Valuing technical projects is key to accurate portfolio management, stage gate decisions and resource allocation issues. The methods vary according to whether a project falls into Category 1 Incremental, Category 2 Next-Generation, or Category 3 Radical and Breakthrough Innovation. For Horizon 1 Incremental projects discounted cash flow (DCF) is a quick and easy [...]
Innovation Board Some organizations empower the Chief Technology Officer with managing all aspects of the innovation process. Alternatively some companies create a central fund that invests in innovation. The budget for an Innovation Board is allocated and managed separately from the main businesses. This allows investment in innovation be managed with different expectations [...]
Gaining the benefits from global technology networks is critical today for all organizations but especially those of large multinational corporations. The process started in earnest in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. At that time efforts were rudimentary in international R&D organizations were put in place mostly to customize a corporations major product [...]
Clay Christiansen in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, showed clearly why great companies can fail. He points out that is companies go through their normal technology maturity S-curve there reaches a point in which a new disruptive technological change provides greater value to the end-user or customer. He further points out that the [...]
To do well at innovation, companies need to design their internal processes to engage in three activities: (1) facilitating serendipity to create sparks of creative ideation among the employees, (2) capturing and testing the outputs of this creative ideation, and (3) transforming new ideas into successful products and services. It was John Seely [...]
Post project reviews, sometimes called postmortems, are opportunities to improve performance and subsequent R&D projects. Unfortunately most companies have not established a structured approach to learning from projects after their completion. Those companies that neglect post project reviews as a tool for systematic inter-project learning, throwing away invaluable potential insights for competence building. [...]
In the early 2000’s a program which had improved manufacturing operations performance and reduce their costs was called Six Sigma. These efforts were focused on reducing the variability in manufactured products and to some extent services. By improving the quality of such products and services the company experienced superior financial performance. There were [...]
Knowledge Building Project - Overall Process Flow Knowledge Building Project - Overall Phase (Gate) Review Questions The stage and gate methodologies described above work well for next generation products and services developments. As can be seen from the detailed gate questions being asked above, there are times when a next generation project is [...]
Overview of a Generic Stage Gate Process During the 1990’s and through the 2000’s, "Winning at New Products" by Robert Cooper has served as the bible for product developers everywhere. In his book, Robert Cooper demonstrated with compelling evidence why consistent product development is so vital to corporate growth and how to maximize [...]
The One-Page Project Manager Spreadsheet There are many books on the use of PERT and Gantt charts to manage incremental type projects. The trick to success for these projects is to push them through to completion in short periods of time and with little overhead. One of the most elegant methods of managing [...]
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