Experienced in Innovation

 

Innovation culture and organization

Everybody knows that product innovation is the key for the future of a company. But still in the hectic of the daily business the priority disappears somehow. To change this it is important to translate the abstract knowledge about the importance to a livid awareness and to make the innovation culture a part of the daily and not just written company culture. This is a task of the whole senior management and of course especially of the technical leader. A systematic innovation management starts when innovation is a visual part of the daily work of the leadership.

 

Also within R&D the number of distractions is high e.g. by resource critical project situations, an urgent customer projects or a sudden quality issue. In order to achieve a robust innovation management, which is not interrupted repeatedly, I founded a dedicated innovation group separated from the operative part of R&D. I staffed the group with a mix of creative and process oriented talents and a mind set which is less analytic but more intuitive.

 

Innovation strategy

The alignment of the innovation strategy to the business unit goals and vision/mission meant in our case a strong focus on the customer application. This meant switching the focus from just improving the device performance values (the number game) to improving the applications of our customer in the chemical and biotechnological laboratories. In a first step we needed to get (hire) knowledge to understand these applications, find new solutions to improve them and also ways to prove the improvement.

By offer consulting and testing capabilities to sales specialist who wants to make a deal we could directly connect to customer, to their questions and their issues. The more demanding customer became then our best source to identify future needs. Instead of relying on second hand information we made additionally each R&D engineer connect with customers and put a strong focus on emerging markets especially China, which have unsurprisingly quite different needs.

 

Innovation management

The Babylonian confusion of tongues by countless "experts for development and innovation methods" makes it difficult to separate between innovation management and product development (what is part of what). I will use innovation management only for the two very early phases of idea generation (ideation) and idea evaluation, which are then followed by the realization in a "classic" project based product development. In other words the Innovation process is the front-end of classic new product development process.

 

Idea generation

A good idea is the nucleus of a successful innovation. Both is true: mass doesn't replace class and it is more likely that a bigger mass consists a classy idea. Nucleus for a successful innovation management is to have many and good ideas.

 

Despite several helpful methods and ways of thinking is the generation not just systematically processable.  

Idea generation needs time, a certain easiness, an environment without fear and especially priority and creative mind. As creativity is always linked to personal experience it is important to involve different education background, different functional areas and different ways of thinking

 

Systematic idea evaluation

A thorough evaluation of an idea requires a big effort. Hence everybody is using multi step approaches to narrow down the number of further considered ideas quickly. By applying stepwise more and more accurate but also more labor intensive criteria. Having done this frequently I've learned that it is very important 1) to involve other functional areas especially marketing and sales to increase the plausibility and 2) to visualize explicitly at which step of the evaluation process you are in order to soften the discomfort of some people dealing with uncertain fuzzy information used for evaluation.

 

Technology testing and voice of customer were the final steps in the idea evaluation before an idea becomes part of a project proposal and a business case. We executed technology testing both external in our network of supplier and universities and internal mainly by students of various course of study.

 

Intellectual property

I defined organizational the management of intellectual properties as a subtask of the innovation group. Due to the history of our company we had a couple of hundreds of different patents (of very different technologies) in several countries of living and also of dead product lines. After reducing the number and the related costs we implemented in the next step a formal multi criteria method to evaluate a potential new patent and a process to drive an aligned yes/no decision. We then redesigned the patent application process itself in order to fulfill legal requirements, to minimize costs and to optimize regional staging (eg. D->EU->US) of the application.