The 2008 Innovation report by BCG has finally arrived. The big idea coming from this work is: Is the tide turning? Looking at the results tells a familiar story: an increase in frustration with innovation and more money being pulled back as a result.
There are 4 things that are the culprits for the lack of return on innovation:
1. lengthy development times
2. risk averse corporate culture
3. difficulty selecting the right ideas
4. lack of internal coordination
The summary goes on to state that all of the above are under executives control. While this may be true, 1 & 3 are easily solved by finding better quality ideas from Stage Zero. If focus is place on finding and choosing QUALITY ideas, rather than QUANTITY, this issue will start to correct itself and innovation teams will be able to cut down on development time and overall spending by focusing on ways to generate better ideas in the front end of innovation.
Existing brainstorm and research techniques force companies to chose between a lot of ideas without quality or few ideas that lack uniqueness. Spending a little more in the front end to collecting hundreds or thousands of observations of how products are actually and then applying a little science into the art of innovation will allow companies to have their pick of better ideas from the start and save them money in the long-run, ultimately increasing their rate of return.
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