Innovation and R&D Overview

Innovation and its successful implementation is a cornerstone of a business’ future. Many companies attempt rapid development, however, these efforts tend to stall during or immediately after the prototyping stage. Keystone’s proprietary research has shown that individual development projects are often times not integrated with the overall product development strategy. As a result, individual projects have unneeded delays and fail to meet revenue targets.

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

In addition, companies are constantly looking for ways to access global talent, as well as lower overall costs. In his recent research, Gary Pisano analyzes different approaches to achieve this, and identified a common theme where companies successfully use collaborative innovation to advance beyond their peers. Leading companies have effectively used four different types of collaboration where structures are opened or closed, and the approach is centralized or decentralized.

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