Experience Counts

Capgemini has a proven track record of helping manufacturing industry leaders overcome obstacles to innovation. In addition to extensive client work, we have conducted research focused on Collaborating for Innovation with 139 senior executives and managers at 63 companies across 24 countries.

The usual belief is that a relentless focus on continually improving the internal innovation capabilities has a direct correlation with the ability to attain long-term sustainable competitive advantage. Our research and our work with clients supports this viewpoint to a large extent. However, we have also identified improvement opportunities that can help companies achieve sustainable competitive advantage through improved management and execution of innovation initiatives.

Breaking Down R&D Barriers

To take advantage of improvement opportunities, it is important first to identify the R&D-related barriers to improved innovation:

• Lack of alignment between marketing and R&D
• Collaboration in a matrix environment
• Costs of development
• Lack of an innovation culture
• Fragmented research efforts for feedback and collaboration
• Ineffective Product Lifecycle Management
• Insufficient resources and difficulty getting manufacturing and purchasing to play stronger roles
• Pressure to shorten time to product release

Targeting Areas for Improvement

Opportunities to improve management and execution of innovation initiatives include:

• Continually monitoring performance of the innovation process by developing and implementing appropriate metrics for performance measurement
• Increasing stakeholder involvement in the innovation process through clear definition of roles and responsibilities
• Viewing suppliers as strategic partners, not just low-cost providers
• Developing advanced methods for customer segmentation
• Evolving an R&D organizational structure that improves cross-functional collaboration