Establishing a consistent, sustainable approach to innovation
Situation
A Fortune 100 company wanted to establish an innovation process to generate ideas, screen the ideas for build potential and set up procedures to manage the funnel going forward.
Approach
Pipelines keep the ideas flowing. Orchid Strategy Group’s approach to an effective innovation pipeline is to build a funnel with many ideas and from many sources (customers, employees, vendors), capture and combine ideas for iteration and improvement, and maintain research and development findings. As technology and consumer tastes change, ideas that were once low on the list, potentially rise to the top, making a periodic evaluation of the pipeline part of the process.
Solution
Orchid Strategy Group created a customized innovation funnel for this client as follows:
Idea Generation (about 1,000 ideas) - Continually generate ideas from varied sources such as formal ideation, secondary research, competitive research, societal trend analysis, employee ideas, customer submissions, emerging technology analysis, and social media programs to generate (as well as rate) ideas
Idea Tracking (reduce to about 250 ideas) – Categorize similar ideas, delete duplicates, respond to employees and customers, and classify ideas into buckets (i.e., high, medium, low potential)
Concept development and high-level testing (reduce to about 50 ideas) - Create concept statements to further define the idea, how it works, and its benefits to the customer. Expose concept statements to a cross-functional internal team to rate potential (i.e., market potential, strategic alignment, and operational feasibility)
Consumer screening (reduce to 10 ideas) – Conduct focus groups using an iterative concept improvement approach, and then field quantitative research
Develop, analyze, and socialize concepts (reduce to 3-5 ideas) – Create the business case and develop a plan to build a new product (identify vendors, in-house capabilities, etc.)
Build concepts (reduce to 1-2 ideas)
Results
We successfully created and managed the innovation pipeline for a few iterations. In addition, following the steps above, we identified a wealth of ideas from which four new products have been launched, and two more are in the build phase.