Innovation is a core path to maintaining competitive advantage. It affords the opportunity to create the next disruptive alternative in order to address a market need; and yet, is a never-ending battle that can become a challenging day-to-day struggle, particularly for organizations with a global scope.

Working within a complex ecosystem can present several difficulties. From our experience across industries, there are common barriers to designing and implementing an effective innovation strategy and model:

• Lost in translation: Markets with different maturities and needs can each have their own interpretation of the role innovation should play. For less mature markets, innovation might become an opportunity for disruptive changes in the market generating a first movers’ advantage. For more mature markets, innovation becomes the lever that protects your brand portfolio against competitors.
• Friendly fire: Innovation requires involvement from all areas of the business. While marketing and sales can take center stage in the push to address portfolio opportunities, supply chain and procurement are critical for enabling this strategy. Managing multifunctional inputs and clarifying roles and responsibilities are as core to success as the quality of the strategy.
• Knowing your consumer: Developing a consumer-focused strategy and using segmentation to meet specific needs rather relying on inward-looking perception
• Being bold: Learning from your past successes and mistakes to take informed risks whilst not being afraid to innovate
• Defining the strategy that works for your context: Using a deep understanding of your products and market to set a clear role for innovation with a strategic intent aligned with your capabilities as opposed to copying and pasting from competitors
• Translating strategy into reality: Ensuring alignment across the organization with enabling factors available to support implementation
• Prioritization of initiatives: Building a feasible implementation timeline with resource and investment decisions based on strategic objectives
• Roles and responsibilities: Setting clear roles and responsibilities and decision boundaries for the ongoing execution, tracking and adjustment of innovation projects whilst incorporating market feedback

An innovation strategy and/or execution gone wrong can also cause hurt across the business:

• Lack of differentiation with competitors can damage brand image, offering, value proposition and premium pricing, causing a decreasing in profitability
• Slow time to market can generate delayed launches, lack of impact and wrong seasonality
• Collapsing categories and offerings can be caused by inactivity and lack of disruption
• unsatisfactory new sales ratio can be due to disconnection with sales teams, channels, clients and consumers.
• Oscillating employee moral and low talent retention can be caused by inability to truly innovate vs competition and startups

We support clients to develop a bespoke strategy and model based on a balance between outside-in and inside-out perspectives

Our methodology supports organizations by following a simple and structured approach that enables:

• In depth diagnosis of your current innovation reality and processes
• Definition of the strategic intent for innovation and how that definition translates into guidelines for building an innovation model
• Perspective (benchmarks) on best in class innovation organizations aligned with the archetype that you require
• Design of an innovation model with concrete measurable targets, an end to end process, clear roles and responsibilities, robust information flows and a clear governance to identify roadblocks and maintain a state of continuous improvement.

We also see and commit to helping you build sustained innovation capabilities:

• In non-technical aspects we will engage, empower and challenge your teams and individuals to step-up their capabilities, speak their minds and increase cooperation and empathy
• In technical aspects we will create and implement the concept of consumer and client centricity with centering models, targets and a mindset to deliver true value differentiation with the right timing, impact and profitability

Several benefits can be reached by having a functional innovation model within the organization:

• Impactful innovation: well-connected launches both in timing, but mainly addressing consumer needs and differentiating from competition
• Increased profitability: Right Pricing, Financial Gate Oriented Approach and Smart Portfolio Management to increase profitability driven by innovation
• Ability to react fast to trends and movements: Empower the teams and capabilities to quickly see, spot, learn, prototype and rollout products, services and features.
• Reduced time to market: less time spent planning and executing innovation projects, enabling a fast response to market needs through efficient product launches.
• Reduced timing waiting for approvals: channel main definitions through a clear approval process to capture the right feedback without losing speed
• Increased visibility and analytics: capture execution information and results in a structured way, to quickly identify and act on issues and opportunities
• Increased clarity of roles and responsibilities: avoid misunderstandings between different areas of the business and optimize resource time
• More effective leveraging of knowledge: centralize knowledge with a model built to inform future decisions

A holistic approach to leverage your internal knowledge and our experience

Each organization has its own unique context, objectives and needs when it comes to innovation. We combine your knowledge of your business with Integration’s expertise on innovation to diagnose, design and implement an innovation model that is right for you.

Our methodology ensures a holistic view of main issues and how to tackle them, and is structured into four main steps:

For example, a tailored approach is used during the initial 2 stages of the methodology. In order to diagnose and design the innovation model, the following frame is commonly used to set a guideline for these discussions.