Innovation remains the key to recovery post-COVID19.

Innovation is important, but where do you start? By understanding where your capacity to innovate intersects with opportunity. A true competitive advantage assessment accomplishes this, and so much more.

Understanding your innovation portfolio mix is essential to long-term competitive advantage. By accurately placing your Research & Development (R&D) and innovation initiatives on the continuum of innovation (Incremental, Sustaining, Radical & Disruptive Innovation), you will be better positioned to allocate resources on the things you truly value. Along the way you will organically identify strategic opportunities to Buy, Build, Partner, Invest your way to sustained competitive advantage.

A proper ASSESS approach is an objective, qualitative and quantitative assessment of the full spectrum of innovative ideas in your organization. By using our proprietary process, you will quickly look within your industry and outside your industry in order to identify First-Mover advantage opportunities. The process begins by answering the 16 questions you need to answer before allocating resources to any R&D project.

1. Technical Analysis Use publicly available documents like white papers, industry trade publications, peer reviewed journals, and technical presentations to answer fundamental questions like:  

Are you leading the market in terms of Technology Readiness Level? What is the magnitude of the impact of the technology on your industry? Are there other industries with an equal or greater need than your industry’s need for a solution? Are there competing technologies that are better suited to fit your need?

2. Intellectual Property Analysis Leverage free or paid global patent databases to identify technical advances being made within and outside your industry. Leverage the data to answer fundamental questions like:

Is your solution already being pursued by another entity, industry vendor, or competitor? Is another industry investing heavily in a technical solution? Are other industries filing blocking IP that may create a Freedom to Operate issue for you? Are there still opportunities to secure patent protection and a limited monopoly for your efforts?

3. Market Analysis Market information on vendors developing solutions can be found in public reports, financial statements for publicly traded companies, company web pages, press releases, and more. The truth is every time a company does something innovative, it leaves a bread crumb. By following these bread crumbs, you will be able to answer fundamental questions like:

Who are the players poised to own the market? What markets are likely to be impacted by this technology? What is the revenue of these markets and Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)? Is your industry actively developing and adopting this technology? Are other market players pursuing Buy, Build, Partner, or Invest decisions to access technical know-how? 

4. Competitor Analysis Market information on competitors likely already exists within your company. For many, the challenge is capturing the information in one document and interpreting the data. If you do not have the data readily available, you can find all the information you need from your competitor’s web page, financial statements, presentations to investors/shareholders, case studies, and the like. Once the information has been gathered, you will be able to answer questions like:

Are your competitors pursuing this technology? If so, what is their TRL? Is their strategy generally First Mover, Fast Follower, Fast Adopter, or Market Lagger? What innovation tools might your competitor use to access the technology (Buy, Build, Partner, or Invest)? 

5. Conclusions By placing these answers on a continuum of “Most Favorable” to “Most Negative,” you can convert qualitative information into a quantitative score. Along the way you will have identified opportunities to accelerate your efforts through partnerships both within and outside your industry.