Innovare's Front End of Innovation

Innovare provides the research capabilities and facilitates cross-functional team through our three-phase front end of innovation process.  We define innovation strategy, new product concepts, technology direction and portfolios of innovation opportunities ready for full development. 

Populate your development pipeline with high value innovations

The front end of innovation is where ideas are developed and shaped into new product and service concepts that populate the new product development funnel. 

Today, most companies have established a formalized product development process such as a phased-review or stage-gate. these are great process management tools.   Unfortunately most have the wrong starting point, they start with ideas. 

At Innovare we believe the product development process begins well before the evolution of ideas. The process responds to strategy and begins with knowledge creation. 

In fact the most successful innovators begin product development with a systematic team process that creates a body of knowledge that informs idea generation.  It moves through concept development and then evaluates the product development opportunities to include in the pipeline.

The three key team activities that make up an effective front end of innovation include knowledge creation, idea generation, and concept evaluation. 

Innovare's Three-Phase Front End of Innovation Process

We facilitate innovation teams through our three phased front end process and create winning innovations the entire organization can get behind!

Phase 1. Discovery  

Through custom research and discovery workshops, we systematically explore and define market drivers, customer needs, and evolving technologies and capabilities to define discovery insights that informs idea generation and concept development.

  Phase 2. Concept Development

The discovery insights are used as catalysts for creating new concepts during an informed idea-generation process. Our Innovare Greenhouse workshops are specifically designed to help cross functional teams think differently, keep in a developmental mindset and create innovation concepts.  We deliver a range of ideas and concepts for new products, technologies, and innovation strategies.

 Phase 3. Validation

 During team and customer workshops, we focus on refining the concepts, building a strategic synthesis and recommendation for a portfolio of priority innovations.  We define the products, technologies, and organizational capabilities required to develop and implement the innovations. We align features with customer requirements, understand customer adoption, estimate the market value, the technology challenge opportunity, and build a case to support each proposition.

A well executed front end approach build the organizational knowledge and evidence that supports each recommendation.  It builds management confidence, encourages buy-in, and gains alignment across the organization enhancing the firm's ability to innovate.

Where do ideas come from?

They generally don't come from a single function.  The strongest ideas evolve out of a creative cross-functional team process and is based on team members having a deep understanding in three key knowledge domains: 

• What's driving the market and competitive environment

• Customer and stakeholder needs throughout the value chain <

• Evolving capabilities and technologies