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Greetings,
The
Innovator’s Toolkit
is a new, valuable bi-monthly newsletter that will help
product professionals and executives improve
pre-development activities and launch new products
faster—and more
successfully than ever before. Each issue offers
concise, practical pre-development tools to assist you
in accelerating new
product discovery,
assessment, decision-making and planning.
Have an idea or
topic of interest for a future article?
Please tell
us about it.
| IN
THIS ISSUE |
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| The
VISION MOLECULE™:
Create
Actionable
Vision |
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 “If
you don't know where you are going, that's where
you'll end up.”
—Yogi
Berra
Forward
thinking is central to all planning, and it
makes perfect sense that to successfully plan
for new products, you must first have a specific
destination.
Although
the word “vision”
has been overused and abused, it’s still the
best term to describe where a corporation,
business unit or product team is headed. Jack Welch drove GE to unprecedented
success with a clear strategic vision used to
drive specific corporate activities in the
intended direction. Of course, not everyone
needs to generate a vision for a $300B company,
but the same concept can be equally powerful to
drive the success of a new market entry or
growing a product line.
This
article describes the Vision
Molecule™—a tool for translating your
organization’s vision into strategic
initiatives
and measurable
goals to help your team drive planning
success.
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| 30-Second
Briefing |
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 Q:
I’m
an engineering manager for a privately run
enterprise software company. Our CEO is always
changing his mind about which products and projects
to pursue. It seems that every time he meets with
a potential customer or reads something from the
latest guru we change directions. Do you have any
suggestions for how to manage this?A:
First
of all, good luck. This is, indeed, a common and
difficult situation, but
before
you can offer solutions,
it’s important to see the challenge from the
CEO’s perspective. For example, if
your company is
financially
challenged,
short-term revenue will trump longer-term
strategy. However, let’s assume that this is not the case
and there is a tendency for your CEO to focus on
short-term opportunities and the
Strategy du Jour.
In our experience, a short-term focus occurs
for two
fundamental reasons:
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| New
Offering! - Finance for Engineering Leaders |
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In
our continued effort to improve collaboration
between the various functions in technology-driven
companies, we have developed a new course to
help engineering leaders effectively work with
marketing and senior management. This 2-day workshop
is initially being offered at the Oregon Graduate
Institute on June 15th
and 16th.
As
any good negotiator will tell you, sharing a common
language is one of the first and most powerful steps
toward building effective teams. We have
developed this course to teach engineering leaders the language of business - Finance. This will
enable leaders to discuss new products, programs,
and R&D projects based on the value they bring
customers and how their projects will affect the
company’s bottom line.
Some
of the questions that will be answered in this workshop include:
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| Join
us at the Front End Conference
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Planning
Innovations Group will be exhibiting at the 3rd
Annual Front End of Innovation conference in
Boston May 23-25. We are pleased to offer
subscribers of The Innovator's Toolkit a 15%
discount off the registration fee.
The
conference will focus on the latest tools and
methodology to deliver profitable innovation and
is co-produced by the Institute for
International Research (IIR) and the Product
Development and Management Association (PDMA).
The conference will feature Jack Welch, Former
CEO of GE.
To
obtain your discount code, please email Ed
de la Fuente. To
learn more about the conference, visit www.frontendofinnovation.com.
If
you're attending the conference, please visit our booth to learn
how Planning Innovations helps companies navigate the
front end of product development. You'll see why we
consider this area the next frontier of
business improvement.
We
look forward to seeing you there!
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Welcome
New Subscribers!
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Welcome
again to The
Innovator's Toolkit.
First,
we’d like to welcome our new subscribers—and
thank everyone for the tremendous feedback we’ve received on our first
edition. As a member of our newsletter community,
please feel free to contact us anytime to let us know what topics
you’d like us to address or questions you’d
like us to answer. Your input is valuable, and we
always look forward to hearing from you.
In
this second issue, we introduce the Vision
Molecule™, a powerful tool to help you map
out specific goals to help you drive your planning
process. Our experience with clients has proven
time and again the need to know where you want to
go before setting out to build a product roadmap.
We’re
sharing this tool with you because we have been
very successful using this tool to set direction
for project teams, help build consensus and
create an innovative vision. We hope you’ll find
it valuable, too.
Best
regards—and good luck,
Ed
de la Fuente
Managing
Director
Planning
Innovations Group
Find
out more about Planning Innovations...
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