Managing the product innovation funnel

In today’s challenging environment for the chemical and chemicals-based industries, the key to growth is product innovation. And the key to product innovation is the efficiency of the R&D organization. Yet in many organizations R&D is unstructured and artisan in its approach. This is in contrast to e.g. manufacturing and supply chain, or sales & marketing activities, where transparency and efficiency have increased with the introduction of ERP and CRM systems. In both cases clearly defined work– and data flows, and improved information sharing, have yielded benefits. These ideas however are rarely applied to R&D.

R&D has a reputation of being unmanageable, because it involves creative activities. R&D is mostly regarded as a high-cost, high-risk, high pay-off gambling game: a good long-term yield, but erratic and infrequent payouts.

However the view of product development as a creative activity is misleading. Creative activity constitutes only some 10% of all activity in R&D, and most of that is re-creation rather than original. Almost 90% of R&D time is spent on communication, administration and simply on waiting for essential information. This is an obvious target for the same approach that has streamlined the manufacturing, supply chain and sales functions.

Predictive modeling can play a role in "squeezing the innovation funnel" by eliminating a large fraction of failing prototypes early in the process.

Novidec can help you to speed up your product development through management of your R&D data and the development, application and maintenance of predictive models.

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