Good Ideas Aren't Enough

2010 OCI Award Winner @Kennametal_Inc featured in @IndustryWeek. Thanks @JillJusko for the mention.  Read the intro below and to read the full article, click here.  Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Manufacturers must improve processes all along the innovation life cycle to ensure product development success.

Global positioning system maker Garmin Ltd. announced in early November that it would exit the production of smartphone handsets. "We thoroughly analyzed the rapidly changing dynamics of the smartphone market and concluded that we cannot reach the scale necessary to effectively compete in the industry," said CEO Min Kao in the company's third-quarter earnings release. "While this was clearly not the desired outcome, we must be prudent with our ongoing investment in the category and have therefore redeployed research and development resources internally, winding down our investment in mobile handset device development."  

Garmin's decision to shut down development of a product not meeting expectations is a scenario likely experienced at one time or another by most manufacturers that are engaged in innovation. Successfully introducing new products into the marketplace is a notoriously challenging endeavor for most manufacturers even as they promote the importance of innovation to their companies' growth. And simply having a good idea is not enough. "It is easy to have ideas; there's no shortage of them out there," says George Coulston, vice president, global research, development and engineering for tooling producer Kennametal. "It's much more difficult to define an opportunity, build a business case around that opportunity, really vet out customer requirements and then work your way through all the commercialization issues."

Indeed, opportunities to misplay innovation extend well beyond the ideation phase, but so, too, do opportunities for improvement. The challenge, then, is to translate those opportunities to misplay innovation into opportunities to improve the business side of innovation...

Click here to read entire article. 

What do you think? Make sure to leave your comments below!