TAMING AND TURBOCHARGING INNOVATION

ByJason Nibauer

Highlights:

  • Innovation is challenging to achieve in a timely manner due to the cross-functional nature of activities.
  • CleverOcean’s Innovation clients have reduced innovation development times by almost 50%.
  • CleverOcean’s Innovation platform can be easily adapted to follow an organization’s unique innovation process, minimizing change management.
  • Clients get up and running in days and weeks, not months.

Innovation challenge:

Business leaders understand that innovation is a critical component to driving growth.  It brings new news to your customers and consumers, and helps build trial.  However, delivering on an innovation plan in a timely manner is one of the most challenging endeavors an organization can undertake due to the cross-functional nature of the activities.  Most companies have created unique stage gate processes and tasks, but implementing them is disjointed because there is often no single innovation owner across the organization.   For example, a new line extension could touch every department in an organization from R&D, operations, legal, product marketing, market research, sales, supply chain, and finance to even external agencies. The inability to easily manage the cross-functional nature of innovation makes it very delay-prone.  According to Gartner, 45% of all product launches are delayed at least one month.

CleverOcean’s Innovation solution:

CleverOcean’s Innovation solution was developed to help organizations tame and enhance their product development process. The core tenets of the system are to codify key steps, streamline cross-functional connectivity, make critical documents easy to find, and simplify reporting. We achieve these objectives by developing an integrated digital platform that is as simple as visiting any standard website application. CleverOcean’s Innovation solution is easily adapted to follow an organization’s unique innovation process.

CleverOcean’s solution is initially preconfigured to follow a generic innovation funnel process for a typical CPG organization. However, given there is no standard solution for any company, we can quickly adapt the solution to match your organization’s unique innovation process, with customized tasks, flows, and visualizations. We generally get clients running in a matter of days and weeks, not months. CleverOcean reporting is also flexible and can be adapted to suit the reporting needs of different roles, from project manager to CEO.

In-market results: 

On average, clients see an almost 50% reduction in development time, as defined as the time it takes from project inception to manufacturing finished goods.   Clients value the ease of reporting, centralization of core documents, and easier cross-functional collaboration.  Innovation leaders value CleverOcean’s ability to get their organization up and running quickly, as well as minimize change management due to CleverOcean’s ability to adapt to an existing innovation process.

Want to learn more?  Email [email protected] if you would like to learn how we can help your organization.