New Product Business – Workshop 1 (Current State)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for New Product Business is provided by Mr. Faigen MEng Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Throughout his career, Mr. Faigen has been laying-flat the issues that block innovative new products from becoming successful businesses. His unique perspective has been shaped by his hands-on experience in Research, Development, Product Test, Customer Experience, Product Management, Marketing, Sales & Brand, founding and leading three software startups, and over 20 years in consulting. He created New Product Business as a pragmatic approach to drive successful commercial outcomes amidst the inherent uncertainty that stymies innovation.
Each of his functional positions taught him how to master pieces of innovation’s complexity. His career started in high-tech R&D which was seen by that industry as the natural owner of innovation since it created new products. His roles in Marketing, Sales and Brand introduced the need for a strong voice-of-customer to guide a new product’s value proposition. Leading Product Management for a $3Bn hardware/software company highlighted the need for portfolio planning and product life cycle management. And consulting to dozens of clients across industries highlighted the need for speed of action across the entire business to scale commercial success for new businesses.
These lessons, however, only partially answered the question, “why do companies struggle with getting their desired financial outcomes from new products”?
Over the previous 20 years, the game clock was reset to “Digital” challenging every company to bring new products to market faster. The common (and flawed) approach was to focus was on developing new products, not new product businesses, but even within new product development, there were significant challenges. Mr. Faigen helped several clients accelerate their internal clocks so they could compete at Digital speed, however, these early engagements also uncovered related problems that had to be flattened for a company to be commercially successful at innovation. Specifically, companies needed a new decision-making model to deal with innovation’s inherently high-level of uncertainty. Uncertainty impacts how projects are funded, how many projects need to be undertaken in parallel, the criticality to use learning as a measure of innovation progress, and the way a company should organize.
Mr. Faigen responded to the need for tools to handle this uncertainty and gathered, built, and incorporated them into the New Product Business approach.
Mr. Faigen holds a Bachelors and Masters in Mechanical Engineering and is a Professional Engineer.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
This program provides teams in Technology, Consumer Goods, Telecommunications, Automotive, and Healthcare the tools, processes, and decision-making skills to create new businesses or radically re-imagine core business processes. They will learn to act as a multi-functional innovation team, owning the commercial business outcomes they will generate through the development of a new product or service. The twelve-month program will engage them in the various aspects necessary to navigate innovation’s uncertain terrain as they move from generating business ideas, through building their product or service, to launching it in the market, and growing it to scale. In addition to working in a new multi-functional silo model, they will become skilled at making fast-paced decisions with little available data and become comfortable with learning quickly, failing, and having to pivot.
In the first month’s workshop, Current State, the team will gain a solid understanding of their starting point and their innovation ambition, which sets the stage for undertaking the innovation journey. The starting point is their corporate strategy, and the role innovation plays in contributing to their company’s growth. The current statement assessment covers how the company is currently organized for innovation, where the innovation decisions are made, by whom, and how often. The maturity of the current innovation business processes marks the departure point and will be used as a reference for the progress to be made as the company adopts the New Product Business process. At the conclusion of Current State, the team will understand the distance up the Innovation Maturity Curve they will need to make to create their desired Future State.
Objectives
01. Internal Analysis: Use the Innovation Current State Analysis tool to document the company’s Strategy, Role for Innovation, Innovation Staffing, Innovation Funding, Portfolio Management, and Innovation Governance. Time allocated: 1 Month
02. Define Issues: Reflect on the Innovation Current State, identifying misalignments, gaps, and breaks. Time allocated: 1 Month
03. Target Setting: Document how innovation targets are set. Time allocated: 1 Month
04: Gather Data: Collect the data for the Current State. Time allocated: 1 Month
05: Analyze Data: Learn how the Current State helps/hinders your company’s innovation efforts. Time allocated: 1 Month
06: Preliminary Plan: Using the Innovation Current State Analysis tool, develop a complete view on your company’s approach to innovation. Time allocated: 1 Month
07: Review Plan: Review the preliminary plan, testing it for accuracy and completeness. Time allocated: 1 Month
08: Test Assumptions: Develop hypotheses and test each. Time allocated: 1 Month
09: Issue Resolution: Resolve any issues that surface from hypothesis testing. Time allocated: 1 Month
10: Implement Solutions: Improve the plan with new learnings. Time allocated: 1 Month
11: Monitor Activity: Review plan with senior management. Time allocated: 1 Month
12: Continuous Improvement: Use feedback to further improve the Current State document. Time allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Internal Analysis: Multi-functional innovation team to capture the company’s Innovation Current State.
02. Define Issues: Multi-functional innovation team to reflect on the gaps and misalignments.
03. Target Setting: Multi-functional innovation team to determine how innovation targets are currently set.
04: Gathering Data: Multi-functional innovation team gathers the data of the Current State.
05: Analyze Data: Multi-functional innovation team analyzes the Current State data evaluating how the current state helps/hinders innovation efforts.
