Enabling, embedding and embracing innovation as a way of life does not just mean getting better at creating new products and services. We help clients improve their business performance by embracing innovating in diverse ways, including:

Turning around businesses, projects and organisations

Improving efficiency and effectiveness within and beyond the traditional boundaries of organisations, projects and teams

Top and bottom line growth through increasing market share

Enhancing customer experience – from recovering alienated customers through to delighting customers who then become active advocates

Engaging employees to deliver sustained business success

Embedding and embodying more relevant values in day-to-day actions

Establishing and maintaining market, sector and industry-leading positions through sustained innovation 

Some specific examples of business performance improvements through helping clients to enable, embed and embrace innovation as a way of life:

Global Oil Company
Our client is a global brand name company that must continuously innovate as it explores for and produces oil and gas in ever more challenging locations. We were engaged initially to help tackle significant financial losses and damage to their reputation due to project overruns on their largest and most prestigious projects. We teamed with geophysics and engineering projects people in Europe, the US and Asia to investigate root causes. We discovered that these were grounded in legacy assumptions and attitudes that no longer served those who held them, nor the organisation. We further helped unearth and explain the underlying patterns that were sustaining these assumptions and attitudes and identify leverage points to change these patterns. As a result of this work the client was able to improve both short term performance and longer-term alignment between previous adversarial factions within the organisation.

Global Industrial Machines Company
Our client is an internationally recognised leader in industrial machinery whose legacy innovation processes were bogging down the development of their next generation ‘fly-by-wire’ plant and equipment. We engaged with multiple internal stakeholders across various US-based technical and product development functions – the boundaries between which were a major part of the problem. The long tradition of rivalry between different functional groups resulted in multiple problems being blamed on others and tossed back and forth in a frustrating and highly dysfunctional ‘ping pong’. By helping the various participants to focus on the overall technical challenge at the root of the company’s problem, those involved were enabled to see opportunities to propel the whole organisation forward in a way that overcame their previous internal squabbles. This not only debogged the current flagship product development project, but unblocked their capacity to align resources in future.

High-Growth Biotech Company
Our client is a historically technology-driven Scandinavian subsidiary of a pharmaceutical company faced severe problems in new product development following their new CEO's mission to 'be market driven'. Working closely with leaders in Product Development and Marketing, we identified the root cause as subtle but profound differences in perceptions regarding market-driven NPD. Once these conflicts had been recognised and understood by senior management and those involved, a new shared understanding rapidly developed. This fostered a spirit of co-operation that allowed them to move forward with alignment and agility, increasing their market value by a significant multiple within two years.

Global Consumer Electronics Company
Our client is an iconic European brand with a long-established innovation heritage, but being consistently out-innovated by Asian competitors. As a result they had evolved a culture of blaming other parts of their own organisation for its all too evident failure to compete. We worked (initially separately) with the Design & Development centre in Europe and their Marketing and Manufacturing counterparts in Taiwan to gain insights into their different perspectives. It was clear that historically poor relationships across their global operations were underpinned by disrespect and mistrust, attributed by each ‘side’ to incompatible cultures. We unearthed solid evidence to disconfirm these negative attitudes and created opportunities for this evidence to be ‘discovered’ by the key protagonists. A breakthrough occurred when we got the developers to recognise that by ‘saving’ a few thousand dollars, a key development decision actually cost the company millions of dollars in revenue. We set the stage for this realisation in a context that brought together previously disconnected colleagues in a constructive way leading to a spirit of mutual respect and interest in working together that had been hitherto conspicuous by its absence. The financial return was in the many millions of dollars over the first year and significantly more in subsequent years.

International Media Company
Our client is a well-known media company with a global reach from their European headquarters. They had devised a set of values intended to underpin greater innovation, but were bogged down in getting these ‘off the posters’ and into the day-to-day behaviour. We worked with leaders across key functions to gain insight into the current ‘in-use’ values as compared to the aspired values and key enablers and blockers that would critically affect the uptake of the aspired values. We then helped devise interventions based on these insights to bring the values to life. The client was able to make immediate progress on several values that were previously ‘blocked’ and approach the others with greater focus, energy and belief.

Global Fabless Semiconductor Company
Our client is an acknowledged innovation leader that has shaken up the semiconductor industry in recent years. They were concerned that their traditional customer-centric rapid ‘sense and respond’ innovation heritage was being pulled towards ‘make and sell’ attitudes because of several factors including growth, a major ‘make and sell’ acquisition and a Sarbanes-Oxley driven SAP system implementation. We engaged with key people in different functions in Europe, the US and Asia to understand their perspectives on the customer experience. It became clear that although it was under pressure, their ‘sense and respond’ culture had very deep and resilient roots. We further identified a set of changes to operating models, leadership development and the integration of future acquisitions that helped to reverse the drift towards ‘make and sell’.

High-Tech Industrial Products Company
Our client has a leading-edge Research & Development centre that had grown organically in a noted high-tech UK region and had recently acquired a manufacturing facility in Scandinavia that had already been sold and acquired several times. The effects of distance, combined with differences in culture and organisational history were impeding effective innovation. We engaged with key people at both locations to gain insight into their different perceptions, to identify conditions for success and agree improvement actions that would enable innovation to be more seamlessly embraced across the combined enterprise.

Global Industrial Systems Company
This well-known and respected Japanese company plays a major role in one of the leading kieretsu business groupings. We were asked to help assess whether their product innovation management processes in Japan were adequate as part of a legal arbitration process with a major Chinese customer. We had to overcome initial difficulties in that our presence was not always welcomed by our client’s own technical people, who worked together as a tight-knit community that was highly suspicious of outsiders, especially foreigners. As we began to share our own engineering-centred insights into their relationship with their client, the team gradually opened up and shared their side of the story. As a result of the insights we subsequently developed, our client’s Managing Director was not only rapidly able to resolve the dispute with their customer but also deepened this relationship so that future similar problems were prevented. We also raised the engineering team’s appreciation of the ways in which easy-to-overlook differences in perspective can lead to mistrust, mistakes and missed opportunities.