Innovation

The development of value propositions is key for leverage technological intelligence. Meaningful and sustaining attributes for differentiation are able to contribute significantly to long term growth if they are based on a value oriented business model. Well known from Service Industries, customer integration could be applied to other industries for product development, too. Associated risks can be detected and subsequently managed.

Strategic product planning and strategic technology planning is more important than ever. This planning is based upon the anticipation of market and technology developments. The article shows how new technologies are taken up and how they can be combined to coherent technology strategies. These help the companies to further develop the product range and to position themselves advantageously in the competition of tomorrow. A consistent example from the automotive lighting engineering underlines the high feasibility of the methodology.

Change Management and transformability of factories are usually not planned in an integrated way today. While Change Management focuses solely on the change process itself, this process is mostly ignored in the planning process of a transformable factory. The synthesis of these two approaches allows a holistic support of change processes, in order to promote innovations for example, upgrade employee competencies and use the planned technological, spatial and organisational transformability thoroughly.

This article tries to answer the question what implications innovation management will have on the future performance of companies. For this purpose a new approach has been developed that considers the time factor to be the determining element for the success of an innovation which also includes an invention. The developed model analyses the entire innovation process on several levels as well as the innovation performance and innovation capability of a company. This model permits to highlight critical elements within the company and the specific project, on the basis of existing data. This allows to give recommendations for optimisation and to evaluate modifications.

With regard to the current competitive environment companies, and especially small and medium sized companies, ought to combine their competencies through the formation of strategic networks. This bundling permits the organizations to realize economies of scale, offer combined services and generate innovations. But especially innovation networks make great demands on network management. Based on the framework taken out of the manual “Managing Innovation Networks” by the VDI this article therefore outlines the particular management functions for innovation networks and reviews related literature. The purpose of this analysis is to point out suggestions for the management of innovation networks and to give an overview of research findings.

In the branch of technical high end consumer goods for the companies it’s becoming more and more difficult to differ in the functionalities of their products. This applies especially in the luxury car segment. Keeping in mind the developmental periods of about 60 months, a clear strategy is needed. A process for strategy development can be found in most companies on the top management level. But a systematic approach for the prioritization of development projects is also needed on medium enterprise levels. The implementation of such an approach in the development resort of an automotive company shows barriers and potentialities.

The in-firm innovation process can be divided into four phases. The first phase (concept finding) is also called „fuzzy front-end“ as it is un-structured and activities are left to chance. However, case studies show that this phase can also be clearly structured and supported by adequate methods. For the stages of concept finding „strategic orientation“, „idea generation“, „idea selection“ and „pre-projects“ specific proved proceedings and methods are available. Idea management has to be integrated into the organizational set-up of a company: All ideas should be submitted to an idea collection unit. An idea manager takes care of them and pushes them forward. For the screening and evaluation of ideas a cross-functional committee should support the idea manager.

Today, innovations are perceived as the crucial factor for economic growth and employment. Companies investing heavily into research and development for technologically innovative products seem to have a competitive edge. This finding is empirically proved. However, further promising innovation strategies do exist. Based on a survey of 1450 companies of the manufacturing sector this article shows that also companies focussing on intelligent product service combinations or innovative techno-organisational processes outperform their competitors as regards employment growth.

A wide definition of weak spots does not only allow analysing the possibilities for technical or technological improvements and innovations, but it is the basis for innovations in the companies’ organization. If a weak spot exists due to disrespect of the normative organizational structure, the management has to enforce the acceptance of the given structure. If there is a weak spot due to any mistake in the organizational structure itself, the analysis of weak spots in the organizational system provides a basis for process optimizations.

The theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) supports the innovation management process as a whole. It enriches the finding of new ideas, generating and evaluating alternatives as well as the transformation of ideas. TRIZ provides a comprehensive set of tools to support the various steps inside an effective innovation management. Contradiction thinking is one key finding of TRIZ. Contradictions may occur in a one- or two parametric form and represent the core aspects of a problem. TRIZ-tools help to resolve these contradictions. A comparison of the tools (i) inventive principles and (ii) separation principles, demonstrate the imposing use in the innovation management.