The Integration of Innovation and Marketing Best Practices for Business Excellence III
The Integration of Innovation and Marketing Best Practices for Business Excellence III
Profitable innovation and marketing management are both dynamic processes of continually creating new business models, improving customer experience, and opening new markets — as well as launching new products. To support value maximization and accelerated innovation Pentadigm ® Customer Value Management and Rapid Innovation’s; “Innovation Management Cycle” are examples of how marketing and innovation best practices integrate.
Pentadigm® Customer Value Management
Understand the Customer
Commit to the Customer
Create Customer Value
Obtain Customer Feedback
Improve Customer Value
The Innovation Management Cycle
Discover
Ideate
Stage Gate Development
Post Launch Review - Continuous Improvement
Portfolio and Life Cycle Management
The models both show how typical activities undertaken by marketing teams give plenty of scope to leverage teams and research gathering and analysis activities to manage value and innovate simultaneously. If managed well, customers will take time with marketing and R&D teams to uncover needs, the root causes of problems, unearth satisfaction gaps and develop solid reasons for a new product or service.
Marketing and Innovation Connectivity – An Example. Pentadigm® and “The Innovation Cycle”
Below we compare the activities of the two models, demonstrating clear parallels.
Customer Value Management 1. Understand the Customer
Understand markets, value chains and customers, discover customer need and value-based segmentation, quantify customer need and value, evaluate competitive positioning, select and target customer segments.
Innovation Management 1. Discover.
Research customer and market needs. Identify satisfaction gaps by using advanced Voice of Customer research methodology, trends and technology mapping. Gain deep insights into markets opportunities and satisfaction gaps that lead to opportunities to innovate.
Customer Value Management 2. Commit to the Customer
Develop customer segment strategy, differentiate offerings (customer commitments) to chosen target segments, communicate offerings internally and externally – ensure full understanding within the company and throughout the target customer base, define and measure key performance indicators.
Innovation Management 2. Ideate
Validate insights with customer to create opportunities. Leverage knowledge and creativity. Understand how customers measure the improvement an innovation can bring. Ideate around these opportunities using idea management and creativity tools, leveraging internal and external teams. Develop first pre-concepts or "protocepts" and gain customer feedback and interest.
Customer Value Management 3. Create Customer Value
Develop a customer culture throughout the organization led and driven from the top, define and populate customer value processes, develop customer value infrastructure, implement customer value creation.
Innovation Management 3. Stage Gate Development
Create customer culture through integrating the customer throughout the Stage Gate NPD development process. Continuous or dynamic prototyping will ensure faster low risk developments and customer buy-in to the innovation. Integrate customer into pre-launch activities to improve intimacy and help problem solving.
Customer Value Management 4. Obtain Customer Feedback
Track won and lost business, proactively obtain customer feedback from formal and informal sources, measure and track customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention, manage customer queries and complaints.
Innovation Management 4. Post Launch Review
Track delays, additional costs, functional and product deliver issues. Brainstorm solutions to improve the root causes that led to the issues. Manage and implement solutions. Suggest further opportunities for teams to innovate. Process creates significant good will and bonding between internal and customer teams.
Customer Value Management 5. Improve Customer Value
Implement short term improvements, discover and implement continuous and ongoing improvements to customer value, challenge and improve customer understanding, re-define customer commitments, strive for sustainable differentiation, improve customer value creation and streamline implementation.
Innovation Management 5. Portfolio and Life Cycle Management
Strategy, resourcing, balanced decision-making. Continuously review the relevance and value of the portfolio in relation to company strategy, trends, competitors, new technology, changing customer needs and potential for a disruptive innovation. Discontinuing low volume and non value-creating offerings frees up precious resources to fund and support innovation.
