What it is, when it makes sense
Almost all chemical companies have the ambition to further grow. After the strong increase of company prices organic growth moves back in the focus of many management teams. After decades of strong growth especially in Asia the growth opportunities within the existing product portfolio is limited for many companies. Therefore innovation becomes a top priority for many companies.
In contrast to the past, innovation goes far beyond the classical R&D and also includes new business models or service innovation.
In addition, innovative digital approaches open up a large playfield for innovation in the chemical industry.
Furthermore many business managers challenge if time to market for larger innovations in the chemical industry need to take 6-10 years or if the chemical industry can benefit from new approaches like agile project management.
Overall, the option space to invest in internal innovation growth topics has been significantly boosted – as well as the underlying complexity for taking the right decisions.
Our “Innovation growth programs” support chemical companies in overseeing the entire option space and taking the best decisions in the aspired risk-benefit ratio.
What you get
There is no typical or standard “Innovation growth program” since they strongly differ in scope, size, growth ambitions and transparency at project start. We have supported Business Units having already identified a specific gap in their development pipeline as well as large corporations with the overall ambition to grow faster.
Overall there are four different phases with specific deliverables:
- Growth pipeline diagnostics: the status quo of the existing growth projects needs to be transparent in the beginning of a growth initiative.
- Map of opportunities / long list: Depending on the scope this item differs significantly from project to project. In projects with narrow scope there might be already a large number of high level ideas available that just need to be specified and prioritized. In other cases a comprehensive scoping for the option space might be required as well as the generation of ideas in the area where our client has limited internal competency (e.g. handling of big data)
- Target innovation growth portfolio: in close cooperation with the client the map of opportunities is developed to a rough innovation growth roadmap and the target portfolio. An important success factor is the choice of an appropriate pace and project management approach. Especially for innovation with strong impact to customers an agile approach with early prototypes can be highly beneficial. The result of this phase is the decision proposal including implementation plan and high level business cases for the approval in the management team / board.
- Implementation of growth portfolio: Our impact in the last phase strongly depends on the scope. For innovations ‘beyond’ the chemical lab we have a high number of experts in our partnering network and can support complementing project teams with external resources.
How we work
The duration of our projects varies from 3 month for smaller target portfolio developments up to several years.
In smaller engagements we typically work with one highly senior project manager with strong expertise in the chemical industry. The project manager works ‘on-site’ and relies on our expert network with 1000+ experts who can be incorporated to the project via expert interviews, workshops or other collaboration formats. In larger projects we typically staff additional consultants and/or subject matter experts.