Tweaking and merging the current existing portfolios of the company was a common practice before the digital age shot for the moon. High-tech companies would tweak their supply chains to gain big advantages. Many companies involved with household products changed bottle sizes for their shampoo assortment. A car manufacturer would introduce new design details and make vehicles more aerodynamic and fuel-efficient.
However, all of these did not change the basic product that was there to offer: a phone service, a car, or a shampoo. And these tweaks worked. They produced the desired bump in sales, for the most part, allowing companies to stay on track.
Until, however, the rise of digital came along and customer expectations changed entirely. Consumers today don’t care as much about brands. Consumers want products and services on their own terms and conditions. And they want ready access to a plethora of products and services alternatives through a multitude of digital channels.
Doing things differently when it comes to innovation will involve transforming company roles. To extract value from digital, companies need to re-engineer the role of product manager, building up the role of solution managers instead—a role that will orchestrate the innovation pipeline and ecosystem interaction. It requires a change in mindset from approaching innovation as one person/department’s wheelhouse to seeing it as the secret sauce that’s created when bringing different disciplines together.
The rate of innovation has skyrocketed in modern times and this rate is so hyper that most companies cannot move fast enough to realize new sources of value.
Although the days of incremental tweaking aren’t entirely over (most companies’ portfolios consist of products that have been enhanced), winning means creating breakthrough innovation. That calls for organizational structures that are nimble, open to new input from the extended ecosystem to drive a higher percentage of breakthroughs. And it means working in tandem with consumers.
Yet most companies are still stuck in “small change” mode, using outdated innovation methods and expecting different results. Now is the time to step off the crazy train and fundamentally change the approach to innovation and product development—or risk being wiped off the competitive map.
Steps to get off the old methods and enter the digital age
Construct around modern platforms:- Develop a platform approach is an innovation to the business, and it generates innovation. How? Because platforms bring together an extensive innovation network. Think of the innovation Apple enables through its App Store. By establishing a platform and becoming the orchestrator, not just a follower, companies can command and enable the ecosystem to drive value.
Innovation 2.0:- It’s time to fully capture the potential of the innovation partner network, going beyond paper-based ideation to capturing the culture and processes from different ecosystems to bring innovation to life and provide the much-needed boost to catapult the ongoing product engineering services.
Manage customer relationship:- Winners will upgrade or build connected customer insight capabilities within their R&D/innovation network. That will entail creating connections to a multitude of customer data sources from social media and around the web, and using analytics hand-in-hand with product development to harvest multichannel insights to enrich solutions based on the wants and needs of customers.
Conclusion
Boosting innovation requires finding the leadership to orchestrate change in an organization’s way of innovating and developing customer-centric solutions—and bringing in new talent pools like analytics experts. In order to successfully extend products into services, companies need solution managers in place of product managers.
Read Also:
No comments:
Post a Comment