Smart Innovation is the lifeblood of a healthy, competitive and forward thinking business.
Innovation goes beyond generating smart ideas. It demands hard work, exceptional vision, drive, commitment, collaboration and a business culture that rewards risk taking and learns constructive lessons from failure.
As thought leaders in Strategic Innovation Consulting, we help businesses shape their innovation strategies. We review and develop innovation capabilities and ecosystems, driving new business opportunities and the ability to adopt and exploit business model and technological innovation with agility and confidence.
Strategic Innovation Consulting Services
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Methodology
Our preferred delivery methodology is Agile (Scrum). Our approach is highly configurable and responsive to client need. We iteratively produce deliverables through a series of Agile Sprints ensuring that key business and IT sponsors are fully engaged at each step.
We use a number of Creative Problem Solving techniques including PEST(EL), SWOT, SCQA, Six Thinking Hats, TRIZ, 5 Whys, 5 Hows, Systems Thinking, Hypothesis Based Problem Solving, Business Model Canvass, VPEC-T and Issue Tree Analysis. We coach your staff on the use of these methods and our culture is collegiate, open and focused on knowledge sharing and sustainable knowledge transfer.
We offer a number of fixed price and time and materials based engagements from our modularised Smart Innovation Consulting Methodology.
Smart Innovation Strategy
Strategy defines ‘where to play and how to win’. Our deep expertise in business, technological and sociological trends ensures that your innovation strategy focuses on the best commercial opportunities underpinned by new technologies, suppliers and commercial partnerships. Using our proven Innovation Consulting Approach we help you prioritise investments and deliver rapid value from your existing capabilities.
We have extensive experience in incremental, disruptive and Open Innovation and understand how to balance different innovation methods focusing on incremental gain and paradigm shifting change.
Our approach and expertise also covers:
- Innovation and ideation tools
- Gamification of Innovation
- LEAN Start-up and Agile principles including Minimum Viable Product, Split Testing, Alpha/Beta/Live cycles, continuous improvement and focus testing, pivots, scale-up/out of business models and technology solutions
- Research and development methods (rapid prototyping, building research vehicles, proof of technology and concept, stakeholder and customer engagement in the experimental process)
- Avoiding and overcoming barriers to successful innovation (Intellectual Property, trust, knowledge sharing, disincentives)
- Qualifying and prioritising innovation and understanding its commercial potential (cost of entry, market and competitor analysis, innovation risk)
Maturity
We work with you to baseline your existing innovation functions, processes and commercial models to develop a rich understanding of the level and maturity of innovation within your business. Innovation is often informal, lacking ownership and key measures. We work with you to develop an ‘as is’ picture of innovation and formulate a set a tactical and strategic recommendations to extend innovation capabilities in line with your business need. Our approach delivers quickly, highlighting areas of excellence that can be replicated to deliver greater results across your business.
Smart Innovation Capability Development
A well-defined innovation strategy provides the business context for development of fit-for-purpose innovation capabilities. A Capability Baseline is a rapid ‘snapshot’ of your current state. Tactical and strategic recommendations are taken forward in a Capability Development Phase.
We align development of innovation capabilities with your Operating Model, suggesting changes or additions where appropriate. This often involves creation or expansion of innovation functions, formalisation of innovation processes and artifacts. We believe that innovation must be measurable and measured and work with you to define the critical success factors, KPIs, management information and governance structures that best enable successful innovation management within your business.
We help you develop new technology capabilities and understand technology trends and key disruptive forces and the opportunities these present. This includes Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Digital Ledger Technologies, Wearable Computing, Future Cities, Electromobility, Gamification, Mobile Payments, Future Currencies, Cloud Computing and Web-scale Digital Solutions.
Facilitation of Innovation
- We facilitate innovation workshops and help clients solve business and technology ‘point challenges’
- We facilitate the ideation process and have experience in running innovation competitions (with academia and private sector)
- We help clients develop new technology and business partnerships and develop symbiotic innovation ecosystems and problem solving teams
- We help clients drive greater innovation from their supply chains by introducing supplier innovation forums and new commercial models (such as incentivised co-innovation).
Interim Leadership and Recruitment to support your Smart Innovation initiatives
We provide interim resources to lead your innovations functions. We also support clients in developing job profiles and terms of reference for innovation roles, interviewing prospective candidates and working with HR and recruitment functions to source internal and external talent.