Innovation Strategy

Develop a sustainable innovation strategy as the ‘North Star’ for your entrepreneurial future.

It is said that the only constant is change and in an ever faster turning world, market environments are becoming more dynamic across industries. Companies are facing the challenge of developing new products/services, rethinking established processes and even renewing their business models at an increased frequency. To compete successfully, companies must implement mechanisms to strike a good balance between strategic foresight and target-orientated operation.

Situation:

Against the backdrop of changing framework conditions, you are seeking to develop the strategic plan that helps guiding your innovation activities by ensuring an effective and efficient innovation management in line with your corporate strategy.

Our contribution:

We support you in sharpening your entrepreneurial vision – your North Star – and translate it into promising search fields with a balanced portfolio of initiatives. Starting from your individual status quo, we follow a collaborative approach that combines a top-down view from the management with bottom-up involvement of relevant employees at an early stage. Thereby, we generate enthusiasm for the strategy’s implementation and a positive momentum for change in your company.

Impact:

We will develop a forward-thinking strategy that defines the goals and bounds of your innovation management within concrete search fields and ensures that your innovation activities balance customer focus, your individual level of ambition and the cost-benefit ratio to ensure profitability and feasibility of your innovation strategy.

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Business Model Innovation

Innovate your business model to keep the pace.

‘Be it through the increasing importance of sustainabiltiy, digitalization, increasing demand for convenience of customers or productivity boosts by competitors, your firm’s present market environment is challenging its current business model. To keep the pace and be successful in the future, business model innovation might be the right move.

Situation:

You recoqnize your firm is beeing situated in such a challenging market environment. However, your firm has the appetite and feels ready to turn this situation into an opportunity by innovating the business model.

Our contribution:

‘We support you in developing your business model of the future which addresses your biggest challenges and might even reshape your industry. Initially, we will analyse your current business model and conduct an in-depth markets analysis of potential business model best practices. Based on this starting point, we will follow a collaborative approach to develop the new business model. During the development, we will moderate ideation workshops which involve all relevant stakeholders. For the most promising ideas, we will leverage prototyping ideas to decide for the right option. When it comes to the implementation of the business model, we make use of sophisticated of change management procedures.

Impact:

‘We will support the development of a well-founded and validated idea for a business model innovation which not only  addresses current challenges but ensures sustainable success of your firm. We will guide your change process to make the innovation reality.

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Ideation and Trend Identification

Maximize the portfolio value.

Innovation cycles accelerate. In order to stay ahead, you need to monitor their market environments and identify emerging trends – such as changes in customer demand, new technologies and abundant, high-growth start ups – early on. Our trend radar enables you to identify and monitor new trends via AI-based analyses of data from multiple sources.

Situation:

You perceive your innovation pipeline as insufficient to ensure long-term survival of your company. At the same time, your current product portfolio is rather mature and massively threatend by new technologies and changing market dynamics. With the trend radar, you will be able to enrich your innovation pipeline and guide ideation for promising innovation search fields to ensure your long-term success.

Our contribution:

We typcially apply a four step process to develop a trend radar. First, to sharpen the trend scouting scope we prioritize your focus areas according to their trend scouting relevance. For each focus area, relevant search fields are defined and existing hypotheses will be captured. Second, we will identify the sourcing data for each search field based on pre-aligned criteria. Data will be captured via multiple sources (direct access to data sources via partner ecosystem and proprietary data channels, Third, we will run a first analysis. Trends will be analyzed in terms of their relevance (demand side), feasibility (technological readiness), viability (business potential) as well as their implications (e.g. partnering). The analysis will yield both, a trend radar as a MVP and a comprehensive overview on the latest trends. Finally, we will find the right way to implement the trend radar for the continous use.

Impact:

You will be perfectly set up to implement the radar and scout trends ongoingly to significantly enrich your innovation portfolio with concrete trends which serve as inspiration to guide ideation at the beginning of the innovation process.

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Collaborative Innovation

Leverage unique capabilties of partners.

If you think you don’t have the right innovation capabilties, collaborative innovation can be a lever for you and other firms to complement one another to mutually benefit.

Situation:

You have a established process and value networks, but lack of dynamism and disruptive ideas to innovate. Or the other way around.

Our contribution:

We will assist you to manage collaborative innovation by preparing partnerships, partner successfully and continously adapt for a thriving and rewarding partnership. During the preparation phase, we will lay the critically important and often overlooked foundation for collaboration. This foundation involves defining objectives, finding the right partners, and preparing partnering organizations culturally. When it comes to the actual partnering, we will support to structure the projects with partners to ensure that the benefits, risks and governance aspects are adequately defined. Finally, we will ensure that partnerships adapt and thrive for the mutual and sustained benefit of all parties as they are executed and
as the context changes.

Impact:

We will help you to increase your innovativeness by leveraging partnerships without loosing sight of the your competitive edge.

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Innovation Agility and Processes

Increase innovation efficiency and speed.

Against the backdrop of accelerated innovation cycles corporates need to become faster. However, companies often struggle to keep up with the fast changes in market environments. These shrinking lifespanes are driven by technology shifts, economic shocks, M&A and missed opportunities to adapt to change.

Situation:

You are facing competition with quicker time-to-market that jeopardizes your competivie position and therefore, seek to shorten time-to-market and leverage further innovation potential with given resources. In order to enable such changes and improve innovation agility, you are looking for external benchmarks from peers and best practices from leaders in other industries.

Our contribution:

We support you in improving your innovation agility and processes in three phases. Through an analysis of your innovation processes and comparison against your industry peers, we will develop intial hypotheses for improvements. To benchmark performance levels and practices, we will conduct selected interviews and “peer exchanges”. Based on this, we will recommend high-value recommendations that are inspired by best in class practices across disciplines and serve as aspirations for the future. Together with you, we will then develop an action plan to implement agreed changes.

Impact:

We will develop comprehensive set of levers to increase agility across innovation management dimensions and further enable their implementation by applying theses levers to a selected innovation project for which time-to-market can be shortened.

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Innovation Metrics and Corporate Governance

Define metrics to manage innovations.

Companies often struggle with repeatable and scalable innovation due to organisational barriers, technology complexity or a highly concentrated product portfolio. To become a world class innovator, innovation metrics and corporate governance for innovation will help.

Situation:

You are facing a highly competitive market environment and must increase your innovation outputs. However, you have a moderate innovation management performance and struggle to measure your innovation pipeline and results.

Our contribution:

We will conduct a comprehensive assessment of your innovation capability in terms of innovation practices, culture, measures of success and resulting performance in your desired scope (e.g. across business units and functional organizations). We will further conduct deep-dives into select areas of the enterprise innovation capability and define “SMART” executive-level and operational KPIs and scorecards to measure innovation performance.

Impact:

We will define powerful KPIs and scorecards to measure innovation performance.

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Measuring and Benchmarking Innovation Capabilities

Learn best practices from your peers.

Innovation is a manageable when you measure your innovation management performance and compare with industry peers.

Situation:

You are facing a highly competitive market environment and must increase efficiency and effectivity of innovation activities. Therefore, you would like to assess and compare your innovation performance.

Our contribution:

We holistically benchmark your innovation capacity – either across your business units or against industry peers. We will provide conrete benchmarks for key KPIs – e.g., in a recent client case example, clearly showcasing that the time-to-market for some offerings was twice the average time-to-market of other companies in the same industry and in comparable size
– and develop roadmaps to enhance your innovation capabilities.

Impact:

We will identify specific focus areas for improvement such as improvement potential in the innovation process based on a a quantitative comparison to benchmarks and direct link to financial performance. We will further define a program to address focus areas for improvement.

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