Fast Innovation & Growth

Fast innovation & growth was developed as a unique capability to address client needs from customer insight development to idea generation to commercialization. It helps organizations striving to be high-performance businesses by addressing the significant growth issues in commoditization and the unsustainably long time-to-market development process. We help develop innovation strategy as well as execute the significant process improvements required to achieve sustainable growth and markedly faster time to market.

Accenture enhanced its long-standing operational and strategy expertise with the 2007 acquisition of George Group, a recognized market leader in process, operational and business transformation, and innovation, whose capabilities and offerings form the foundation of this new practice. Our fast innovation & growth experts help executives develop and execute organization-wide growth and innovation strategies that deliver profitable market place results in an accelerated time frame.

We understand that executives are under increasing pressure to meet or exceed shareholders expectations for top line growth. The average job tenure of CEOs is actually decreasing as board-driven timeframes for demonstrating growth become more aggressive. Accenture's work in shareholder value analysis (SVA) has found that innovation is a major driver of the market's expectation for growth and is a fundamental driver of share price and market capitalization. However, companies often find it difficult to consistently innovate while balancing short-term financial pressures. Furthermore, clients consistently tell us of the organizational challenges they face in integrating an innovation strategy with planning and execution and moving at speed to stay ahead of the competition.

Our experts have deep industry and domain expertise, helping companies to uncover future sources of growth by identifying and assessing key trends and factors that provide opportunities for growth; providing advanced customer insight that leads to differentiable value propositions and developing a go-forward growth and innovation agenda. We also help unlock the organization's cultural and operational capabilities by diagnosing current innovation capability and designing effective organization and operating models before working alongside client teams to implement high-priority initiatives.

Implementation typically involves the design and management of pilots and trials of new solutions, processes and business models; the implementation of proven tools to accelerate innovation; and the creation of the internal capability required to achieve sustainable excellence in innovation.

Why fast innovation & growth:

• Addresses significant growth issues in commoditization and the unsustainably long time-to-market development process.
  
  
• Provides an end-to-end, holistic innovation process performance perspective to define and realize corporate & brand strategies.
  
  
• Delivers tangible results through new breakthrough business opportunities and creates a sustainable innovation capability.

Fast innovation & growth experts help executives explore and address a variety of business questions:

• How can we anticipate that our customers and the marketplace will embrace our new ideas before they go to market?
  
  
• How do we make sure we are structured to innovate not just once, but constantly?
  
  
• How can we balance the resources and people we have with the pressing need for new products and product change?
  
  
• We need new products and services, but how do we access and manage the risks associated with the investment?
  
  
• How can we help shareholders through this change and encourage employees to participate in the innovation process?
  
  
• We are unsure what our competitors are doing. Does that matter?
  
  
• We want to be trend-setters, but how do we get ahead of the pack and stay there?
  
  
• What methods or processes should we put in place to drive development?
  
  
• We know that change in thinking and the way we do things is needed, but how do we get buy-in from all levels of the business?
  
  
• How do we reconcile development costs with the desired financial results even before we get started?
  
  
• We have lots of ideas, but how do we determine which should be pursued?

Fast innovation
Our proprietary tools facilitate diagnosis and resolution of variation and inefficiencies in organizations’ innovation processes, resulting in faster speed-to-market and potentially up to a 50 to 80 percent reduction in new product and service development lead times. The group also works closely with clients on product lifecycle management, portfolio prioritization and management implementation.

Innovation process and capability building
Our expertise and knowledge in what makes leading innovative companies excel helps our clients rapidly design, pilot and implement an innovation capability for themselves. We bring proven processes, methods, tools and structures to transform a company into a significantly more innovative organization—one that consistently delivers high performance, valuable new products, services and business models to its customers year after year.

Process innovation
Our deep innovation experience helps companies rethink the way they deliver value to customers and facilitate fundamental redesign of core processes and in some instances entire business models. We bring our end-to-end approach and proprietary tools and techniques to help clients shed conventional thinking on how processes “should work” to rebuild and transition processes, structures, incentives and assets to focus fully on customer value. Our offering addresses all aspects of a company’s business processes that affect the customer experience.

Innovation & growth strategy
Our growth strategy approach helps clients drive disruptive innovation, breakthrough thinking and business opportunity development. In addition, crowd-sourcing-based ideation tools bring together market analysis and broad organizational involvement to solve key customer, market and process issues. The group also has extensive experience in working closely with clients on new business "venturing" process development and open innovation process design.