Corinne Jouanny, Managing Director - Altran Pr[i]me

In your opinion, what are the main challenges facing innovation management?

For the high tech companies, where nearly 70% of revenue is generated from products less than 2 years old, the new products development and launch process is more than ever key.

Today, companies have to innovate at an increasing order of magnitude and complexity. They are aiming to create new growth by leveraging emerging trends, exploiting current capabilities, business models and increase their innovation efficiency in order to enhance their competitiveness.

In a constantly changing world, they need to master emerging technological challenges and to effectively manage global development activities, which involve striking the right balance between geographical and organisational complexity. Therefore, their teams have to gain agility rely on specific combination of collaborative processes, methods and tools.

What is the relationship between innovation management and product lifecycle management?

Companies need to re-invent their products, services and value propositions. By increasing functionality and performance, they also aim to reduce costs and time-to-market. Transformation also takes place at the organisational level to improve innovation performance (quality, costs, time), which explains why enterprises seek creative, systemic and agile methodologies that help their teams to innovate.

"Regarding high tech products and services, cost issues, late to market/missed market demand, and customer needs are most often cited as reasons for failure.” *

A better synergy between innovation management and product lifecycle management processes will be the key to succeed in the cross-functional processes supporting the new products and launch creation a development.

These synergies and complementarities are from the front-end innovation step (capture and formalisation of the insights and needs), up to the exploration of the design and associated supply chain, and the follow-up of the development and launch process, keeping and transforming into reality the key differentiating factors defined at the front-end step.

What does this solution bring to our customers?

We help companies to identify new business opportunities, to generate innovative scenarios or products and services that we usually co-create with them.

We help to find and maintain all along the ideation and development steps the equilibrium between business-economic sustainability of a solution, people-desirability of a new product or service, and technology-system integration and feasibility.

Thanks to our enlarged vision of the PLM, enclosing innovation management and thus the product development and launch process, we support our clients in mastering “design to value” and reaching the highest efficiency.

We also help companies to manage the value creation through idea management and to develop open innovation ecosystems.

* “PLM Strategies in High Tech by Michael Burkett and Heather Keltz” AMR Research Custom Executive Summary in Collaboration With Siemens” | December 2009