Design for Innovation best practice business discipline

| | | | | | | |

How We Work

“We embed best practice discipline in business so our clients don't have to reinvent the wheel to achieve what they need”

What's it like working with Design for Innovation? On this page we'll tell you the kinds of results our clients have reported and we'll also give you a sense of our guiding beliefs, approach to client projects and how we're different to most technical management consulting companies.

Our company has evolved over time to respond to the growing needs of our clients. Working with Design for Innovation is like hiring an Innovation Management Consultant, Strategic Planning Manager, Business Development Director, and Business Performance Coach all at the same time.

Our goal is to provide you with all the services necessary, at one location, to develop and implement a best practice value-creation management process.

Best practice companies thrive regardless of the economic realities they are facing, because they have learnt how to deliver a sustainable increase in value from their production capability on a continuous, systematic basis. This is the key to achieving a genuine competitive advantage in any economic climate.

This process continually improves an organization's business model: its ways of serving customers and outperforming competitors, as well as fairly and appropriately rewarding all stakeholders.

What results can you expect from us?

When you work with us you can expect to see desirable and sustainable improvements for:

Delivering business performance measurement and management best practice;
Managing best practice customer-driven solutions capture and development; and,
Achieving best practice strategic value-creation, innovation and problem solving.

Here are some of the benefits you will derive from delivering business performance measurement and management best practice:

Improve your strategic decision-making processes, deliver consistent metrics and ensure real-time access to integrated information.
Establish an integrated, holistic approach to how your organization manages itself and coordinates relationships with partners and stakeholders.
Realign your organizational priorities to focus resources, improve operational efficiency, manage for profitable results, and leverage opportunities for growth.
Link individual processes into a coherent system that drives improved efficiencies, corporate agility, faster business cycle times, and optimal resource utilization.
Empower every department in the company to set, measure and hit goals; accumulate the results in a way that promotes cross-functional collaboration across the enterprise.
Share a holistic view of the enterprise unifying disparate groups, while managing complexity and communications, and leveraging data in operational systems.
Improve business performance, extending traditional reporting and analysis by unifying the results and management processes across all lines of the business.

Here are some of the benefits you will derive from managing best practice customer-driven solutions capture and development:

Build strategic competitive advantage by designing business systems on the principles of customer value, loyalty and partnership.
Define and predict the future value of customers, and how to measure value by tracking the behaviour of customers, and quantifying their economic consequences.
Learn about customers faster than the competition and how to apply that learning faster than the competition, taking customer specific action when trends are negative.
Design high return on investment (ROI) relationship marketing, customer loyalty, and customer retention programs.
Grow profitable customer value through up-selling, cross-selling and referrals, while strengthen links between customers, products, and profitability.
Effectively manage customer relationships and supporting processes for maximizing current and future profitability of all existing customers and prospects.
Develop superior products and services addressing unmet market needs, product and service usage, function, improvement and ongoing developments and innovation.

Here are some of the benefits you will derive from achieving best practice strategic value-creation, innovation and problem solving:

An expanded, futuristic vision of the business, including the strategic roles that innovation can satisfy.
Motivated team members who are rewarded financially, commensurate with the market performance of the new products they launch.
Effective measurement indices enabling the company to determine its return from innovation investments & calibrate future expenditure levels, depending on strategic roles.
Improved up-front consumer research, which explores the problems & unmet needs in a defined category to help guide idea generation.
An alignment of technology & R&D resources against new product strategic roles to increase both efficiency & effectiveness.
Committed & supportive functional & senior managers to ensure the "right" people resources & funds are dedicated to innovation.
A pervasive & optimistic attitude about innovation that is felt & endorsed by all employees.
A systematic development process that enables new product participants to know their roles at each step of the process & to understand their accountability & decision-making criteria.
Acceptance of business judgment, intuition, experience, & insight as additional "tools" to use in the development process.
Values that encourage & foster a belief in innovation as a legitimate & leverageable "intangible asset" for accelerating stock price & increasing future earnings.

Our guiding values and beliefs

Embedding best practice discipline in business is an indispensable mechanism for helping any business improve its underlying capabilities and business processes.

New Zealand companies operate in some of the most competitive areas of business and are faced with constant new challenges, threats and opportunities.

Whilst every business can expect continuous performance improvements as part of the "business-as-usual" activities of managers, we believe properly constructed and managed projects are one of the most effective delivery mechanisms for "step-change" increases in business performance.

Work can and should be a fulfilling experience. While profitability is all-important, sacrificing satisfaction is not optional. Whether you are employed or own your own business, personal fulfillment is imperative for improved bottom line results. Our professional lives takes up too much of our time not to find ways to make it more enjoyable for all involved - staff, customers, co-workers.

