Your Process. Our Lens.

You have a documented innovation process that incorporates many popular practices and newer emerging practices. Generally speaking, users follow the process, but few actually use it. Several key stakeholders criticize the process, especially the senior leaders, because it is not producing desired results. There are many suggestions, but no one can pinpoint the problem or explain how to fix it.

You are:

leading or contributing to a process improvement initiative, or
are mid-way through improving your innovation process, or
are implementing your newly improved process.

Should you obtain an expert opinion on process design?

According to our clients, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

That is, our clients say they would not proceed with another innovation improvement initiative without our advice or support (1). They have experienced the value first-hand and understand why leveraging our expertise and experience helped to guarantee their success, accelerated time to impact, removed objections with on-the-spot answers to tough questions, empowered the full range of stakeholders, engaged the senior leaders, and afforded the sponsors peace of mind.

By contrast, a recent market poll confirmed that many leaders regret their decision to skip the expert opinion when implementing their innovation process.

Why skip an expert opinion? The most popular reasons cited:

under pressure to deliver fast results,
desire to keep firm control of the scope & focus of improvements,
sensed that it was their job to know the answers,
had access to ‘free’ advice from software firms/memberships,
poor experience with general consulting firms in the past,
no appetite to introduce significant change.

Are you wrestling with any of these concerns? Read on.

Avoid pitfalls and disappointment.

In the same poll, 75% of the innovation process initiatives proved to be more complex than planned, were late, over budget, or did not produce a material difference in performance: new product profitability, speed to market or stakeholder satisfaction. While their competitors were gaining ground in the market, they were losing ground inside their own organizations. What was the opportunity cost to these organizations? How does this type of setback impact future initiatives?

Putting a high-impact innovation process into your organization should be a highly rewarding experience that delivers lasting results. Yet, it is such a disappointing experience for so many. Stage-Gate International has been perfecting the innovation process for 25+ years. The depth and breadth of our research and fieldwork in this area is significant and widely available. No organization should have to endure this kind of failure or disappointment. It is avoidable. While the average business leader might lead this type of initiative 1-3 times in their career, a senior principal or partner at Stage-Gate International will oversee 15-25 every year. Pairing even one of our experts with your team is one of the best ways to guarantee your success and support your team.

As you approach your innovation process/framework initiative, set yourself up (and your team and organization) for success by leveraging our unparalleled expertise, experience, benchmarks, best practice playbooks, and purpose-built programs, products, and services. Our combined resources enable us to draw upon thousands of real company situations – what works when, and what doesn’t. Handle all the above-listed concerns with conviction and ease.

Setting up for success.

Every organization is unique. Every innovation process initiative will have some unique aspects to it. Therefore, the way in which we impart our expert opinions will vary from client to client. What is important is that you have the flexibility to choose the approach that best fits your style and your organization’s norms, business needs and budget. Here is just a sampling of the many ways our clients have obtained our expert second opinion:

1-hour private coaching sessions
subject matter expert at a process design review meeting
innovation best practices training camp
post-launch review retrospective
multi-day kaizen
holistic 360-degree assessment
portfolio and pipeline analysis
design workshops
software review
and more.

Leveraging our uniquely expert lens allows you to move fast, stay focused, get it right, and reflect on your community of stakeholder inputs in a more meaningful way.

impartiality and tact
holistic and complete
precision improvement or a comprehensive overhaul.

Your Process. Our uniquely expert lens.

validate your current process strengths with science-based facts to accelerate alignment and buy-in.
reveal opportunities for improvement with benchmarks and company use case examples to accelerate understanding, visualization, and adoption.
uncover hidden gems, pockets of excellence and emerging themes of merit fostered by your key stakeholders.
expose areas of process misalignment across disciplines, roles, levels, and regions.
customize a continuous improvement roadmap of prioritized improvements, including timelines, monitoring metrics, and estimate efforts for planning and budgeting success.
professional and casual presentations to build awareness, understanding and buy-in.
we listen, find meaningful insights, and collaborate with you to prioritize recommendations.

A high-quality innovation process is a gift that keeps giving if it can positively influence every innovation project in your portfolio to spend less, launch sooner, generate bigger revenue and more profit, delight more customers and deliver a positive return on your innovation investment. Additionally, a high-quality process can help to shape your organization’s innovation culture by enlisting value creators, empowering quality contributions, enabling cross-functional collaboration, removing friction, managing expectations, improving decisions, and bringing visibility and transparency to what many perceive is a very chaotic business undertaking.

Let’s do this. Connect with us to discuss your innovation journey.

¹ Stage-Gate International’s 92% Net Promoter Score is calculated by a 3^rd party marketing firm (Hinge).