High Velocity Innovation
What are the challenges in innovation?
Innovation is crucial for companies to continue to grow and compete in a rapidly changing marketplace. But developing innovative products brings challenges for both managers and technical people. In this blog, we will discuss some of the key challenges and how they can be overcome.
Risk management
One of the biggest challenges in innovation is risk management. Developing innovative products often involves high costs, especially if wrong choices are made in the development process. In addition, there is often a lot of uncertainty. Especially if the team is developing an entirely new product or component and has no knowledge or experience with it yet.
Progress management
Another challenge is managing progress. Developing innovative products is often an unclear process, especially in the early stages of development.
Innovation management
A third challenge is innovation management. Developing innovative products should provide a competitive advantage. So companies need to make sure they develop the right products for the customer or market.
Challenges in the product development process
In addition to these general challenges, there are also specific challenges in product development. To understand these, we need to look at the different stages of the product development process. In the concept phase, teams still have little knowledge about the design. They still need to build that knowledge. As the process progresses, knowledge about the design increases and only then informed design decisions can be made. Let’s take a closer look at the different stages in the process and discover what you would ideally want.
Let’s start with Design Freedom
Product development involves many decisions and choices. In many organizations, these decisions are made as early as possible with the intention of moving forward. As a result, teams do not have time to build the necessary knowledge. What you need to keep options, is to defer these decisions, giving teams more time to choose the right design.
Committed costs
Cost is also related to delaying decisions. If you make design decisions too early in the process, you have to order things like materials and components in line with your design. But if you adjust the design and you have already committed to this cost by ordering all kinds of goods, it can lead to failure costs. What you want is to incur costs as late as possible in the development process.
The third and final aspect is Knowledge about the design
In regular projects, you notice that knowledge is built in line with the progress of the development of the new product. However, innovative products require a different approach. To allow for a longer time of design freedom and later cost capture, defer design decisions to the last possible moment. This creates time that teams can use to build sufficient knowledge to make informed design decisions.
Wondering how to accelerate your innovation process?
This approach – making design decisions later to accelerate knowledge building – may feel counterintuitive, but ultimately leads to an acceleration in the innovation process. Wondering what we can do for your organization? Then contact us to talk about High Velocity Innovation and your organization’s challenges in it. We are happy to think along with you.
