Market Intelligence for Innovation and Product Life Cycle Management
The Global Intelligence Alliance focuses on the process side of marketing & innovation intelligence efforts in their new white paper issue named “Market Intelligence for Innovation and Product Life Cycle Management“.
In a fragmented industry or business landscape research & development departments often miss the link to marketing or vice versa. GIA recognizes the increasing need to link the market insights and management of markets to innovative capacities.
Oftentimes marketers and R&D staff are worlds away and it requires strong processes to take advantage of combined strengths. Worse even, many companies still innovate based on their sheer capacity to do so without in-depth knowledge of marketability of their innovations.
Customer perception needs to drive innovation (and thus investment there) and this needs to be identified by marketing departments. Opportunity scouting can still be a joined effort by innovation resources. But here as well a link between the idea and the targeted satisfaction of a market need needs to be established. Especially when new needs are to be defined by an innovation.
A structured way of gaining important market insights and making this insight available to members of the several groups within the organization is being phrased by GIA as follows:
“Organizations need systematic management of information in order to provide meaningful Market Intelligence input to the innovation and product life cycle management process.”
From the executive summary:
“To explore Market Intelligence needs in innovation and product life cycle management, a structured live-phase approach has been proposed in the form of a stop/go decision model in which a number of decision points are defined as tollgates…”
The following concepts are being reviewed and described n detail:
- Process Integration
- People Involvement
- Focus and Outsourcing
- Global Focus
- Creativity
- Continuous monitoring
The white paper concludes:
“This GIA White Paper argues that organizations need a comprehensive set of Market Intelligence products as well as systematic management of information in order to provide meaningful input to the innovation and the product life cycle process.”
With friendly permission of the Global Intelligence Alliance you can download the white paper here and even discuss its content and findings in our dedicated Intelligence Theory Discussion blog.