More in depth research using advanced Voice of Customer techniques such as “Job Mapping” across the value chain will uncover a multitude of opportunities for higher value improvements through more innovative new offerings. The greater knowledge and close customer interaction through the ideation and Stage Gate development process the better marketing and R&D can manage the risk associated innovation investment and new product launch. In all cases, teams should be well aware of the business strategy and goals in order to tune their “radars” to activities that will excite top management. Without focusing their innovation radars and applying good VOC techniques, teams may miss the chance to delve deeper into issues and needs to first understand fully the situation. And without a good grounding in innovation best practices, teams may be unable to turn these insights into opportunities for creative, collaborative ideation and potential project developments.
Tackling the issue of innovation risk, marketers can mitigate those risks by studying how risky projects are statistically, and balance the portfolio between Big “I” breakthrough innovations and “little i” incremental innovations. They can also ensure the use of current best practices and productivity tools to research, ideate, screen, rapid prototype and efficiently manage the chosen projects through a robust Stage Gate process.
New Productivity Tools
Of particularly interest are emerging I.T. systems for innovation management, such as Innovation Framework Technology’s Front End of Innovation (FEI) Idea Search Engine and Management tool, and it’s “back-end” integrated NPD Staged or Gate development process, with portfolio and lifecycle management features.
Such enabling I.T., linking and integrating the company’s total innovation initiatives to current best practices have been shown to deliver maximum speed and efficiency at lowest risk and cost and can make a significant improvement on both productivity and Return on Innovation (ROIV).
In Conclusion
Marketing and Innovation management are inseparable and integrally linked to business success. Why, then, do so many companies keep these activities separated and segregated into different silos?
Now is the time to bring together these interrelated activities into an integrated Strategic Marketing and Innovation group with the remit to optimize the current business for profit and to steer the company to the right future opportunities.
In both cases the need is for a detailed and in-depth understanding of the market value chain, business and competitive environment and a strong focus on customer needs and value drivers, led from the top and driven by senior management down through the organization.
Ideation and creativity must be encouraged and allowed to flourish as the company seeks to differentiate itself from competition with new offerings, new business models and new marketing approaches.
Key tools used in Integrated Marketing and Innovation Management are:
Customer Value Segmentation
Market Value Chain Analysis
Voice of the Customer
Job Mapping
Stage Gate NPD
Customer Commitments and the 4R’s of Sustainable Differentiation
Vital is the introduction and leadership of a customer value culture throughout the organization.
®Pentadigm is a registered trademark of GEMS Europe GmbH
The Integration of Innovation and Marketing Best Practices for Business Excellence III - To learn more about this author, visit Phil Allen's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
An Example of Marketing and Innovation Integration
Profitable innovation and marketing management are both dynamic processes of continually creating new business models, improving customer experience, and opening new markets — as well as launching new products. To support value maximization and accelerated innovation Pentadigm ® Customer Value Management and Rapid Innovation’s; “Innovation Management Cycle” are examples of how marketing and innovation best practices integrate.
Pentadigm® Customer Value Management
Understand the Customer
Commit to the Customer
Create Customer Value
Obtain Customer Feedback
Improve Customer Value
The Innovation Management Cycle
Discover
Ideate
Stage Gate Development
Post Launch Review - Continuous Improvement
Portfolio and Life Cycle Management
The models both show how typical activities undertaken by marketing teams give plenty of scope to leverage teams and research gathering and analysis activities to manage value and innovate simultaneously. If managed well, customers will take time with marketing and R&D teams to uncover needs, the root causes of problems, unearth satisfaction gaps and develop solid reasons for a new product or service.
Marketing and Innovation Connectivity – An Example. Pentadigm® and “The Innovation Cycle”
Below we compare the activities of the two models, demonstrating clear parallels.
Customer Value Management 1. Understand the Customer
Understand markets, value chains and customers, discover customer need and value-based segmentation, quantify customer need and value, evaluate competitive positioning, select and target customer segments.
Innovation Management 1. Discover.
Research customer and market needs. Identify satisfaction gaps by using advanced Voice of Customer research methodology, trends and technology mapping. Gain deep insights into markets opportunities and satisfaction gaps that lead to opportunities to innovate.
Customer Value Management 2. Commit to the Customer
Develop customer segment strategy, differentiate offerings (customer commitments) to chosen target segments, communicate offerings internally and externally – ensure full understanding within the company and throughout the target customer base, define and measure key performance indicators.
