OBJECTIVES:

• Develop a product innovation strategy to focus your business’s new-product development effort
• Define clear and meaningful goals and objectives for product innovation
• Define areas of strategic focus for innovation – deciding where to invest and which area to avoid – to better direct focused project selection decisions
• Develop and use Product and Technology Roadmaps and Strategic Buckets to help make R&D resource allocation decisions
• Translate your strategy into action by picking the right development projects to invest in
• Learn the best techniques for making Go/Kill and project prioritization decisions – Productivity Index, Profiling, Expected Commercial Value, and others
• See the best visual methods for ensuring you have the right balance and mix of development projects in your pipeline – by project type, risk level, across markets and technologies
• Maximize the productivity of your R&D spending through an effective portfolio management system

Why you and your colleagues should attend:

• Achieve high IMPACT by prioritizing projects with the greatest strategic alignment.
• Achieve greater return on your product innovation investment with improved project selection – PROFITABLE projects that are also strategically important to the company.
• Optimize scarce resources – FOCUS ideation and innovation efforts on problems that are important to solve.

CONTENT:

A Product Innovation Strategy for Your Business & Strategic Portfolio Management

Picking the right development projects and platforms to invest in is at the heart of successful product innovation.But effective project selection or portfolio management hinges on having a clearly defined and articulated product innovation and technology strategy for your business. It begins with goals for product innovation and how innovation ties into your business goals. Next are the arenas of strategic focus – in which markets, technologies or products should you focus your R&D efforts? Put more briefly, what’s “in bounds” versus “out of bounds”, where do you invest and where are your “search fields” for great ideas? Deployment is a major component of strategy development: Strategy becomes real when you start spending money. Spending splits and the right balance of spending across project types (new products versus improvements and extensions) and across market segments and product lines are the topics here. Selecting major initiatives and developing the strategic product road-map is also a topic, so in the latter part of Day 1, we shift into our first look at best practices in project selection with a focus on methods to optimize the portfolio.

Deciding Your Development Portfolio

Portfolio Management is about resource allocation in your business. That is, which new product and development projects from the many opportunities the business faces should it fund? And which ones should receive top priority and be accelerated to market? It is also about business strategy, for today’s new product projects decide tomorrow’s product-market profile of the firm. Finally, it is about balance; about the optimal investment mix between risk versus return, maintenance versus growth, and short term versus long term product projects.

The five goals we tackle in effective portfolio management are:

1. To maximize the value of your development portfolio – to pick the right development projects
2. To ensure strategic alignment
3. To seek the right balance of projects
4. To ensure portfolio sufficiency versus your overall product innovation goals
5. To balance the number of projects with resources available – not overloading the pipeline.

Best practice methods to decide which projects to invest in and how to allocate scarce resources are highlighted in order to achieve these five goals.

INSTRUCTOR:

Dr. Robert G. Cooper is the Founder and President of the Product Development Institute and an ISBM Distinguished Research Fellow.  Dr. Cooper is also the creator of the world-famous Stage-Gate® process, and was named the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar” by the prestigious Journal of Product Innovation Management. He has combined practical consulting with ground-breaking research for many years. Besides his best-selling books “Winning at New Products” and “Portfolio Management for New Products”, he has published more than 120 articles on new products, R&D and innovation management.

Dr. Cooper is Professor Emeritus at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University in Canada and ISBM Distinguished Research Fellow at Pennsylvania State University in the USA. He is also the founder and President of Product Development Institute offering innovation know-how and support around the world. Many companies in North America, Europe and Asia have introduced his methods, including 3M, ABB, Alfa Laval, Arkema, BASF, Bosche-Siemens, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Chemicals, HP, ITT Industries, Kennametal, Siemens, Volvo Construction Equipment, and others.