Five Ways Product Innovation was Accelerated During the Pandemic: A Two-minute Summary

Two-minute Summary

Michelle Jones, Senior Partner of Client Innovation condenses the following award-winning article into five key learning points. Accelerating Innovation – Lessons Learned by Dr. Robert G. Cooper. 25 pages. Published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management. National Library of Medicine, Wiley Public Health Emergency Collection. Named Industry’s Top Cited Article of 2022.

Upon closer examination of numerous new products developed and launched in record time during the Covid-19 Pandemic between 2020-2022, we uncovered five ways leading corporate innovators are pushing the boundaries of performance, specifically, speed. When needed, firms can respond quickly to new opportunities. They can also pivot smartly at decision points. But this performance does not happen by accident, and many get it wrong. Doing what you have been doing, faster, does not work. The NPD process must be purpose-built for speed. 

Companies of different sizes, industries and geographic regions were studied. The full article features five companies and projects commercialized during the pandemic:

1. BioNTech’s Project Lightspeed to accelerate a Covid-19 vaccine.
2. Corning’s antimicrobial, virus killing Guardiant®.
3. Heron Gruppe’s precise Covid-19 detection system
4. SnapCab’s portable privacy pods for medical testing.
5. Morelli North America’s virus-killing cabin air filter for shared-use transit and ambulance transportation.

Five Lessons to Adopt Now

1. Focus on fewer, better projects. During the pandemic, successful companies became more selective in their commitments. They said NO and placed projects on HOLD more often than saying GO. Betting on fewer projects enables organizational focus: cross-functional project knowledge, contribution and alignment at both decision and team levels. The result is higher quality, speed to market, and a more significant impact.
   Key to success: Engage and support your decision-makers to enable their tough, timely Go/Kill/Hold decisions, especially before development begins. The Stage-Gate Model, specifically its Gate Governance Framework, is the industry standard for this.
2. Ruthlessly resource the winners. The successful companies relied heavily on proven project prioritization methods designed to predict winners with up to 83% accuracy. Only the highest-ranking projects received resources and got what they needed to win in the marketplace. Emphasis is placed on understanding opportunities and potential attack plans adequately, especially in the early stages before technical development, to enable substantial resourcing decisions.
   Key to success: Get your Gate Deliverables right. Teams can and should supply relevant business case information to enable effective prioritization and resourcing decisions at critical decision points. The Stage-Gate Likelihood of Commercial Success Scoring Model and Productivity Index are popular, proven methods to surface the best opportunities. Visibility to high-priority project needs makes effective resourcing doable.
3. Be disciplined within a flexible process. During the pandemic, successful companies gave their new product idea-to-launch process a quick tune-up before proceeding with new opportunities. They realized their once ‘lean, robust & enabling’ processes had become slow, procedural & bureaucratic after years of neglect. Process updates served two purposes: to signal the new reality and spirit necessary for success and to provide guardrails for teams to self-manage within. The process provided the roadmap and facilitated flexibility & judgement to each project’s unique context.
   Key to success: Get the Process right. Teams can move quickly when the process provides much-needed guidance, especially when pursuing new-to-company projects. Don’t mistake administrative checklists and forms to be genuine, enabling direction. Trade in the bureaucracy for enabling guides/tools that help teams conceptualize, analyze, visualize, and synthesize complex and complicated new product proposals and plans.
4. Use time-saving Technology. Successful companies explored and used emerging technologies to accelerate many aspects of product development. Significant gains were made in the early stages, long before a physical product was even developed. This was key. Teams accelerated critical customer/market insight and feedback using real-time simulators, virtual and augmented technologies, variations of 3D printing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI machine learning systems and computational analyses enabled the stepwise serial process of R&D to be hyper‐iterative and integrated, so that real‐world information coming back from testing influenced the research being conducted.
   Key to success: Encourage the exploration of high potential, relevant enabling technologies to accelerate time to profit, but learn how to de-risk before introducing them to projects entering development. The Technology Development Stage-Gate process designed by SGI’s Dr. Robert Cooper in collaboration with Exxon Mobil is an excellent process model for de-risking new technologies.
5. Project Team Agility. For several years now, organizations have been debating whether Stage-Gate or Agile should be the method of choice for new product development. The pandemic helped to resolve this as leaders became more engaged in prioritizing growth opportunities while teams rigorously iterated and experimented between decision gates. The two served to illustrate the duality of innovation – slow down to make wise decisions and speed up to execute on point. Stage-Gate guides the governance of new products (engaging business leaders to prioritize projects and resource allocation, and scale cross-functional organizational readiness) while Agile guides the rapid technical development of products (engaging the development team in agile techniques within each stage). During the pandemic, successful companies solidified this collaborative union, enabling them to thrive as one integrated, common, end-to-end process.
   Key to success: Integrate useful techniques from Agile. Design your process to engage and support all Functions contributing to new products. For technical development teams pursuing new-to-company projects, give them the breathing room to self-manage deliverables, and sprint through iterations.

Accelerated innovation is a worthy goal that can deliver many benefits. However, be careful in your pursuit as speed is not a panacea. There is a dark side. The speed demon is also known to spell teams into taking shortcuts that negatively impact in-market performance, curse bold innovations that require longer time horizons and trick teams into executing project work by dividing into functional silos, performing relays at the expense of alignment. Approach speed like these top-performing companies have, balancing a multi-faceted solution.

Contact Michelle Jones to discuss how to incorporate these lessons into your organization. The full original article is available for download below.