Increased Expectations in a Challenging Environment
Innovation and the endeavor to bring new products to market is a critical part of the pharmaceutical industry and it is back in the spotlight for many segments of the chemicals industry. Nurturing innovation is no easy matter. Innovation requires a culture that nourishes creative ideas, a process that enables raw ideas to grow to full-fledged products or processes, strong collaboration that is increasingly global, and the vigorous protection of intellectual property.
New development can be costly and to remain competitive, process manufacturing companies must align innovation strategy with the business and have complete visibility on costs and milestones across individual projects and full portfolios. Maintaining such control and visibility is more challenging when innovation stretches across the organization and beyond to include collaboration with business partners and customers.
Microsoft studies show that most companies, including those in the process industries, lag in developing processes that support innovation. Efforts to develop well-defined processes are further complicated by some major trends in the process industries:
- More R&D work done by globally dispersed teams.
- An increase in R&D collaboration outside the company.
- Concerns about protecting intellectual property in certain markets.
Successfully managing innovation requires:
- Implementing collaborative and social networks for capturing requirements and ideas, from colleagues, customers and partners, into products.
- Establishing consistent, repeatable processes for translating concepts into products.
- Making role-based data available to all stakeholders during each stage of the product development process.
- Standardizing the data captured about each project, such as strategic alignment, financials, and risk levels.
- Managing intellectual property including patent assets and the protection of specialized, proprietary knowledge.
- Managing the project portfolio, tracking execution and alignment with corporate mission and competitive goals, and making time-to-market decisions via flexible scheduling.
- Maintaining effective communications across multiple sites and organizations.
People Are Key
Process manufacturers need secure, intuitive technologies to manage the process of innovation from ideation to project management. These solutions should integrate with other applications, and seamlessly aggregate data from disparate sources into common, accessible formats. They should be familiar and easy-to-use so that global team members can manage and share information effectively at any time, wherever they are.
Microsoft and Its Partners Can Help
To bridge the gap between the intent to innovate and innovation itself, companies need to build a path to innovation, an infrastructure that includes a transparent process with an appropriate level of process control.
Microsoft and its partners provide an Innovation Management solution that offers a technology backbone to help the process industries facilitate and manage the innovation process. The approach focuses on four aspects of the process:
- Ideation and knowledge capture: capturing, socializing, analyzing, and protecting all ideas.
- Collaboration and knowledge management: orchestrating ideas across functional groups and geographies to reduce the time to bring a concept to reality.
- Portfolio management: defining business strategy as well as aligning and analyzing your portfolio of innovation investments.
- Project management: managing the schedule, costs, and resources associated with projects.
Microsoft provides the core IT capabilities that facilitate innovation management. These include ideation, collaboration and unified communications, performance management and business intelligence, project and portfolio management, and information rights management for intellectual property protection customized to everyone’s role in the organization.
These capabilities are extended by our partners to provide tailored solutions unique to your innovation process and business. With Microsoft solutions, you get a familiar and easy-to-use environment that is widely used and supported. The software integrates with what you have today and is supported by our own commitment to innovation at Microsoft.
Key Benefits
Widen the idea pipeline.
- Foster a culture of innovation.
- Involve more of the right people at the right time.
- Facilitate collaborative participation - both within the company and from outside.
Formalize the innovation process.
- Balance creativity with process discipline.
- Ensure that key decisions and actions are taken at the right time.
- Give all stakeholder visibility into process status and project progress.
- Secure and manage intellectual property.
Optimize return on innovation and time-to-market.
- Provide objective and strategic selection criteria to maximize relevancy.
- Capitalize on business opportunities by improving the robustness of idea selection.
- Maximize the financial return of ideas.
- Optimize budget allocation according to strategic value.