Disruptors Drive Need for Business Agility
The global digitization of business and the ever-increasing power of the consumer have created constantly changing markets prone to regular disruptions. Organizations focused on new product development (NPD) and innovation performance are reacting by infusing agility into their Stage-Gate ® processes to improve two elements of speed to market:
- Speed to Learning — the time it takes to identify and validate new product concepts that will win in the market; and
- Speed to Launch — which is how long it takes to bring validated new product concepts to market.
Consistent, Iterative Feedback Drives Speed to Learning
The only way to keep a pulse on evolving consumer demands is to engage consistently with the end-user across the NPD lifecycle. Building spiral feedback cycles into each Stage enables organizations to test concepts—via diagrams, samples, low and high fidelity prototypes, and more—and listen to customer feedback, revise the viewpoint of the project, adjust and then adapt the plan. The customer's emotional responses must build the business case to pass Gates and move to the next Stage.
Cross-Functional Collaboration Drives Speed to Launch
Effective innovation and NPD depends upon the ability of global cross-functional innovation teams to work well across time zones, national and organizational boundaries. Enabling teams to communicate, collaborate and share insights from current and past projects reduces process friction, increases efficiency, and aids in the decision-making process. A robust, integrated tool that allows team members to easily store and share documents, presentations, ideas, results, comments and more with powerful search functionality greatly aids with managing and truly leveraging people's knowledge across the organization.
Innovation Performance
The desire to create plans that enable cross-functional teams to be more agile and deliver more value requires an underlying toolkit to streamline processes and increase speed to market. This is where it is critical to invest in a highly-configurable Enterprise Innovation Management software solution like Accolade, which automates a hybrid Stage-Gate ® and Agile planning and execution process. Accolade enables a business to be responsive to the high rate of change and extreme volume of information, and to track progress against goals while ensuring the most optimal plans are aligned with corporate strategy and market needs. By incorporating Agile principles into new product development processes, organizations will become more responsive to the rapidly changing environment in a way that will help them launch more successful offerings more quickly and more frequently.
Sopheon's Accolade® Software is Certified for the Newest Stage-Gate® Ready Category for Innovation Team Agility
Stage-Gate® Ready Version 4 certification validates that Accolade software has the features and functionality to address the needs of innovation teams for flexibility, agility and speed. Included is the ability to automate a hybrid innovation model that integrates methodologies like Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban and Spiral Development into a Stage-Gate ® Idea-to-Launch Process.
