs and faster delivery.
Higher Product Quality
Another emerging trend is to couple innovation methodology with quality management to create a seamless, continuous feedback loop between design and quality functions. The resulting closed-loop design for quality systems drive both higher customer satisfaction and lower defect liabilities. This is meaningful for all manufacturers, but even more so for environments that are caught up in the trend toward performance-based-logistics contracts where lifetime maintenance costs are bundled in up front.
Better Right-to-Market Delivery
High Performance Innovation is all about getting the right product to the client when and how they need it. Any given product has a natural window of revenue opportunity. Late delivery means permanently lost and nonrecoverable revenue opportunity. This is why innovation best practices revolve around identifying what innovations are right for the market and which will provide the best return on R&D funding, not just identifying what innovations are possible.
The bottom line is that while we might feel the pressure of time urgency and be tempted to say that we don’t have the time to employ innovation best practices, the reality is that we can’t afford not to invest the time. Innovation disciplines are the solution, not the problem.
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