Feldman Consulting Enterprises,
LLC offers a variety of Innovation Management Consulting Services,
which will help to make your projects more successful. Our
expertise and techniques in Innovation Management have been
refined through application with many different companies on
a wide array of innovation projects.
Is your company getting the maximum possible
benefits from innovation? Does it seem like you
need to do something to get ahead of the competition?
Does your company have lots of ideas, but just can't
seem to find the time and energy to forge ahead? Do you
feel that you should be making more profit and revenue
from projects you've worked on? Do you want your
projects to be breakthroughs and "wow" the customer?
Turn your ideas into profits!
Innovation is necessary to stay ahead of the
competition and improve margins and profitability.
Many companies fail to innovate and focus too much on
"today." What happens is "tomorrow" those companies are
stuck with obsolete products, low margins, and they're
struggling harder than ever to stay afloat.
Don't get yourself caught in that trap!
A healthy corporate environment is necessary for
innovation. You need to take advantage of ideas that
come along, choose the most appropriate ones to develop
based on your capabilities and corporate strategy, and
then devote the appropriate resources to making those
projects as successful as possible. While every project
entails some risk, if innovation is managed
properly the costs of any failures will be more than
outweighed by the benefits from your homeruns!
Here are some of the ways we can help:
Innovation Environment
Corporate Innovation Analysis
We'll perform a complete analysis of the innovation
process in your company by interviewing key employees
and looking in depth at current and past innovation
projects. This will help determine what your company is
doing well in addition to identifying opportunities for
improvement. This is designed to help your company:
Increase the number of ideas proposed by employees
Get more innovative projects started
Boost the success rate and speed of innovation projects
Innovation Portfolio Planning
Innovation Portfolio Development and Strategic
Innovation Analysis
Your portfolio of innovation projects needs to be
appropriately diversified in terms of risk and reward. A
good portfolio consists of a mix of projects with both
minor and major marketing and technological changes. The
mix of projects should take into account your current
offerings as well as those of your competitors to help
you determine which projects will carry you into the
future. This will ensure that your offerings stay
competitive in the near term and in the long term,
positioning your company to maintain or improve margins
and expand into new markets by developing products and
services which are unique in the marketplace.
Develop appropriate mix of innovation projects
Maintain or increase profit margins
Expand into new markets
Individual Innovation Projects
Marketing and Ethnographic Research
Will your customers be
rushing out to buy your latest product, or will it be a
flop? Do you really know what your customers want? Are you
trying to deliver something they don't really care about but
missing the things that they aren't able to tell you that
they need? By spending some time on the front end to
investigate, the probability of success for your project
will be much higher. Proven product development tools can
make sure that you're putting your efforts in the right
place and that your end result is going to be something that
your customers enjoy.
Find the true unspoken needs of your customers through ethnographic research
Analyze the potential competition and substitutes for your offerings
Ensure that your product has the features and characteristics necessary to succeed
Value Capture Planning
Through careful analysis and
planning strategies can be crafted to make sure that you
reap the benefits from your innovation instead of copycats or your
competitors. There are many great ideas out there, but there
are things you can do to ensure that you're the one who
profits from your hard work. We can help you by analyzing
the markets that you want to introduce your innovation in,
developing a business model, and assisting with determining
appropriate pricing strategies.
Market and consumer needs and willingness to pay analysis
Develop a business model for introduction of your innovation
Determine appropriate pricing strategies
Project Planning and Risk Mitigation
While no innovative project can be guaranteed to be 100%
successful, with proper planning at the beginning you
can maximize the chances of success for your project.
Develop project roadmap with appropriate goals and decision points
Project realistic budget and resource needs
Plan ahead for expansion of product line in the future
Project Rescue
Do you have a project that has gone off track or just
never seems to get completed? Is the project over budget
and behind schedule? Or is your project not generating
the sales and profits for your company that it should
be? We can do whatever is necessary to get your project
back on track from analysis and recommendations to a
complete takeover of the project to make things happen!
Get projects back on track that are over budget or behind schedule
Increase profitability of the product line
Funding Your
Innovation Projects
We have experience in
assisting our clients find and successfully apply for grant
money from various organizations to help pay for their
innovative projects. While the return on investment of the
projects we work on is often excellent, contributions from
other sources to defray the expenses of the initial
investment can make working with Feldman Consulting
Enterprises, LLC even more attractive. We are a
MATAAC Partner
and have connections with several other funding sources as
well. Not only do we want to help your business succeed, but
there are others who want to help you succeed too!
