Putting the Innovation in Product Innovation

One important key is overcoming fragmented customer data. The right innovation platform helps to deliver accurate, detailed and timely knowledge of customers' needs and preferences based on product interaction history in real-time. A more detailed understanding of customers results in more accurate development of products and services with innovative, differentiated capabilities.

Break down internal walls

Accenture’s 2008 product development survey found that a third of all respondents cited poor interdepartmental cooperation as a significant impediment to effective innovation. An innovation platform enables promotion of instant and open collaboration, which helps to develop the processes and talent required to manage the innovation process with more rigor and predictability.

Expand the idea pool

When it comes to innovations, many companies suffer from an inability to harvest good ideas. New social networking technologies provide the potential to locate ideas and to encourage the kinds of dialogue and knowledge sharing from which good ideas naturally emerge.

To keep these dozens, hundreds or even thousands of resulting ideas manageable and actionable, SDP 2.0 technology can employ participants to rate and rank individual ideas. This mass evaluation technique helps to separate the highest-potential ideas from others, leading to short, concentrated listing of top intellectual material.

A Final Word

Budgets will be tighter in the foreseeable future; that much is clear. But companies cannot stand still. Those who want to survive and flourish must leverage new technologies that create a broader, more efficient networked innovation environment.