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Command of innovation

Command of innovation requires:

  • the definition of the innovation strategy based on both market needs and technological opportunities,
  • the definition of new product / service target offers accordingly,
  • and finally, the management of the innovation portfolio.

Innovation management then aims to:

  1. drive creativity, generate and manage flows of ideas through, by way of example, the deployment of sensors designed to understand the market and the opportunities, or the creation of an innovation network (internal players, customers, partners or laboratories),
  2. assess and manage a portfolio of projects, while taking the scheduling of the projects, the analysis of their coherence and their relative priority (in view of the actual capacity of in-house skills and know-how to complete the projects) into consideration,
  3. reconfigure the R&D processes and make them more efficient, while clearly defining the roles and responsibilities in order to make sure the players form a tight fit (by adopting Lean approaches or best practices for program management in particular),
  4. speed up the development processes by encouraging co-development and cross-functional operations.

Argon Consulting helps its customers to manage their project portfolio and improve their R&D processes by:

  • auditing the performance of the innovation process (maturity matrix, benchmark, etc.),
  • identifying the challenges and estimating the cost of overhauling the processes, organization and tools (innovation business case),
  • overhauling the innovation processes,
  • clearly defining the target organization in terms of roles and responsibilities (central vs. local, by product line or by market), skills and size,
  • defining and deploying an innovation scorecard,
  • defining and implementing processes and tools to manage/plan projects and the associated human and material resources and skills: R&D supply chain,
  • taking Lean engineering type initiatives to improve the performance of the development and industrial manufacturing processes,
  • deploying a plan for improvement (training, fine-tuning of models, etc.) and change management (changes in culture, behavior, skills and communication).