When innovation happens in different locations within a business and no consistent frameworks or processes exist it is difficult for a management team to evaluate and make decisions about which ideas to fund and what ideas and solutions are possible. For this reason, OVO advocates the introduction of a central or corporate innovation team to encourage more consistent use of innovation processes, tools and techniques. DSM and HANNING are two companies that successfully operate in this way to help their organizations achieve innovative excellence.

When innovation occurs across different product groups or business functions, the teams may view each other as competitors for investment and resources or they may have a reluctance to work on innovations that were "not invented here". While OVO advocates the introduction of a central or corporate innovation team to encourage teamwork and collaboration, Dave Wall of DuPont Teijin Films has found that encouraging the initial development of a small number of high-quality relationships is an alternative way to establish sustainable and goal-oriented co-operation.

The last 10 years has seen an increasingly external outlook for many organizations, getting closer to customers, focusing on users and understanding customer needs better. However open innovation doesn’t just mean leveraging the people within the organization, it requires organizations to find ways to overcome barriers to the external world and to lower transaction costs with external communities. In essence, it requires a very creative change in the way companies operate and innovate. This Quick Insight takes a look at what open innovation is, why companies are beginning to adopt open innovation models, and describes the means by which DSM aims to generate €1 billion of additional sales from open innovation by 2010.

Until recently, Intel struggled with a 10-week long annual product planning process which put a severe strain on management time and relied on data that was never entirely accurate. This Quick Insight takes a look at what portfolio management is, why it should be used, and describes how a highly-successful pilot project significantly improved Intel’s product planning process. As it becomes an ever more widely adopted process, this is a must read report for those looking to save time and money in their planning process.

British Telecom’s Customer Centricity Programme makes use of external vendors to deliver specific improvements to the online capabilities of the company. It then stands these vendors down as soon as their part of the program has been delivered. By highlighting the factors companies must consider to make collaborations successful, this Quick Insight takes a look at what two leading companies are doing to improve the productivity of their New Product Development processes.

This Quick Insight investigates supplier co-development, with a focus on performance measurement. It focuses on how a leading automotive manufacturer developed a co-development performance management system from scratch, covering topics such as up-front planning, key issues and potential benefits. This Quick Insight is an essential read for anyone looking to manage supplier-manufacturer relationships.

Driving development teams to continually work faster and reduce time to market is the stated goal of almost every project manager. This Quick Insight looks at the process for determining the importance of development speed and captures insights from companies where ensuring time to market is not a false ambition but a recognized business necessity.

Most product development processes suffer from bottlenecks; whereby a resource that is shared by most projects – be it a specialist design function, prototyping workshop or development administration activity - ends up acting as a black hole, where work goes in but never seems to come out again. One approach increasingly used to deal with this situation, and the time, resource, and efficiency issues they involve, is to outsource these often non-core development activities.

It is critical that companies actively develop people to work effectively in today’s new product development teams. In doing so, they must consider the hurdles presented by outdated organizational approaches and widening ‘generational’ cultural differences. This Insight reviews these hurdles, examines the core skills required for team working, today, and presents some insights into what companies, and managers, can do to improve their efforts to develop the best people for their needs.

René Rohrbeck of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories provides a piece by piece overview of the company’s scouting process. This includes a description of its ‘Technology Radar’ methodology; its goals and the process, along with the outline of a generic process. This Insight includes unique diagrams and models that other companies can use and adapt to generate or refine their own technology scouting activities, and also provides a framework for incentivising technology scouts.

This Quick Insight explores roadmapping as a vehicle to bridge the gap between ‘R’ and ‘D’. This powerful technique is being increasingly adopted as a core integrating mechanism for strategic planning and innovation. But, it can be challenging, and there are some key success factors that companies must consider before embarking on a roadmapping initiative. An overview of roadmapping, along with sample roadmaps, two alternative workshop methods for developing a first cut roadmap, and a detailed case study makes this a very practical and flexible Insight.

While development projects often have to change direction due to external factors, just as many are diverted off course by ‘people’ issues. Although these can be worked through and a project brought back on line, all too often the failure to tackle, early on, these internal ‘team and culture’ factors can lead to a project’s demise. There are crucial lessons to be learnt from such experiences.

Based on an interview with Raytheon’s Robert Carter, this Quick Insight describes a way to apply a framework from the Six Sigma defect reduction methodology to the innovation process and describes an example of such an application. It also discusses the necessity of balancing the technological, organizational, and human sides of innovation.

An ideal team structure needs to take into account both what is ideal for the business as well as what is ideal for the project, but what might be ideal for the project might not be practical from a business perspective. It’s a careful balance, which requires careful selection of the right components to suit both needs.

When it comes to product innovation metrics, few companies believe they have the right metrics in place, and some have very few relevant measures at all. We have taken a “back to basics” approach reporting potential hurdles, illustrating the metrics companies are looking at, and featuring effective processes and tools for developing and deploying balanced measurement systems for the entire product development process.

An analysis of Standard & Poor’s index of the 90 most important US companies found that an organization joining the index in the 1930s could expect to remain listed for 65 years. By 1998 this had dropped to just 10 years. Today’s organizations face increasingly “discontinuous” business environments and will need to engage in disruptive innovation for long-term survival.

Many companies are still looking for that elusive “innovation solution” that will transform their product development processes into a source of innovative growth. One possible approach for achieving this is I-DFSS, which combines Design for Six Sigma with TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), while another option is to combine DFMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly) and TRIZ.

Based on an interview with Jean-Marc Frangos, BT Group’s Technology Innovation Vice President, this Quick Insight explains how Mr Frangos leads a small team of talented, hand-picked people to find and integrate the most valuable technologies and innovations in the world today into BT’s business operations.