Dear Reader, I can see a change of trend when working with customers on their innovation management journey. At the start of this century Innovation Management was defined as an Idea to Market process, very much a process owned by R&D. The process is mostly called the NPD or NPI process. Companies tried to align the different business functions on new product investments, in fact on how to spend the R&D budgets in the most effective way, in order to achieve a good ROI. Many c

Dear Reader, take a close look at this picture for a moment.. You see 2 circles that both start with Strategies. The Outer Circle represents the Front End processes. It is in fact a supportive circle that should help the Inner Circle to survive in the market. The Inner Circle with the arrows is the “heart” of the company, there is the blood pressure to launch new products, in time, the right products for the right prices, so that sales can sell, and the plants can produce, an

A while ago I was in the process of understanding the challenges of business people with the innovation process. Business people: I mean the Sales teams and their leaders. In fact colleagues of Adam, the person in my previous Blog. Adam had difficulties with his role as a decision maker for investments. The person I will discuss here, Christine, has different challenges with innovation. Christine is the VP Commercials in a large country of a global consumer goods company. Sh

“Huub, really, if I would be held accountable for the success of our innovation projects, I would kill 70%” Dear Reader, in this Blog I want to share a story with you that changed my view on the pure rationalized approach of decision making in the innovation process. Mostly innovation decisions “seem” to be based a rational argumentation, supported by market analysis, business case calculations, strategic scorecards, technology feasibility studies, etc. But some time ago I i