Innovation

New Market Driven, Project Driven Innovation Organization

A mid-sized chemical company’s strategy was to offer high-value products at a premium. Being successful in several protected niches, the failure to bring unique, innovative products to the market had long been hidden, especially because the years before the financial crisis had delivered very good profits.

The new SVP of R&D realized that the future success of several of the BU’s depended on new products that for years had not been launched, especially since the company was aggressively adding capacity while at the same time competitors were entering the niches.

Analysis revealed that the R&D and business unit development resources were spending less than 50% of their time on innovation projects, and that many projects lacked a clear business drive, had fuzzy targets and no project plan.

In a project with R&D and the BU’s, the company designed and implemented a new innovation organization. Elements of the new organization were a central innovation portfolio management function led by the business, project teams as the main organizational unit in R&D, and newly appointed, professional innovation project managers. Simultaneously, the Performance Management processes were adopted to appraise project contribution, and a Technical Career Ladder was introduced to offer professionals a growth path in an organization with fewer hierarchical layers.

Life Sciences Venturing Initiative for a Chemical Company 

A multi-billion dollar chemical company was keen to grow its life-science activities. The company was interested in making major acquisitions, and also in building a portfolio of small but promising companies with leading-edge life-science technology.

Implementum helped the company develop a venturing strategy, which included advising the department responsible for screening the market, selecting potential investment targets and conducting a gate review process to determine and prioritize ongoing funding.

Implementum conducted an extensive, active search effort to identify potential investment opportunities to jump-start the venturing funnel.

The initiative enhanced entrepreneurial thinking within the conglomerate, by aligning R&D and business functions with targets and by opening access to new technologies, products and markets that would otherwise have been missed.