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Innovation strategy

Innovation strategy Agency Consulting firm Experts Specialists Consultancy

Find the right model to build a winning innovation strategy

For more than 30 years, our specialized team has been supporting companies across the board in building an innovation strategy that focuses their resources and processes on the creation of value in order to meet the needs of their targets.

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    The key success factors of an innovation strategy

    Innovation is not a goal in itself; it must enable the organization to create value for itself and/or its customers. The whole point of an innovation strategy is to give direction, momentum and meaning to the efforts deployed. A vast undertaking! Several key success factors need to be taken into account when defining an innovation strategy:

    An innovation strategy must be aligned with the company’s overall strategy, to ensure coherence that maximizes the impact and relevance of innovative efforts.

    To achieve this, we need to define the objective and type of innovation desired (incremental, breakthrough, adjacent, radical), the targets (customers, employees, suppliers), the markets, etc., based on needs, trends and competition.

    What do we need to achieve our strategic objectives? Where is our playground, where can we develop a differentiating offer?

    All too often, we see lukewarm ambitions, self-censored by limited resources. Good practice is in fact the opposite: it’s ambition that should enable us to define the necessary resources (human, financial, material…), and to choose the best innovation model (internal, external, open innovation…). Then, the organization can be structured to support these efforts, with clear processes and a corporate culture that valorizes innovation.

    What skills, tools, budgets, materials… are needed to achieve innovation objectives? What innovation model should be chosen?

    A lively, committed innovation strategy needs to be driven by top management, who must set a clear vision and become actively involved in supporting innovative initiatives. A dedicated innovation manager can be an asset in orchestrating these efforts, ensuring project coordination and coherence. At the company level, it is essential to create an environment conducive to continuous and sustained innovation, to nurture a culture of innovation and to promote its specific values.

    How can top management demonstrate its commitment to innovation? How can innovation be integrated into the corporate culture? How can innovative initiatives be rewarded?

    Innovation projects need to be managed with the same rigor as a “classic business”: clear roles and responsibilities, a timetable, milestones and so on. A balance between short-, medium- and long-term objectives is needed to guarantee rapid gains while building a sustainable vision. Internal and external communication will enable successes to be celebrated at every stage, learning to be shared, and strategies to be adjusted in the light of feedback. This dynamism, underpinned by a clear, shared vision, ensures that innovation remains an ongoing priority, reinforcing the motivation and commitment of the entire organization.

    How to prioritize projects to achieve a balance between these different time horizons? How to organize communication (channels, targets, content)?

      Tell us about your uncharted territory

      You have a project and want to discuss it with our explorers, write us!

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      How we support you in your innovation strategy

      To anchor the innovation strategy in the DNA of our customers, we help them develop a corporate culture around innovation that motivates and mobilizes teams, and promotes interaction within the ecosystem.

      Our teams also work on exploring, challenging and developing models such as open innovation, crowd-sourcing, frugal innovation, participative innovation, reverse innovation,… or reinventing business models, with tools such as the Business Canvas or Odyssey 3.14.

      Some innovation models that we implement to work on your innovation strategy:

      • Open innovation: opening up the innovation process to external players – customers, suppliers, SMEs, other industrial companies, start-ups, universities, laboratories, etc. – to take part in the innovation process.
      • Crowdsourcing: submitting challenges to a community of web-based problem-solvers.
        Frugal innovation: doing better with less (the genesis of this concept comes from developing countries who have to prove their ingenuity because they lack resources).
      • Participatory innovation: involving all the company’s employees in the innovation process, for example through innovation contests or simply an idea box! This model leads above all to incremental innovations that are easy to reproduce.
      • Reverse innovation: identifying products developed for developing countries and adapting them for marketing in Western countries.

      Examples of recent innovation strategies carried out for our clients

      • Setting up an "innovation lab" to stimulate a culture of innovation

        We assisted a leading pharmaceutical company that wanted to bring its teams together around innovation to develop new products, new services, new market access models and new ways of working; all in a special and unique place. We decided to generate this new momentum by imagining the creation of an “innovation laboratory”, a physical place “apart”.