Innovation Management 2. Ideate
Validate insights with customer to create opportunities. Leverage knowledge and creativity. Understand how customers measure the improvement an innovation can bring. Ideate around these opportunities using idea management and creativity tools, leveraging internal and external teams. Develop first pre-concepts or "protocepts" and gain customer feedback and interest.
Customer Value Management 3. Create Customer Value
Develop a customer culture throughout the organization led and driven from the top, define and populate customer value processes, develop customer value infrastructure, implement customer value creation.
Innovation Management 3. Stage Gate Development
Create customer culture through integrating the customer throughout the Stage Gate NPD development process. Continuous or dynamic prototyping will ensure faster low risk developments and customer buy-in to the innovation. Integrate customer into pre-launch activities to improve intimacy and help problem solving.
Customer Value Management 4. Obtain Customer Feedback
Track won and lost business, proactively obtain customer feedback from formal and informal sources, measure and track customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention, manage customer queries and complaints.
Innovation Management 4. Post Launch Review
Track delays, additional costs, functional and product deliver issues. Brainstorm solutions to improve the root causes that led to the issues. Manage and implement solutions. Suggest further opportunities for teams to innovate. Process creates significant good will and bonding between internal and customer teams.
Customer Value Management 5. Improve Customer Value
Implement short term improvements, discover and implement continuous and ongoing improvements to customer value, challenge and improve customer understanding, re-define customer commitments, strive for sustainable differentiation, improve customer value creation and streamline implementation.
Innovation Management 5. Portfolio and Life Cycle Management
Strategy, resourcing, balanced decision-making. Continuously review the relevance and value of the portfolio in relation to company strategy, trends, competitors, new technology, changing customer needs and potential for a disruptive innovation. Discontinuing low volume and non value-creating offerings frees up precious resources to fund and support innovation.
More in depth research using advanced Voice of Customer techniques such as “Job Mapping” across the value chain will uncover a multitude of opportunities for higher value improvements through more innovative new offerings. The greater knowledge and close customer interaction through the ideation and Stage Gate development process the better marketing and R&D can manage the risk associated innovation investment and new product launch. In all cases, teams should be well aware of the business strategy and goals in order to tune their “radars” to activities that will excite top management. Without focusing their innovation radars and applying good VOC techniques, teams may miss the chance to delve deeper into issues and needs to first understand fully the situation. And without a good grounding in innovation best practices, teams may be unable to turn these insights into opportunities for creative, collaborative ideation and potential project developments.
Tackling the issue of innovation risk, marketers can mitigate those risks by studying how risky projects are statistically, and balance the portfolio between Big “I” breakthrough innovations and “little i” incremental innovations. They can also ensure the use of current best practices and productivity tools to research, ideate, screen, rapid prototype and efficiently manage the chosen projects through a robust Stage Gate process.
New Productivity Tools
Of particularly interest are emerging I.T. systems for innovation management, such as Innovation Framework Technology’s Front End of Innovation (FEI) Idea Search Engine and Management tool, and it’s “back-end” integrated NPD Staged or Gate development process, with portfolio and lifecycle management features.
Such enabling I.T., linking and integrating the company’s total innovation initiatives to current best practices have been shown to deliver maximum speed and efficiency at lowest risk and cost and can make a significant improvement on both productivity and Return on Innovation (ROIV).
In Conclusion
Marketing and Innovation management are inseparable and integrally linked to business success. Why, then, do so many companies keep these activities separated and segregated into different silos?
Now is the time to bring together these interrelated activities into an integrated Strategic Marketing and Innovation group with the remit to optimize the current business for profit and to steer the company to the right future opportunities.
In both cases the need is for a detailed and in-depth understanding of the market value chain, business and competitive environment and a strong focus on customer needs and value drivers, led from the top and driven by senior management down through the organization.
Ideation and creativity must be encouraged and allowed to flourish as the company seeks to differentiate itself from competition with new offerings, new business models and new marketing approaches.
