Rapid Innovation

Faster to Market

The future belongs to companies that bring more variety to the marketplace and do it faster than their competitors. Improving capability and infrastructure in developing countries is an emerging force that is increasing pressure on established companies to compete. Companies in the United States and Europe—with their high cost structure—must innovate faster to maintain their market position. The challenge is to implement faster, yet it must be cost-effective innovation. This means they need to create a strategically aligned innovation process that brings to market more differentiated and sophisticated products, thus increasing variety for the customer while reducing complexity and cost. Our Rapid Innovation Program provides the strategies and techniques to shorten the innovation cycle through lean development and launch management. Rapid innovation is a customer-driven approach to reduce parts, cost, and complexity, while increasing speed, flexibility and variety (where valued by customers), embedded in a lean development process.

Rapid Innovation Program (RIP)

Purpose: shortening time-to-market through rapid innovation
Application: when portfolio is aging and competitors gain share
Process: value engineering, TOC lean development, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
Duration: 6 months and more, dependent on development cycle time
Deliverable: redesigned innovation and product development process
Impact: 50% reduction in launch times, while increasing success-rate of introductions
Impact medium term: stable pipeline of marketable innovations
Impact long term: growing share from new products

Voice of the Customer

Customers demand goods and service tailored to their needs and delivered at their terms. The demand for more variety, instant availability and higher performance at lower cost is growing for all categories and sectors.

Accelerating Innovation

The future belongs to companies capable to bring more variety to market, faster than others
Improving capability and infrastructure in developing countries increases pressure on established companies to compete
Especially companies in US and EU with their high cost structure must innovate faster to maintain their market-position

For Engineers

Focus is on reducing parts, cost and complexity, while increasing flexibility and variety
Lean development shortens time-to-market through critical chain management (TOC)
Lean design focuses on essential features, reducing parts and labor content (BOM/BOA)
Innovation cost reduction through standardization, modularization, and platform-concepts

Challenge and Conclusion

Faster, yet cost-effective Innovation. Creating a strategically aligned innovation process that brings to market more differentiated and more sophisticated products/services of higher quality and variety while reducing complexity and cost. Effective and efficient innovation at pace of customer-demand requires discipline, a structured processes and effective planning and support-systems:

Rapid Innovation Strategies

QFD – Quality Function Deployment – quantitative method to translate customer needs into effective specifications as basis for development
DFSS – Design for Six Sigma – creating products and processes with minimal variability to eliminate the need for costly defects, delays and rework
DTC – Design to Cost – aligning all activities to meet a given cost-target – critically important to remain competitive when producing commodities
RPD – Rapid Product Development – applying Lean-principles to remove waste and slack-time from the development, prototyping and testing process
MSP – Modularization-Standardization-Platforms – making effective use of shared parts, platforms and modules
LPD – Lean Product Development – structured process with focus on value-generation to shorten product development and launch management