        Through an external benchmark and internal workshops with a dedicated project team, we defined its operational functioning and roadmap and then organized the first events taking place in this new laboratory with employees now ready to innovate!

      • Launch of an open innovation challenge in the field of robotics

        We created and launched a one-off challenge of external open innovation for an energy player wishing to boost a new innovation model in the field of robotics.

        Our teams assisted our client in defining the synopsis, writing the rules of the game and the technical specifications, identifying the financing methods, up to the launch of the challenge. About thirty teams responded to the challenge at the international level, but only one team won!

      • Design of an innovation factory dedicated to digital services

        We worked with a major player in the aeronautics industry who wanted to develop new digital services, and who could not afford the very long traditional development times in aeronautics for this kind of innovation race! Everything had to be created from scratch: the process – from idea generation to prototype development -, the places, the people involved and the way they had to interact with each other, etc. A real innovation factory was born! We tested the new approach by accompanying the first 3 ideas, and we also developed user guides, training materials and all relevant models, so that our client could now run it alone and efficiently.

      • Construction of a digital innovation strategy for a pharmaceutical company

        Our customer, a pharmaceutical company, needed support in building the strategy of its digital innovation department, as well as in defining a work organization that would encourage the generation and dissemination of innovation to the rest of the company.

        To achieve this, our team set up an iterative work process, consisting of several working sessions designed to feed, challenge and structure the thinking process. We were thus able to define the strategic axes of innovation (customer experience, digital activation, etc.), and the objectives and working methods of the company’s digital innovation department. Following validation by the management committee, we also developed the communication campaign for these new directions throughout the company.

      • Creation of an ideation workshop to generate new ideas for the development of an innovative product for a pharmaceutical company

        Based on a long-term strategic vision for our customer, a leading pharmaceutical company in the field of anesthetics, we thought about which innovation projects to set up, defining the specifications and needs of the various stakeholders. To this end, we designed and carried out a tailor-made ideation workshop to generate a maximum number of ideas for innovative product development.

        To prepare for the workshop, our team interviewed key players in the company’s management team to define the specifications and define the various needs and points of attention. We then conducted and facilitated the workshop using various ideation methods inspired by design thinking, involving different operational and strategic teams (marketing, R&D, packaging, etc.).

        Following this ideation session, we sorted and categorized the various ideas obtained according to their level of response to the various needs, but also according to their regulatory and industrial feasibility. This enabled our customer to identify several potential avenues of innovation, with different degrees of maturity/feasibility, and to embark on innovation portfolio management.

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        Tell us about your uncharted territory

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        To go further

        Founded in 1993, Alcimed is an innovation and new business consulting firm, specializing in innovation driven sectors: life sciences (healthcare, biotech, agrifood), energy, environment, mobility, chemicals, materials, cosmetics, aeronautics, space and defence.

        Our purpose? Helping both private and public decision-makers explore and develop their uncharted territories: new technologies, new offers, new geographies, possible futures, and new ways to innovate.

        Located across eight offices around the world (France, Europe, Singapore and the United States), our team is made up of 220 highly-qualified, multicultural and passionate explorers, with a blended science/technology and business culture.

        Our dream? To build a team of 1,000 explorers, to design tomorrow’s world hand in hand with our clients.

        Too often, business innovation is a set of disorganized initiatives that are poorly or not at all aligned with the company’s strategy. Building an innovation strategy aims above all to focus people and processes on the real creation of value for the company. The type of innovation desired, the targeted competitive advantage, the involvement of internal teams, customers and external partners, the management of an innovation portfolio, the articulation of the development of innovations on a daily basis, … are all questions to be addressed.

        It’s important to define an innovation strategy to maintain and improve your market position, while creating value and standing out from the competition. And it has to be a real strategy, in line with the company’s ambitions and values, to avoid the over-accumulation of disparate initiatives with little added value / valorisation in fine.

        It also helps to foster a culture of innovation within your company, i.e. to encourage agility and initiative by capitalizing on the skills and knowledge of your teams!