Happy New Year!
I’m always curious to start the year with a look at the product launches on show at the Consumer Electronics Show. The future of innovation: where high tech fuses with elegant design. All afforded, no doubt, by eye watering R&D budgets.
But how do you innovate on a tight budget? As we kick off 2023, budgets are under pressure as most businesses shift resources to tried and tested activities, sacrificing innovation - a proven driver of competitive differentiation and strong corporate performance. Of course, this is assuming things don’t change, that 2023 will have the same challenges as 2010. In reality you will have to innovate even just to stand still.
Innovation is a process of trial and error, where positive outcomes are not guaranteed. If you work in a product development team, you’ll know that demands from management are usually unrealistic, and understanding how to innovate remains a mystery to most people you work with.
We’ve been asking our clients how they are handling this challenge. Here’s a flavour of what we heard:
“There’s a disconnect between those funding innovation and the needs of the business”
“We have an Innovation Lab, but it takes too long to get urgent projects in the door”
“Our Innovation focus should be process enhancements, not just big ticket product launches”
“Getting management buy-in is more difficult than ever - how can we estimate ROI on a prototype idea?”
Learning Journey
Building on learnings from our other Accelerator programmes, we’ve designed the Fast Track Innovation Accelerator - a 6-week online programme which will demystify innovation, shine the light on the need for experimentation, and make it easier for your teams to collaborate.
Meet the Innovation Dream Team
We’ve assembled a global team of experts who live and breath Innovation. I’ve been lucky to work with them all over the past 5 years.
Alfred Biehler, London-based Head of Innovation at Google will share tips on developing creating a Culture of Innovation and deploying AI to accelerate delivery
AJ Boelens, Dubai-based MD at Innovation Connected will show how to align your innovation to the company vision, and deploy design thinking to conceive the best ideas
Pilar Barrio, Barcelona-based Co-Founder of Beyond Good will unlock the power of Rapid Iterative Prototyping to bring your idea to life, and mitigate the risk of failure
Francis Goh, Digital Innovation Leader at Amazon Web Services, will point out why many innovations fail
Meeting Customer Needs, Harnessing AI, Aligning Teams
If you want to read the concepts, head online - this course isn’t for you. If you have a particular business challenge, this is a safe place to define the customer need, create the innovation idea based on customer needs, deploy the best technology to resolve the challenge, formulate your solution using our templates, and align your teams. We’ll be using case studies and industry templates.
Leaving with Implementation-Ready Solutions
Think of the other learners as an independent user testing group for your innovation solutions. In the last stage of our journey, you’ll be pitching v1.0 of your innovation idea to other learners, and getting their feedback before bringing your solution back to the business for implementation.
Successful innovation is all about experimentation. Here’s a reminder from Jeff Bezos: “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. Being wrong might hurt you a bit. But being slow will kill you.”
We hope to see you on the Innovation Accelerator. Please click the button below to register for the Fast Track Innovation Accelerator.
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