With advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics as well as mushrooming of startups, the competition in all industries is at an all-time high. Earlier, if a company produced a novel product or service, it afforded it a competitive advantage for years, if not decades. Now, the competitive advantage doesn’t last long, which in turn limits a company’s ability to pursue long-term innovation projects. To meet this need for continuous innovations, companies are looking for high speed, low risk innovation approaches.
A significant driver for this trend is that the time to market (TTM) pressure is increasing exponentially. For instance, effective inventory management and supply chains are drastically reducing the time to market. While TTM differs by industry, it is a fundamental determinant of competitive advantage for any business. Balancing speed with risk is, however, a critical challenge that companies are now addressing with innovation intelligence.
Reduce TTM with High Speed, Low Risk Innovation
Reducing time to market requires a company to accelerate its product lifecycles. Here is how companies achieve this with high speed, low risk innovation:
Large Number of Trials and Experiments
The rate of innovation is much higher than it has ever been before. Startups globally are working on disruptive technologies that will shape industries in the years to come. Though companies have much bigger research and development (R&D) budgets, they aren’t as agile as startups. To stay ahead of the technology curve, they must run many trials and experiments instead of focusing solely on a few moonshot projects.
Open innovation allows companies to explore multiple research directions at once. Working with startups through data-driven startup programs is one way to do this. Alternatively, companies use startup scouting to identify high-potential startups that meet their innovation goals. Startup scouting also serves as a conduit for lead generation whereby innovative startups are onboarded as vendors or acquired to integrate their technology within a company’s processes.
24/7 Product Development
Traditionally, companies approached product development as a process with an end and a start. Today, the highly-competitive environment demands 24/7 product development, or else companies risk their products being outdated at launch. Continuous product development requires constant interaction between different business units within a company. Even after a product is shipped, customer feedback guides further improvements in the product such as the use of vehicular data in the automotive manufacturing sector.
Innovation intelligence speeds up product development in multiple ways. Environmental scanning identifies emerging opportunities and integrates new technologies and process improvements. Further, companies use technology scanning as a project benchmarking tool to ensure their products are at par or ahead of the market standard.
Gradual Rollouts
Partly as a result of 24/7 product development and a way to experiment with a few customers at first, more companies are releasing updates to their products with gradual rollouts. Feedback from the first set of customers shapes product improvements before they are launched to more customers. While most common in the software sector, more industries are now taking this approach. This minimizes the risk of a bad product launch while providing a method to quickly test it among real customers.
Customer intelligence allows companies to make the most of gradual rollouts. Coupled with competitor intelligence, it enables companies to position their products well and lengthen their competitive advantage.
A high speed, low risk innovation approach identifies technologies that accelerate product development.
Benefits of High Speed, Low Risk Innovation
1. Faster Product Development
By speeding up product development, this innovation management approach allows businesses to experiment with many product lines. This way, they can test multiple emerging technologies at once, picking the most profitable ones. Integrating external innovation with product development also improves the quality of internal innovation.
2. Lower Risk
When a product flops, manufacturers face heavy losses in the form of all the units that they are unable to sell. By prioritizing small, gradual rollouts, a high speed, low risk approach reduces the risk for the manufacturers. It also lowers the risk for the users as rollbacks are easier and affect only a small subset of customers.
3. Greater Competitive Advantage
Gradual rollouts, when done right, also make the product attractive to an increasingly large number of customers. This innovation management approach lengthens the duration of the competitive advantage as customers find it hard to switch to a new company as long as the existing one continues to meet their needs. Further, constant product development is an effective method to evade the commodity trap.
Use Innovation Intelligence to Derisk Innovation
Balancing speed with risk is critical to long-term competitive advantage. Innovation intelligence allows you to identify startups and technologies that enable high speed, low risk innovation. At StartUs Insights, we offer a range of services enabled by the StartUs Insights Discovery Platform covering over 2,5 million startups & scaleups globally. Some of our services that help you achieve your open innovation goals include:
- Trend Scouting: Identify emerging and latent trends and developments that will advance high speed, low risk innovation
- Technology Scouting: Reveal emerging technologies and learn how they can supercharge your innovation process
- Startup Scouting: Discover over 2,5 million startups & scaleups globally, scouting the right partners & saving you weeks of desk research
To discover how you can leverage open innovation to speed up product development, get in touch today!
