Despite all the talk surrounding product development excellence, many manufacturers remain stuck in a cycle of leveraging traditional product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms to achieve engineering and time-to-market efficiencies rather than stretching for the broader and more elusive goal of excellence in design innovation.
Different than the traditional view of PLM, which is about bringing products to market faster and with lower costs, innovation management is about ways to ensure the right products are brought to the right market. The concept, which is now starting to be addressed with new tools and PLM add-ons, is a way of putting structure to the activities surrounding idea generation and evaluation. It is becoming a key part of how companies determine where to channel product development resources to increase their odds of success.
"Part of the challenge is that innovation management is related to, but different than product development," says Chris Groves, CEO and president of Centric Software Inc. (San Jose, CA), the maker of the Open PLM suite of products for innovation, program, and project management. "Where it differs is that innovation management is a way to reach outside of a manufacturer's four walls to solicit ideas from global partners, suppliers, customers and employees. It also provides a way to triage and assess those ideas and narrow them down to those, that if embodied in a product, would have some resonance with customers."
In today's competitive business climate, manufacturers are under increasing pressure to innovate more effectively. With the last few years focused on driving cost out of the business, manufacturers are now looking for ways to grow their top lines and differentiate themselves in a global market. Doing so is a matter of introducing leadership products. The problem is that traditional product development processes don't necessarily correlate to a highly innovative environment, causing many companies to become trapped by their own engineering organizations.
"Most companies have product development processes designed to keep pace on a linear innovation curve," explains Dave Burdick, president of Collaborative Visions (Reno, NV), a consultancy focused on driving innovation in manufacturing. "The bureaucratic processes around product development have been designed and institutionalized around the feature spec war. Instead of trying to keep up with the Joneses, what will really set [manufacturers] apart is to fundamentally alter their trajectory of innovation."
To bust out of that cycle takes a combination of new tools and processes. Products such as Centric's OpenPLM can help bring structure to the non-structured activities related to brainstorming ideas amongst a broad constituency, and tools from companies such as Sopheon Corp. (Bloomington, MN) and IDe - Integrated Development Enterprise Inc. (Concord, MA) can assist in evaluating which ideas are likely to be become successful products.
Other breakout tools include Goldfire Innovator from Invention Machine Corp. (Boston), which helps companies leverage intellectual capital that's been created in their own organization as well as finding appropriate innovations in other areas or industries through a built-in patent knowledgebase.
Equally important, if not more so, than implementing new tools, is putting organizational and management processes in place to foster innovation. Some best practices to keep in mind:
- Leadership support. Innovation has to be baked into a manufacturer's cultural framework and championed by top management. Says Burdick: "You have to have people at the top who will measure, reward, and inspire people to take risks and constantly be on the lookout for new and breakthrough ideas."
- Building agility into your processes. Finding ways to institutionalize innovation means building processes around it and making those processes flexible enough so a manufacturer can change course midstream in development if the need occurs. In most companies, if something unfolds midway through an R&D cycle, there aren't mechanisms in place to address it immediately, but rather, it gets earmarked for subsequent R&D cycles.
- Creating an IP asset management system. It's not just about creating a vault to store CAD models, Burdick says, but rather building a system that houses and manages all the data and nuances about why a CAD model got designed a particular way in the first place. "Creating connections into all kinds of information sources" is an important step, he explains. As is keeping a multidisciplinary view of the innovations so people outside of the product development area are kept in the loop and provided with a forum to give input.
- Synchronize and constantly reevaluate. It's critical to reevaluate the business case and market goals of the product with the development of the product. "Otherwise, you can get to the finish line and the idea is no longer fit for market," says Centric's Groves.