Modul 10: Insights

Question 1

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Answer 1

• Ideas must be able to flow both top-down and bottom-up
• The distinction between existing ideas and original ideas is of fundamental importance. It is a requirement of commercial reason to first investigate whether ideas already exist somewhere.
• The order of priority for generating ideas is therefore: adopt, adapt, create.
• There are almost an infinite number of sources for existing ideas. The order of priority is to search inside the company first and then outside. Besides the competition, there are many other external sources such as the suppliers or the customers
• Original ideas are created permanently and on an ad hoc basis.
• The creative “tinkering” of the individual employee is at least as important as the creative work in the group
• An immeasurable number of tools are available for the creation of ideas, from the analysis of customer complaints to bionics and brainstorming or brainwriting to external workshops with experts
• Brainstorming is the event-related creative technique that is most frequently used in practice, but it has a number of shortcomings. Brainwriting is a very good alternative that eliminates certain weaknesses in brainstorming. There are other alternatives worth considering such as the Google Ventures creative method.
• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. The higher the pain is, which the customer perceives, the greater the chances of market success are if the solution addresses this pain

Question 2

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Answer 2

• Scrum offers significant advantages in the form of shorter time-to-market, better quality, lower risk and higher team productivity and satisfaction.
• Scrum provides the greatest benefit in situations when customer preferences and solution options change frequently; close cooperation with customers is possible; the problems are complex, the solutions are initially unknown and the product scope is initially unclear; creative solutions and time-to-market are important; product ideas can be broken down into small incremental value-adding modules, and learnings from failures in the development process are possible.
• Process elements of Scrum, which are definitely worth transferring to other company processes, are the processing of tasks in sprints, the daily stand-up meetings and the visualization of the project progress using e.g. Kanban boards

Question 3

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Answer 3

• The exploitation / commercialization of an innovation is a key driver of its value.
• The customer development process needs to be synchronized with the product development process and starts very early
• The implementation of an innovation in the market takes place in multiple phases in which different customer groups, which differ in terms of their psychological or demographic profile, adopt the innovation one after the other.
• There are several phase models of the market penetration of an innovation, which differ according to whether the innovation takes place in the B2C or B2B market and whether the innovation is analog or digital. The management of the adoption of a high-tech innovation in the B2B market is particularly challenging, since a gap (chasm) opens between the second (market growth) phase and the third (market maturity) phase that is not easy to cross.
• To get the maximum value from an innovation idea, power marketing is necessary in every commercialization phase.
• In order to maximize the value over the entire innovation cycle, even more is required: After the start of a radical innovation, a cascade of rapid incremental follow up innovations must be launched in order to occupy open market segments and price positions.

Question 4

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Answer 4

• Tactical innovation portfolio management does not consist in only maximizing the earnings value of the portfolio of innovation projects. Rather, it is all about ensuring the right balance of the portfolio in order to manage the risk.
• Lack of balance is the greatest weakness in most innovation portfolios
• To ensure the portfolio balance and to prepare appropriate decisions, companies make use of the most varied of graphic visualization methods, with bubble charts and, among these, return-risk charts or return-success probability charts play a dominant role.
• A systematic seven-step process has proven itself in portfolio review meetings. It includes a review of the strategic “must” projects, a project review for strategic consistency, a priority check, a review of the resource allocation based on the set priorities, a review of the projects for the attainability of the business objectives, a review of the projects for sufficient resources, the feedback into the innovation process.
• A pragmatic approach to tactical innovation portfolio management reduces the frequency of the portfolio review meetings to every six or twelve months, applies different evaluation criteria to the early phase projects and to the projects from the end of the business case phase (gate 3), focuses the portfolio management on the discussion of the more mature projects from gate 3 (end of the business case phase).