Innovation Strategy Solution for Communications, Media and Technology

New Accenture research, conducted in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit, has found that companies are struggling to effectively execute innovation initiatives.

The commitment to innovation is strong, even in a challenging economy, but management often lacks the operational strategies needed to create new products and services and move them through the development pipeline fast enough to meet marketplace needs and generate a positive return on their innovation investment.

Industry executives surveyed as part of our research acknowledge the critical nature of innovation. We found that 62 percent of respondents believe that their business strategy is "largely" or "totally" dependent on innovation. Almost 53 percent of those surveyed believe their organization's commitment to innovation is stronger or much stronger than their competitors.

But when asked if their innovation execution is as effective as it needs to be, significantly lower numbers said that was so. Only 36 percent believed their organization's pace and speed of innovation was stronger and only 40 percent felt they exceeded their peers in terms of frequency of innovation.

To achieve and sustain high performance in the years ahead, companies must conceive of innovation as a business discipline, instead of hoping for an occasional lucky shot. They must also then manage and execute innovation accordingly: as an end-to-end process, guided by customer insight and focused on generating profitable revenue, from insight development to idea generation to development to marketplace launch.

With its Innovation Strategy Solution, Accenture helps companies put in place the vision and operational strategy necessary to guide new-product development effectively, as well as the management processes that can reduce the costs and risks of innovation.

Learn more about Accenture Services for the Communications Industry

The Accenture Innovation Strategy Solution can deliver multiple benefits to communications, electronic and high tech, and media and entertainment companies:

• Reduced costs. In a challenging economy, Accenture helps companies lower their costs for new-product development. Accenture can help companies avoid the risks of abandoned development projects, which constitute a major cost drain today, as well as improve the overall efficiencies of innovation processes.
  
  
• Higher revenues and a more customer-centric focus. Innovation is not a goal in itself; it is targeted at serving current and future customers and generating revenues. Accenture helps with advanced customer segmentation techniques, cross-market insights and ways to involve customers in the innovation process to maximize their input, understand their priorities and increase their acceptance of and interest in new services.
  
  
• Better management of the innovation process. Accenture helps companies generate measurable improvements in business value through more effective new-product development by using a set of key performance indicators and a rigorous metrics program.
  
  
• Faster time to market. By enabling more effective collaboration in an environment of open innovation, Accenture helps companies shorten the pipeline from idea to prototype to profitable service.

Accenture focuses on multiple components for cost-effective innovation and new-product development:

• Innovation processes. To create an effective service innovation capability, the innovation process must be designed to deliver a broad scope of new products and services quickly. As such, the process must be made leaner and more rigorous, guided by clear performance indicators and offering support for open innovation and multi-party development.
  
  
• Business model and positioning. Accenture provides guidance in choosing and implementing the business model required for effective innovation, whether that is an internal process, or the use of “building block services” that are incorporated into another company’s service, or a model whereby services are developed by an alliance partner and then incorporated or branded by the host company.
  
  
• Support systems and infrastructure. Operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) pose two of the biggest hurdles for providers when introducing a new service. Accenture provides strategic guidance in designing a highly scalable platform that can accommodate the rapid and modular development of all services, that has sophisticated reporting capabilities (end-to-end and cross-domain) and can support multi-service, multi-access technologies and multiple end-user devices.
  
  
• Organization and culture. An effective innovation strategy must be executed by people, so the organization's culture and talent management processes must be designed to encourage and stimulate innovation. Accenture helps clients foster the development of an appropriate culture and organization structure (including relevant rewards, incentives and job descriptions) that support more rapid and cost-effective new-produce development.

Download the brochure on Accenture Solutions for New Product Development and Innovation.

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