A strong innovation policy and an agile development cycle that is as short as possible are essential but not sufficient prerequisites. They must be supported by a flexible internal organization to take into account customer insights at different design milestones to achieve a coherent product and service offering.

Customer insights are not only for consumer-oriented organizations. So how do you integrate insights, customer data, consumer behaviors, and market expectations and disseminate them throughout the enterprise, specifically in the innovation phase?

Although organizations are competing with each other in terms of ingenuity to optimize their performance, when it comes to innovation, they have not yet found the ideal solution: their ability to free themselves from internal resistance and the cumbersome nature of their operating methods and processes in order to “generate” breakthroughs has yet to be proven, and attempts to integrate external innovations – equity investments, partnerships, open innovation – have not necessarily been more successful to date.

To resist and succeed in this context, companies must question their organization, their processes and their culture, which are sometimes too rigid, while putting user satisfaction at the heart of their strategy: who will be the customers of tomorrow? What will their uses be? How can we provide them with an offer that is both differentiating and competitive? The stakes are high because, today more than ever, the winner takes all…

The offer must be designed to meet an ambition, a mission or even a commitment of the brand to its customers or to society. Innovation must be placed at the service of these objectives, which are then the result of a well thought-out and organized strategy in order to

• Improve the brand’s positioning.
• Optimize or build a coherent portfolio of products and services.
• Rethink products, services or experiences.
• Market new products, services or experiences.

At Pagamon, we are convinced of the need to :

• Drive innovation projects through knowledge, not resources.
• Put the voice of the customer at the center of the organization and of innovation and development projects.
• Break down silos and mobilize the entire company in innovation activities: as the probability of success of innovation projects is relatively low, they must involve and communicate with all functions in order to maximize the understanding of needs, the ability to generate new ideas and the anticipation of risks.
• Constantly adapt to the context and promote test & learn: as the development cycle of products and services is often long, the R&D, Innovation, Marketing, Sales and Services teams must communicate regularly to be able to integrate, at the right level of risk, the new constraints and opportunities that appear during development.
• Freeze the development level on a regular basis: sharing and freezing technical and functional choices at each milestone makes the development process more robust.
• Anticipate risks: it is necessary to assess the “benefits/risks” ratio for all innovations in the portfolio very early on and to regularly update it, and to know how to stop a project when this ratio becomes unfavorable.
• Leverage customer knowledge to better serve experience-based consumer spaces, structure a product offering or consolidate a brand’s positioning.
• Use a customer demand-centric approach to develop the right value for the product and service portfolio, while respecting the brand’s values and desired target positioning.

Our experience in managing both upstream (innovation and development) and downstream (product and brand strategy, service policy) cycles enables us to support industrial, R&D, marketing, sales and service departments, and to help you align your processes and your organization with customer expectations and a constantly changing competitive environment.