Technology platforms and implementation
Situation:
This company's emphasis on incremental product innovations had left them with a innovation funnel with inadequate market value to achieve even their short-term revenue targets. The company's innovation team had evolved a structure and incentives as "internal consultants". This resulted in the innovation team working almost exclusively on short-term vendor-supplied product updates. There were few long-term, big-hit, or disruptive innovations in the pipeline, and those that were, were not receiving budget or resources.
What We Did:
Newlogic created technology platform working groups within the company's innovation organization. Each technology platform was structured to support a technology used across multiple categories in order to capture maximum efficiencies. The innovation organization adopted new incentives allowing platform team members to commit a specific allotment of time and resources to their platform initiatives. Additional KPIs were developed in order to reinforce the importance of short-term as well as long-term outcomes that were aligned with business objectives.
Results:
Client's platform teams were quickly able to identify new product, cost-savings and technology opportunities. One platform team identified, initiated and implemented a platform project that resulted in over $1M of cost savings within the first year. Another platform team co-developed a state-of-the-art technology that strengthened their defensive IP position. Every platform team established internal best-practices and state-of-the art knowledge bases aligned with the BU and product strategies. This enabled them to be effective when proactively proposing new innovation, technology and product opportunities to the business units and brands.