Change doesn't have to be a scary thing. They say nobody likes change but change is inevitable. The trick is to find simple, easy ways to incorporate change in your life. When you understand fully what is involved and the positive impact it can have in your business or your life, the anxiety drops away.

Look at the bigger picture and see what's possible. We all want to do great things in the world but shrink away because we feel we don't have the ability. Pushing your boundaries a little at a time will get you 'out there' much faster than you thought possible. You will find that giving others tasks that stretch them 'just that little bit' will unlock their potential in surprising ways.

Creating customer value is the fundamental engine for growing the shareholder value of any business. Perhaps we may be guilty of stating the obvious, but customers and their revenues are the lifeblood of any business. We believe the ultimate purpose of best practice business projects is to help companies serve their customers in ever more effective ways.

Businesses exist to make a profit. Your organization can't survive, prosper and grow without an ability to generate and grow profits now and in the longer term. The greater your ability to serve customers successfully and generate surplus value, the more you can afford to invest in serving more customers in ever more effective ways in the future. The greater the customer value and profits a company enjoys, the more it is able to invest and reward its employees. We believe projects are a key mechanism in supporting your ambitions to grow customer, employee & shareholder value over time.

Our approach

Our programs and strategies are flexible. Different clients need different things at different times. Our programs and strategies have in-built flexibility to ensure maximum relevance and 'do-ability' for our clients. We design action plans that produce sustainable results with less struggle.

We operate with the highest level of integrity. We are always open and honest with our clients - we tell it like we see it. If something is not working, we won't kid ourselves or you that things are okay. We don't believe in wasting your valuable time - or ours - on strategies that aren't getting you measurable results.

Closing the "Execution Gap" between knowing what needs to be done and actually doing it is what separates great businesses from the competition. It's rare that we find a situation where no-one in the organization knows what needs to be done to turnaround a difficult situation. However, for one reason or another, organizations can get trapped in inaction, or "analysis paralysis" or even obsessive planning but with no tangible actions being taken that meet their problems square on. We are convinced of the virtue of having thought through the situation, you need to specify and complete rapid, focused actions to move you forward.

The 80/20 rule allows you in focusing your efforts to have maximum impact in moving you forward. Alfredo Pareto documented the 80/20 "Pareto" principle over a hundred years ago, that as a general rule in life 80% of results arise from 20% of causes. This is a powerful principle when applied to projects. 80% of the value of your project is likely to arise from 20% of the scope. 80% of the difficulties you are facing could be resolved by eliminating the root causes of 20% of your issues and problems. By applying this principle, we can help you have a much more effective and rapid turnaround of difficult projects than by more resource intensive approaches.

Transparency is critical to successful decision-making. A challenge with dealing with experts is their fondness for holding critical information in their own heads and not down on paper! Our experience is that the more transparent you can make a project in terms of its the current status against clear milestones & deliverables, benefits realization and risk situation then the more likely it is to be a commercial success for you and your organization.

What makes us different

We have studied and perfected best-practice learning to formulate a superb program designed specifically for New Zealand business and derived from real-world successes of some of the world's largest organizations. This program utilizes our combined skills and thirty years of consulting experience. It is based on over half a dozen models of international best practice. This is the tool your business needs not only to survive the challenges of this year but to actually thrive.

Part of what differentiates our company is our ability to integrate the "hard" task-specific orientated approach honed through research, academic study and disciplined approach to problem solving and analytical reasoning, with the "soft" appreciative-enquiry, professional coaching approach that allows interaction, freedom and safety to encourage input and buy-in from personnel both inside and outside your organization.

The combination of this integrated approach means that not only are areas of improvement identified but the outcomes are owned by the individual team members because they play such a large part in their development and we imbed the positive behavioural change within your organization. We call this integrated approach a "3D business perspective" covering: our unique best practice stakeholder perspective (first dimension), your internal company stakeholder perspective (second dimension), and the external market stakeholder perspective of your customers, competitors, partners etc. (third dimension). Our multi-stakeholder 3D perspective enables us to: ask better questions, find better solutions, deliver better results, and achieve better returns on your investment in time, money and effort.

What makes our consulting stand out is our expertise and experience with strategic innovation management. We're management consultants who work at improving productivity, capability-building and profitability, but it's our knowledge of best practice value-creation systems, processes and methodologies that enables us to quickly build credibility and rapport at all levels in your company. All our consultants have a minimum of twenty years of business development and innovation management experience (acquired in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, The Philippines, The United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States).

Now that you have a better idea about the results you can expect by working with us and our approach and philosophy of working with clients, next go to our Services and Solutions page to learn about the specific services and programs we offer.