Key tools used in Integrated Marketing and Innovation Management are:
Customer Value Segmentation
Market Value Chain Analysis
Voice of the Customer
Job Mapping
Stage Gate NPD
Customer Commitments and the 4R’s of Sustainable Differentiation
Vital is the introduction and leadership of a customer value culture throughout the organization.
®Pentadigm is a registered trademark of GEMS Europe GmbH
The Integration of Innovation and Marketing Best Practices for Business Excellence III - To learn more about this author, visit Phil Allen's Website.
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Linda RichardsonLinda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website |
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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John PowerJohn Power, founder of Biltmore Franchise Consulting, has extensive experience developing and marketing franchises and business opportunities. He has been in and around franchising for over twenty years. From 1980 through 1990 he conceptualized, organized, and developed the American Video Association. He grew AVA to 2,000 national members, before selling the company it 1990. It was later merged into another home video marketing company. From 2000 to 2005 he worked as a contract marketing and human resources consultant to several local and national companies. In 2005 Mr. Power began working as a franchise development consultant on a full-time basis. Since that time he has helped more than three dozen companies initiate and develop their franchising program. He notes that there are many companies interested in developing a franchise program, and who need his specialized assistance. Mr. Power is a “hands-on” franchise consultant. He said, “I am the ‘nuts and bolts’ person who tends to the details for my clients.” Mr. Power holds a B.S. degree with a major in Marketing. See: www.biltmorefranchise.com You may contact Mr. Power at: jpower@biltmorefranchise.co - Visit John Power's Website |
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John BrennanJohn Brennan Ed.D. Dr. Brennan is President of Interpersonal Development, LLC, a training and development firm. Interpersonal Development has provided sales training and coaching to more than 3,000 sales reps from over 100 companies. A native of Australia, Dr. Brennan received his doctorate from the University of Rochester. His dissertation researched the effectiveness of Behavioral Modeling Technology in training people in interpersonal skills. While he has spent most of his career designing or delivering training, he was also a Vice-President of Sales of a training and development franchise with operations in 25 markets. Dr. Brennan has designed and delivered sales training in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. He has been a guest speaker at numerous national and regional professional conferences. When Microsoft wanted Best Practices articles on sales for their web site, they called Dr. Brennan. The results are at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011387391033.aspx His firm’s clients have included Volvo, The Prudential, Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak, Gannett, Equifax Europe, the Economist Group and countless small businesses. - Visit John Brennan's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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David AchesonDavid Acheson is the founder of DCJA Consultancy. DCJA Consultancy is a management consultancy business specialising in B2B sales consultancy. They offer bespoke and packaged sales consultancy including Sales Optimisation Review, Interim Sales Management, Sales & Marketing Review, 1:1 Sales & Management Staff Analysis, Management Training, Solution Sales Training, Creation of New Pay Plan, KPI's, run Customer Feedback Campaigns, assist with Recruitment, Coaching, Appraisals and set up Strategic Marketing Campaigns. David spent his early career in accountancy and then moved into sales in 1982, working in Office Equipment, IT, Advertising, Training, Outsourcing and Consultancy. He has held many Senior Positions in SMBs and Global Organisations including Head of Sales Operations & Head of Business Development. His knowledge, skills and great experience of the Sales Industry has led to David making keynote speeches and running educational sessions to key businesses through organisations including The Chamber of Commerce and Business Link. - Visit David Acheson's Website |
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Anne BarrAnne Barr has over 26 years experience in sales and marketing, six years as a franchisee. She has assisted over 367 business owners and purchasers to achieve their goals in career change, transition and exit strategy. She holds the designation of Certified Franchise Executive from the International Franchise Association, Certified Business Intermediary from the International Business Brokers Association and Board Certified Broker from the Texas Association of Business Brokers. Anne is active in professional organizations, networking groups and volunteers for non-profit entities. As owner/operator of four successful businesses, Anne has proven people skills and enjoys helping clients find the right "fit" in business ownership. Visit www.FranchiseOpportunitySpecialist.com for more information about me and my company. - Visit Anne Barr's Website |
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