This document provides an overview of how to structure an effective innovation process in 3 parts: 1. It explains that an innovation strategy helps companies outsmart competitors by defining a vision, mission, and goals and innovating the business model and product portfolio. 2. It outlines the steps to develop great products and services, including interacting with customers, formulating insights, generating ideas, developing propositions, and creating a roadmap. 3. It discusses marketing and sales innovation, such as innovating communication approaches based on customer emotions and reinventing sales tools to focus on value instead of costs.

1. 10 Years SunIdee:
sharing innovation best practices
Part 1:
How to structure your innovation
process
© SUNIDEE 2012

2. 10 Years SunIdee: sharing innovation best practices
We want to share our most valuable learnings with you throughout the year
It has been an incredible journey, working on inspiring innovation projects for leading brands. Projects that inspired us
and that inspired our clients. In addition to working on innovation projects, we function as a sparring partner for
innovation managers world-wide in a joint effort to help their organization reach the next level in innovation. In doing so
we have had the opportunity to try out many new tools and methodologies and develop them to perfection.
To celebrate our 10th anniversary we would like to share our most valuable learnings with you in several presentations,
each containing 10 slides on a specific topic. These presentations will be released throughout the year.
This first presentation explains the basic principles of setting up an effective innovation process. It provides you with
guidelines how to use these principles in your organization. In the following presentations, we will zoom in on these
basic principles.
the bright way to innovate!

3. Innovation is the process you undertake to
create something new
Innovation can be applied to almost anything: products, services, business models, processes,
and even organizations.
SunIdee focuses on innovating companies’ offerings. Within this focus we have identified 4
levels of innovation:
Strategy! Product! Service ! Marketing
innovation! innovation! innovation! innovation!
Long term effect Mid term effect Short term effect
the bright way to innovate!

4. An innovation strategy helps you to outsmart
your competitors
Defining a clear innovation strategy will enable you to seize new
business opportunities before others do.
Step 1: raising the bar
• Vision. In your vision you state how you think the world will change in the future.
Understanding consumer, technology and market trends are crucial elements for
creating an inspiring vision.
• Mission. When you have established your vision on the future, you define your role
in this future world. Exploring different scenarios helps to create a future-proof
mission. Understanding opportunities and risks and having the guts to make bold
statements are critical success factors for an inspiring mission.
• Ambition. Make your mission actionable by translating it to SMART (Specific,
Measurable, Ambitious, Relevant and Time-specific) goals. A good understanding
of how to make things happen in your organization is required to set ambitious yet
achievable targets.
the bright way to innovate!

5. An innovation strategy helps you to outsmart
your competitors
Step 2: innovating your business model
• Investigate new or different ways to add value and make money. Innovating your
business model will have a huge impact on your organization, so prepare to
overcome some resistance. Visually mapping out your business model and letting
yourself become inspired by success stories of other companies are essential for
seeing the overall picture and identifying new opportunities.
Step 3: restructuring your product / service portfolio
• Understanding your customers’ needs and using this to create a portfolio
framework will become the basis of your customer-focused product portfolio.
• Plot existing products and services in the portfolio framework and define a plan of
action to strengthen your portfolio: reposition existing products, start new product
development projects and discontinue products / projects that do not add value for
the customer.
• Create communication materials to communicate the new customer-focused
product portfolio.
• Setting-up a multidisciplinary team and involving some of your best customers are
critical success factors for creating a strong customer-focused product portfolio.
the bright way to innovate!

6. Bring your innovation strategy to life by
developing great products and services
The right process helps you to create truly great innovations that:
• meet a (latent) customer need
• have an edge that sets them apart from the competition
Step 1: interact with your customer / consumer
• Forget about outsourcing market research to an agency. Train your team to make them
capable of talking to customers (e.g. asking open-ended questions), visit customers in their
own environment and see the world through their eyes. In B2C, on-line communities can
prove an inspiring way to learn from and interact with consumers.
the bright way to innovate!

7. Bring your innovation strategy to life by
developing great products and services
Step 2: formulate customer / consumer insights.
• Summarize your customers’ most important needs and aspirations in clear
statements. Involve your customers in co-creation sessions to fine-tune insights
and validate insights in a quantitative test.
Step 3: generate ideas
• The best ideas meet a (latent) customer need and have an edge that set them
apart from the competition. To find the right mix of these aspects requires a two-
way approach in idea generation, both from a customer as well as a product
perspective. Involving a multidisciplinary team and suppliers in ideation significantly
improves the variety and quality of ideas.
Step 4: develop propositions
• Bring an idea for a new product or service to the next level by taking the customer
insight as a starting point and then define the key benefit, reasons to believe, brand
fit and differentiator. Keep in mind that a strong proposition is single minded and
focuses on added value for the customer. Adding visuals makes your proposition
more concrete and ready for testing with customers.
Step 5: create a roadmap
• Plan your different propositions in time, create a story to connect the different
propositions and create a visual overview to easily communicate your innovation
roadmap to colleagues. Involving key stakeholders in the process helps to create
buy-in and enables you to make a concrete plan of action ready for implementation.
the bright way to innovate!

8. Boost your commercial success through
innovative marketing and sales
Most companies do not get the most value from their existing product
portfolios. Innovative marketing and sales offer good opportunities to
quickly improve your business results.
Step 1: marketing & communication innovation
• The approach of innovation for marketing and communication is similar to the steps as
explained for product and service innovation (see last slide). The difference lies in what
you look for when interacting with customers. With product / service innovation you will
be looking for more practical issues, wishes and needs while for branding / marketing /
communication innovation your focus will be more on emotional triggers.
Step 2: sales innovation
C
• Completely reinvent the way your sales force interacts with your customers by
developing inspiring sales tools that facilitate talking about value instead of costs.
• Especially in B2B there are many forces influencing decision makers. Creating a value
net helps to obtain an overview of these forces and helps to find new opportunities to
market and sell your solution.
the bright way to innovate!

9. Carefully structuring your approach has
clear benefits for your business
Structuring your innovation process might seem like a no-brainer. However most
organizations have not mastered the skill of managing innovation well. Doing so will
offer you many advantages. To name only a few:
• Use resources more effectively
Reduce the amount of projects: better insight in the opportunities that lay ahead leads to better decision
making.
• Shorten time to market
Avoid pointless discussions and endless iterations: move through the innovation funnel at high speed.
• Create a rock solid positioning in the market
No more lucky shots, but a focused and continuous effort.
the bright way to innovate!

10. Contact!to learn more? Come talk to us!
Want
SUNIDEE
Prinsengracht 739-741
1017 JX, Amsterdam
The Netherlands
t: +31 (0)20 6244291
e: info@sunidee.com
www.sunidee.com
the bright way to innovate!