Assistance
finding and applying for grant money
Defray project expenses
Typical types of problems we've solved:
How can we capture more
value with our pricing strategy?
How can we leverage what we already have?
How can we increase revenue with complementary
offerings?
What would make this a "gotta have it" product?
Ask yourself:
Are competitors taking
away my sales?
Are my margins and prices under pressure?
Are my products lacking what it
takes to "wow" customers?
Are my support and warranty costs higher than they
should be?
Could the most recent projects have been more
successful?
Do I want my next project to be a
breakthrough?
Did you answer "yes" to any of the
above questions? We can help!
Here's how we've helped other
clients with
Innovation Management. You could be next!
Case One - A Better
Way to Seal Ampules
A local company desired to
improve upon an ampule-sealing device that they were selling
by developing the next generation of their product. By
listening to their customers they knew what types of
characteristics and features would be necessary to ensure
that the redesign would be a success.
The redesign involved
improving the reliability and durability by replacing many
mechanical components with electronics and sensors in
conjunction with an Arduino robotics board and a
custom-designed shield, which
allowed for customer-requested adjustments to be made while
using the device, such as speed and timing control. Any
parts that were wear items were designed to be easily
replaceable and many wear items were completely eliminated. Other attributes that were important to the
customers such as noise and ease of adjustment were also
addressed. In addition the modular design of the updated
device allowed for flexibility in manufacturing and future
product development. The building of subassemblies could be
contracted out and assembly was simplified, reducing the
amount of labor and lead times necessary to build the
device.
The system was also designed to accommodate
add-on modules (which also use Arduino boards) so that it would be easy to expand the device
to handle additional needs that customers had, including gas
purging and liquid filling of ampules. Through clever
engineering both add-on modules were designed to have
commonality of over 80% of the parts, reducing development
time and costs, and simplifying production. By developing
these add-on modules the company was able to serve a segment
of the market that previously was unable to automatically
fill ampules, which made the device very popular among their
customers. With the improvements and additional capabilities
of the product line the company is also able to target new
markets and applications, further increasing the potential
for sales.
Results:
Reduced production
cost by 15-20%
Reduced assembly time
by 30%
Improved customer
experience through easier use and better durability
Doubled revenue and
profitability of a mature product line by offering compatible add-on modules
See the Ampule Sealer in
action!
Case Two -
Streamlining the Processes at a Financial Institution
A financial institution that
specialized in energy lending to consumers needed a loan
origination system that allowed them the flexibility to
track many unique parameters in order to properly administer
different government programs with special requirements.
Commercially available solutions were too rigid in their
capabilities and weren't able to meet these needs. In
addition those systems were very cumbersome to use and
poorly integrated with the internal processes of the
company, requiring lots of extra effort to manually process
data from the loan applications. The company also had many
data reporting requirements for the various programs that
couldn't be met with what they had.
A brand new database
solution was designed to meet the needs of the company. The
new database was designed to interface with many of the
existing systems that the company used, from gathering loan
applications from the website to pulling credit to creating
and sending out the appropriate documents to customers and
contractors. The database was developed in a modular fashion
with scalability in mind so that future needs could be
handled with a minimum of additional effort. The employees
of the company were involved in every step of the
development process to ensure that their needs were met and
that the system would be well-accepted by the people using
it on a daily basis. The solution allowed the company to
drastically decrease the turnaround time and labor for
processing loan applications while enabling them to easily
analyze data for the programs that they were administering.
The system had approximately
30 simultaneous users from various departments in the
company, including management, accounting, sales, marketing,
and underwriting.
Results:
Processed over 1,500
loan applications per month, including credit reports
and document generation
Usable by everyone at
company in all roles due to intense collaboration with
users during development
Flexible enough to
handle many specialized and unique loan programs
Easily generated
high-value reports for management and provided data for
web services
Protected valuable
business data with automatic backups and off-site data
replication
This is a
typical input screen designed with user input and
program-specific tabs along the top to automatically manage
process flow, which reduces errors and makes training easier.
Many companies struggle with
innovation. Yours doesn't have to be one of them. We
can help you turn your ideas into profits!
Brian Feldman's answers to
Innovation Management questions on Quora: