Innovation and R&D Overview

A company's innovation system is the cornerstone of its future. Often times a company may attempt to introduce changes or pursue rapid development, only to realize that these efforts stall in their early stages. Keystone's proprietary research has shown that individual projects are often times not integrated with the overall strategy and innovation system, and as a result, these projects have unneeded delays and fail to meet revenue targets. Our research has shown that effective implementation requires alignment of the people, processes, technology and architecture that make up the system.

Companies have spent decades improving development processes to try to eliminate this disconnect. Although traditional processes are appropriate for simple development projects, projects with significant complexity and uncertainty benefit from a more flexible and agile development environment. Building a rapid experimentation capability to iterate on ideas with customers and stakeholders is a core element of such an agile process.

In addition, companies recognize that innovation often comes from beyond the company’s internal assets. In his recent research, Gary Pisano analyzes multiple approaches to external collaboration and he identified a common theme where successful companies used collaborative innovation to advance beyond their peers. These leading companies have effectively used four different types of collaboration where structures are opened or closed, and the approach is centralized or decentralized.

Successful companies institutionalize an environment to sustain innovation, which includes external collaboration and rapid prototyping, testing, gathering and acting on feedback to maximize the probability of delivering the right solution to market. With properly defined strategies and processes, the end result is an organization with shorter development cycles, increased development productivity, and new products demanded by customers.

Keystone Strategy Solutions

Keystone's experts and experienced project teams work with our clients to define and implement rapid development processes. Keystone's approach builds upon work by Gary Pisano and Roberto Verganti and includes qualitative and quantitative tools to assess and benchmark the existing development organization, frameworks to structure development activities, and new process definition to institutionalize the changes. Keystone teams use proven ideation processes including lead user analysis, market matching, contextual analysis, scenario building, market research and focus groups to guide our clients. Examples of recent projects include Innovation and Idea Generation, Evaluation and Prioritization of Ideas, Portfolio Management, Project Management and Execution, and Educational Workshops.

To learn more about the Innovation and R&D Practice contact info@keystonestrategy.com