06: Preliminary Plan: Multi-functional innovation team builds the first complete overall assessment of the company’s approach to innovation.
07: Review Plan: Multi-functional innovation team tests the view of the Current State they have created.
08: Test Assumptions: Multi-functional innovation team develops leap of faith hypotheses and tests each.
09: Issue Resolution: Multi-functional innovation team resolves the issues they have uncovered in hypotheses testing.
10: Implement Solutions: Multi-functional innovation team defines changes to their Current State Analysis document.
11: Monitor Activity: Multi-functional innovation team uses the senior management team as a sounding board on their Current State Analysis.
12: Continuous Improvement: Multi-functional innovation team incorporates senior management feedback into their Current State Analysis.
Tasks
01. Internal Analysis: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time early in the next month to become familiar with the Innovation Current State Analysis tool.
02. Define Issues: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to analyze the Current State and provide their input on gaps, breaks and hindrances.
03. Target Setting: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to verify the target setting mechanisms in the Current State.
04: Gathering Data: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time early in the next month to assist in gathering the data required by the Innovation Current State Analysis tool.
05: Analyze Data: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to provide their input on how the Innovation Current State helps and hinders innovation efforts.
06: Preliminary Plan: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to create the first full view of the Innovation Current State.
07: Review Plan: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to test the Innovation Current State for completeness and accuracy.
08: Test Assumptions: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to create hypotheses that will pressure test the Current Plan.
09: Issue Resolution: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to tests the hypotheses they have created.
10: Implement Solutions: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to update the Current State using the learnings from their hypotheses pressure tests.
11: Monitor Activity: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to meet with senior management to review the Innovation Current State.
12: Continuous Improvement: Each member of the multi-functional team sets aside time in the next month to take the learnings from the senior management review to update the Innovation Current State.
Introduction
Planning
Innovation is a powerful tool and wielded properly, can significantly improve the arc of a company’s growth curve. Yet, few companies are successful in using innovation to improve their financial futures. How is it that innovation, with all its promise to create new businesses based on a combination of new products sold to new/existing customers through new/existing channels, often fails to deliver? The answers to this question are found in how companies wield innovation and not with innovation itself.
Innovation is an immensely flexible tool, and it is this inherent adaptability that creates a problem for many companies. While innovation can do almost anything, the question senior management need to answer is, what specifically do we need innovation to deliver? Innovation, like mathematics or artificial intelligence needs a specific application to provide it shape and size. The best place to define an application for innovation is your corporate strategy as this can explicitly define the role for innovation.
To be precise, there are four roles for innovation in support of your corporate strategy. First and most common, it can Fill the Gap between your strategic growth plan and the growth you are expecting from your current product set. Second, it can become your Growth Engine where 20% to 40% of your yearly revenue is generated by products that are only two or three years old. Third, it can act as an Accelerator, shortening the time it takes to achieve commercial success. Lastly, Innovation can boost a company’s performance through a Moonshot, creating a new product that rapidly scales in the marketplace and significantly contributes to shaping your company’s future.
The four roles differ significantly in their potential impact, and require different staffing, funding and risk taking. Senior management need to select one of these four potential roles. In the absence of a compelling case, most companies pursue a Fill the Gap approach as this has the most chance of success.
Beyond selecting innovation’s role, each company will need to consider how it is organized to undertake innovation. Innovation is an action sport, played by a multi-function team. The team is developing a new business which will return attractive commercial outcomes, measured against the strategic goals it needs to accomplish. The measurements must ally with the business model – for some business models this is the addition of new customers, for others it might the number of new customers that recommend other customers, or for some new businesses, the traditional financial measurements of revenue, profit, and market share might be best. For the team to be successful, it needs to know how the score will be kept and what success looks like.
Often innovation is siloed into an Innovation Hub or more traditionally, done in Research and Development. The common logic is that innovation is all about creating something new, and that is the bastion of someone who is immersed in technology. This idea might have been useful when technology was in its infancy, roughly 50 years ago, as digital technology was cumbersome and expensive limiting its application. Today, with an accelerating pace, innovation is transforming our daily lives across lifestyle, entertainment, healthcare, industry, transportation with ubiquitous potential. This means innovation teams need to know the specific application (customer pains and gains) plus competition plus how to quickly build a product and a business around solving those customer pains and gains. This Rubik’s Cube of Market, Product, Channel, Brand, Operations, and Time to Market is best solved by a multi-function team whose individual specialization covers the diverse set of problems.
Innovation teams must answer a range of different questions such as, what market secret have we discovered? How can we uniquely unlock the market’s secret? How does our brand proposition align with serving this new market? What sales and marketing motions do we need to create? What are the economics of the new business we will create? What risks are involved in our new business? How will this new business impact our supply chain? How will our Operations team need to adapt to handle this new volume of business? What new capabilities do we need across the entire customer experience?
Clearly, a technology-only team would be incapable of answering the representative list of innovation questions shown above. The recommended approach to staffing the innovation teams is to assign the range