Integrated Innovation
Cambridge Design Partnership is a consulting company that develops innovative new products in the medical, consumer and cleantech sectors.
We help our clients grow by creating successful products ahead of market trends and we believe an important factor in achieving this is our integrated product development approach.
Product Innovation is central to every company’s efforts to compete and in the recent recession the degree of competition has in no sense reduced; if anything it has been heightened. The 2009 Booz & Co. Global Innovation 1000 report concluded that long product development cycles have forced companies to maintain their R&D spending even when revenues decline so they are in a position to profit from the coming upturn, but in doing so they are actively seeking smarter processes to achieve a higher return on investment because money alone does not guarantee success.
Companies seeking to excel in innovation are faced with many specialist companies offering a broad range of new innovation tools. When exploring these approaches we often ask vendors why they don’t exploit them for themselves to create the next breakthrough product? Unsurprisingly few do simply because new product development is a business process which requires a particular breadth of skills and expertise to implement well. Back in 2006 the Booz & Co innovation study concluded ‘the highest leveraged innovators have one thing in common, they focus on building multifunctional, company wide capabilities.’ At CDP we believe the major challenge in innovation is not equipping yourself with the latest tools such as open innovation or crowd sourcing, but it is about achieving effective integration of the basic product development processes.
However, having challenged vendors it is only polite to answer the same question ourselves. At Cambridge Design Partnership we certainly do invest in innovation, we create our own IP and new products both independently and in partnership with our clients and their investors. We strongly believe this shared experience makes us a more efficient and effective innovation partner.
So what should an integrated approach comprise? We believe you need entrepreneurs to crystallize the business model and to inspire support from those with the necessary funds, marketeers to identify the voice of the customer, plan product positioning, communication and brand values, designers to harness customer insights to create vision and market pull, scientists to focus nature’s principles to meet customers unmet needs, engineers to find new and creative ways to manufacture more cheaply and more sustainably, and most importantly, effective project managers to maintain vision and quality, coordinate the process and communicate with stake holders. We believe breakthrough innovation delivers commercial success most often and reliably when these skills work together creatively and with a common purpose. For this reason at Cambridge Design Partnership we measure ourselves against five benchmarks for integration innovation.
The Integrated Team
Innovation is a paradox that requires both creative diversity and disciplined analysis. At Cambridge Design Partnership we have built our team around a core of PhD level scientists, engineers and designers all driven by a culture of market focus, critical analysis, design thinking and business acumen unusual in an organisation with such in-depth technical capability. Our inclusive company culture empowers this team to work together creatively, to take the necessary risks to create breakthroughs and to manage resources and schedules to deliver complex new products beyond expectations.
The Integrated Process
Management of the Innovation process is a major challenge because by definition the endpoint of projects is uncertain at the start. Success depends on taking a series of well judged risks maximising the probability of success at each point based on a combination of evidence, experience and established best practice and it takes a talented project manager with vision, strong nerves and a thick skin to guide it. To help, at CDP we have distilled our experience of hundreds of projects into a best practice framework. Working inside the conventional stage gate methodology and the constraints of highly regulated medical markets, our process aims to maximise return on investment. It is based on a statistical approach because at the start of a project one can create many conceivable solutions and the challenge is to focus resources on the most profitable ones. Thinking about product development as a linear Gantt chart is appealing in its simplicity, but it is a poor model for management. CDP’s process considers the possible outcomes at each stage and aims for decisions which build step by step the project’s net present value. This means measuring progress in terms of knowledge and value at the early stages while switching to a linear timeline model closer to product launch.
The Integrated Concept
Optimising product innovation requires objective review and selection. Ironically success depends on failure, in particular the skill to fail quickly and cheaply, because out of failure comes the learning that will eventually create a successful breakthrough, and without failure you are clearly not trying hard enough or learning much! However for breakthroughs to occur they must be recognised early on and nurtured, to do this the team must be ‘tuned in’ to both the customer and the underlying business opportunity. Our experience has taught us that it’s all too easy to fall in love with a cool new idea which may not be what customers want, so to improve success ahead of the market we use a more sophisticated metric we call ‘integrity’. This is a function with five dimensions including user needs, product technology, the supply chain, the brand and the business environment. Using this to measure progress significantly increases our ability to deliver premium value from R&D investment.
The Integrated Portfolio
The capability to manage the uncertainty inherent in the innovation process is crucial, otherwise projects begin to lack ambition. We specialise in delivering new products at the leading edge of markets and technologies and we believe we have created an organisation that excels in this space. However to optimise return on investment a portfolio approach is essential and new product platforms must be exploited systematically across global markets and incremental developments completed cost effectively to extend lifecycles. This is built into our thinking and we work closely with our client’s in-house teams to transfer technology as well as teaming with partners across the world when an alternative cost base or skill set is needed to maximise returns.
The Integrated Inspiration
CDP believe the most exciting opportunities arise when changes in markets and technologies collide. These opportunities are often hard to spot because these changes can happen slowly and often go unnoticed and few organisations truly and effectively communicate between technical, market and commercial functions. When opportunities do arise often people’s natural inclination is to dismiss those which are uncomfortably outside the status quo. We aspire to be a truly ‘open innovation’ organisation embracing technologies and unmet needs where ever they can be found and knitting together technologies and consumers in new and exciting ways. We work regularly with both third party commercial and academic IP so it is no coincidence that we are based in Cambridge UK, Europe’s leading centre for science & technology research.
For more information on Cambridge Design Partnership’s integrated capabilities please contact us through the tab above.