FEI - Solutions

Front-End of Innovation - Innovation management
Your new product pipeline is only as good as the ideas coming into it. In fact, the Front End of Innovation (FEI) process is consistently rated as being the most important driver for new product revenues. Best-in-class companies focus on FEI as a predictable, repeatable process and continue to invest in enhancing and extending the process to maintain their competitive leadership.
So where do great ideas and relevant insights come from? There are several approaches to fill your FEI pipeline:
Co-creation and Insight methods such as private on-line customer communities, outcome driven innovation opportunity management, lead user analysis, customer visits, focus groups and client co-design. Open innovation such as obtaining ideas and technology proposals from partners, vendors, customers, external scientific or inventor communities, and from external idea contests. An Idea Management approach involving all or part of your internal R&D and marketing teams to leverage your internal organizational talents and your available sources of insights

IFT offers solutions to achieve process excellence with each of these approaches, which can be implemented individually or combined, according to your needs and innovation business models:
Co-creation with customer on-line communities One of the most effective ways of generating new ideas is by implementing private online communities of actual and potential customers for your products and services. IFT offers an extremely powerful solution in this area by creating a private on-line community for your organization and animating it through series of online exercises and focused forum discussions. This allows your organization to uncover innovation white spaces and generate ideas leading to more radical innovation. Read more…

Outcome driven innovation / Opportunity management To define what customers really want so as to innovate more systematically, companies need to think more efficiently about customer requirements. Successful organizations have modified their approach to understanding customer requirements, introducing new segmentations based on "jobs to be done". IFT's solution uniquely supports this best practice, helping the organization to…. Read more…

Open Innovation. Best-in-class companies are twice as likely as their industry average to have open innovation processes in place. IFT's Open Innovation solutions enable you to reach out to experts, partners, suppliers and inventors to broadcast marketing or R&D search themes or challenges, capture idea and technology submissions and collaborate on developing powerful new concepts to feed your innovation process. All this in a managed and controlled way. Our solutions relies on our search and scouting services, our idea and insight management solution and its fully integrated web portal to source ideas, insights and technology proposals. The result is immediate access to a vast new network of external experts along with the automated tools to quickly and effectively sort, manage and evaluate the volume of ideas and technology proposals generated. Read more…

Idea and Insight Management Idea suggestion process and software have been used for several decades with mixed results. At Innovation Framework Technologies, we have studied multiple implementations and analyzed company feed-back to define a set of key best practices in this area. Those best practices are now fully embedded in our approach and software solution. Our unique, patented correlation engine also supercharges your idea management process by providing automatic prompting to related ideas, sources of insights, and people... Read more…