" She is someone who demands the highest levels of performance and professionalism from those in her team and this translates into high performance thresholds that clients love. "

What is it?  Innovation goes beyond R&D.  Innovation is the creation of economic and non-economic value through new products/services, operations (e.g., processes), and business models.  Innovation can be harnessed and lead to true breakthroughs.  Breakthroughs happen with “net-new” insight and a “net-new” value proposition. 

Typically, the Research and Development (R&D) is tasked with innovation.  R&D takes different forms in different companies.  In the retail industry, for example, most of R&D happens in the marketing function.  In high-tech, there is a functional unit called R&D.  The “R” and the “D” are unique capabilities.  When paired properly and aligned best with the rest of the organization and ecosystem, they drive enormous value for the company.   Institutionalizing innovation in the company, making it every employee’s job, is the best means of sustainable growth, where the R&D function is the steward of innovation.  The critical capabilities within R&D include: collaborating with key players in the ecosystem; pipeline management (ideation through incubation); innovation management (managing the “business” of innovation, including activities such as innovation strategy, portfolio management, resource allocation, organizational design, incentive management, etc.); innovation administration (including compliance, patent services, knowledge harvesting, etc.) and asset lifecycle management

 

Why do it? Enhanced innovation-oriented R&D capabilities make up to a 73% impact on profitability.  Growth breakthroughs make 10-100X the profitability impact vs. incremental innovation.  It takes 11 ideas to generate 1 commercial success. 41% of ideas never become a successful product. 23% of product launches fail. 46% of product development resources are spent on products that fail or never make it to market. 5-21% of revenue spent on R&D, however, 42% of companies had either no owner of research and product development or the process held titles below vice president and had no budget authority over R&D.  Only 52% of companies have metrics applied to R&D.   21% of companies have no standard development process; 53% have them but don’t follow them. Finally, many times companies continue to create technical enhancements, but face the “good enough” phenomenon—where the initial differentiating feature is not valued by customers. The root cause of these issues is effectiveness and efficiency challenges in how the company drives innovation and/or "the R&D business model".  Effectiveness (aka, making the right thing) issues are typically around Idea Management (ideation through incubations); Market Planning and lack an integrated strategic planning process so that demand data is not integrated into R&D planning.   Efficiency challenges are typically focused on the product/service development process, poor collaboration, limited usage of technology standards/tools, lack of appropriate resource management, poor product development management tools and inadequate leadership and performance management. 

 

What does RHT Consulting offer?  For innovation to work, traditional thinking needs to be challenged.  For example, businesses/brand cannot be thought of as those to be “maintained and protected”. To get a “breakthrough”, rigor must be applied in large quantities!  All RHT Consulting’s offerings challenge traditional thinking and apply ample rigor. 

 

  • Insight Development:  The critical lynchpin to create growth breakthroughs is comprehensive insight development. Once insights are developed they can be used to develop growth breakthrough innovation as well as be used for any kind of strategy, transformation and restructuring.  Insight is NOT A=B; it is not qualitative; it is not static; it is not an “answer”.  Insight is a link that cannot be made directly.  Insight is qualitative, quantitative and reflective.  Insight is dynamic.  Insight is a systematic process that allows one to identify and critically review data that creates breakthroughs; informs strategic decisions; provides benchmarks for restructuring and creates the platform for innovation and transformation. Insights exploited in this offering include: market insight; customer insight; ecosystem insight; financial insight; technology insight; social/policy insight; operational insight; business model insight and product/service/solution insight
  • Innovation Diagnostic and Strategy: RHT Consulting helps clients create an Innovation strategy (by identifying the right products/services/ solutions and optimizing the product portfolio) to align with and push the business strategy.  The innovation strategy also identifies how to make innovation sustainable, the Innovation engine, operational/maturity improvements for managing the “business” of Innovation, thereby increasing effectiveness (what you’re focusing on) and efficiency (doing it well).  From an effectiveness standpoint, RHT Consulting helps clients identify what products, services, and capabilities are required to increase revenue growth, margin growth, reduce costs and increase strategic differentiation.  From an efficiency standpoint, RHT Consulting helps improve the Innovation operating model (people, process, and technology) through our Innovation diagnostic based on leading practices; internal benchmarks and CMMI capabilities assessment.  Our deliverables include: an Innovation strategy; the innovation roadmap and associated business case
  • Growth Breakthrough: RHT Consulting has proprietary, patent pending rigorous methodology with associated tools to identify opportunities that, based on $1 million in investment result in profitability and $1 billion in revenue over three years.  RHT Consulting’s methods and tools can be applied in a facilitated manner, or, alternatively, RHT Consulting can execute the process for you.  The result, every time, has been at least $1 billion in top line revenue within three years given a strong operational platforms that can be leveraged 
  • Ideation through Incubation: Many ideation processes fail.  Why? They don’t go through the complete lifecycle.  A  great new idea is not enough. Companies need to know how to nurture and “incubate” the idea until it’s ready to “graduate” into normal business operations.  RHT Consulting focuses on institutionalizing an Ideation through Incubation process in companies (or running the process for them) that churns out breakthroughs in the marketplace.  Key elements of the offering include:
    • Rigorous analysis to differentiate good ideas from bad ones
    • Incorporating non-traditional idea generation and management techniques into the idea pipeline process
    • Improving upstream idea generation/incubation by, again, infusing every part of the process with insight
  • Portfolio Management: The Product Portfolio Management offering provides strategies, processes, metrics and tools for managing products/services portfolios with a balanced view of investment, strategic differentiation, risk and profitability; in summary, RHT Consulting: 
    • Focuses on selecting initiatives, assets and products/services that are aligned with strategies/market demand 
    • Identifies the best use of available resources by applying them to the highest priority initiatives, assets and products/services
    • Regularly assesses how projects and programs are contributing to portfolio health
  • Collaborative Innovation, aka "Open Innovation": RHT Consulting’s Collaborative Innovation offering increases the ability of organizations to innovate, communicate and leverage intellectual capital in real time across the ecosystem.  This offering starts with establishing the key objectives/strategies for collaboration, determining which parties in the ecosystem can meet innovation strategies and then identifying the policies and structures around how collaboration should take place.  This offering also evaluates current collaboration practices and benchmarks them against leading practices in order to identify collaboration gaps, new processes, and technologies that will support the future state.  Furthermore, the collaboration offering establishes a roadmap of initiatives and a business case that underlies collaboration strategy.  The results of Collaborative Innovation for clients:
    • Speed of innovation increases by 10-50X the normal speed, increasing the ability of organizations to innovate, communicate and leverage intellectual capital in real time  
    • New differentiation
    • Enhanced collaboration practices, strategies, processes and policies with the ability to address gaps based on leading practices

 

How is RHT Consulting different? RHT Consulting has deep experience, tools and methodologies in every aspect of the core of breakthrough innovation, but also in making it sustainable!  RHT Consulting has proprietary innovation frameworks that rigorously examine insights at every step of an engagement to ensure the innovations and/or the innovation strategy will create “breakthrough” results.  In addition, to make innovation creation sustainable, the business model of innovation must be solid.  RHT Consulitng has developed an Innovation Business Model and framework with an associated diagnostic to assess clients' innovation capabilities.