Executing on innovation efforts in product development can fluster any organization large or small as the activity is both essential and fairly misunderstood by most stakeholders. In large organizations there are typically more projects to work on than resources to pursue them and consequently many companies employ a combination of open innovation, where they bring in external developments, and in-house development to try to close the gap between what they want to do and what they can do. Often the use of both external developments and in-house serves to highlight the “deficiencies” in the in-house development process as nothing seems to get done internally as fast as the organization would like. Some organizations get so frustrated with their internal development efforts that these in-house efforts actively devolve to simple product support activities while the organization looks to open innovation for anything “new”. They effectively give up on internal execution.
In most cases there are clear benefits to a balanced pursuit of both in-house and open innovation. At IOI Partners, we help organizations meet their objectives through more targeted and efficient product innovation. We help companies understand the value to themselves and their customers through tools and processes that will also ensure alignment amongst the various stakeholders as they focus on the “true north” provided by the customer and organization’s value propositions. This approach allows our customers to “get out of their own way” efficiently leveraging the creative efforts throughout the organization which are required to bring a product to market. We tightly link product development actions with a company’s business objectives, and we prune efforts that are not in alignment. Our goal is to help your organization target the right problems to solve and learn fast to enable you to spend your resources where they will generate the most successful outcomes. Our practical approach to innovation means that even though less may go into a client company’s development effort, much more comes out.
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