Connected Innovation solutions from Microsoft helps companies transform their good ideas from initial inspirations to marketplace success stories. We streamline the process of making ideas real by helping people capture, protect, share, and collaborate on their new ideas and innovation-based projects, whether with internal workgroups or external partners. Keeping a particular focus on collaboration as the foundation for successful commercial innovation, these solutions reflect the Microsoft commitment to provide companies transparent innovation processes for greater payback on their new ideas.
Business Challenges
Current challenges such as evolving technologies, globalized markets, and corporate growth mandates may also signal new opportunities. Visionary companies know how to take advantage of these changing conditions with innovations that respond to new demands. They promote and propel their own people's inspirations and turn them into realities… real products or services that meet the needs of the marketplace and return profit. The formal practice of Business Innovation itself continues to gain recognition and corporate commitment - the title “Chief Innovation Officer” now appears in some of the world’s best-known companies.
Managing the innovation life cycle
To succeed today, consumer goods companies must be more effective at Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) which covers all phases from initial ideation on through to eventual retirement of the product. PLM comes with many challenges, though, such as anticipating competitive threats in evolving production processes or market, then quickly determining and implementing the best response. Following recent corporate upheavals, many organizations now face a set of disparate systems, lacking unified streamlined processes. This can cause decision-making delays. And without early alerts to potential changes, they often operate reactively, finding it difficult to control costs and improve product quality and service.
Solutions
Consumer Goods companies will gain many benefits from Microsoft solutions for PLM and innovation process management. For example, the technologies supporting these processes make the processes themselves more transparent and automatic, requiring less time and attention from innovators. This eliminates distraction from the team’s primary focus on bringing new ideas to market. Also, these tools and systems can support a Knowledge Management system as an innovation-support infrastructure where idea-related knowledge can be stored, indexed, and accessed as needed.
- Ideation and Knowledge Capture
We offer solutions that help streamline the innovation process with tools to express and capture ideas, research additional information, and invite opinions from experts in manufacturing, design, and marketing from within and outside the enterprise. A new idea can be readily captured, socialized, analyzed, and protected. To evaluate viability of an idea, originators can locate existing IP, expertise, and resources within the enterprise, or perhaps post an idea on an internal wiki or blog where others may comment, contribute, and add momentum.
- Collaboration and Knowledge Management
No longer restrained by locations, innovators can easily collaborate across the hall or around the globe, with colleagues, customers, suppliers, or partners. Our advanced collaboration and workflow technologies help people orchestrate resources across functional groups and geographies to reduce the time required to bring a concept to reality.
- Project and Portfolio Management
With sophisticated portfolio management techniques, decision makers can view the full innovation pipeline and balance ideas against resources and risks. When idea initially shows high probability of success, the team can evaluate it against other candidates per business strategy, market conditions, globalization, client loyalty, resources, and other factors. Tools are also available to create the business case presentation for best concepts.
- Product Development and Investment Management
Partner solutions based on Microsoft technology enable engineers to coordinate with suppliers and manufacturers to assure right-the-first-time product development and manufacturing. Following the business decision to proceed with a project, PLM tools can reduce new-product development cycles, improve role-based productivity, and reduce product cost. Automating the process to leverage KM capabilities also improves product quality, business decisions, and efficiency of the development process. These solutions help the company create competitive, differentiated, high-value products by managing the innovation and product lifecycle process.