Peter Merrill’s knowledge and experience in the world of innovation extends from an early career in R & D through a wide range of design experience to being Chief Executive of design led brand in Europe.  He will guide you through innovation in your business.

Innovation Consultant

Peter Merrill is an Innovation Consultant who brings many years of practical experience from his early years in Research and Development to being Chief Executive of a Designer Brand to enabling companies such as IBM, 3M and Blackberry develop their capabilities. If you are interested in Business Innovation we can provide this in a number of areas:

1. Innovation Gap Analysis

A Gap Analysis will tell you what actions you need to take to become an Innovative Organization. We will identify your Innovation ‘Gaps’ using the globally accepted standard on Innovation Management, ISO 56001. We do this by interviewing key persons in your organization and engaging them into innovative thinking. 

We will provide detailed notes from those interviews and we will deliver a comprehensive report with an analysis of each area of the business. We will show the actions you need to take, together with guidance on those actions.  

The report will be grouped into ten areas including Leadership, Strategy, Culture, Processes and Metrics and include a priority list for action. We will then focus you on the issues that require attention for you to become an innovative organization. 

2. Developing an Innovation Strategy 

“Strategy” comes from the Greek stratēgia, or “art of the general,” and is “a high-level plan to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty”. Your Innovation Strategy will shape your future and must be agile. You will need to pivot as new knowledge is gained.

We will lead a SWOT Analysis with you, identifying the external and internal issues that will affect your innovation strategy. We then will help you decide the types of innovations you wish to pursue, whether products, services, incremental or radical. 

We will then help you set your strategic innovation objectives and milestones, together with the resources required using a VUCA Risk Analysis. This will initiate your Strategic Plan for Innovation. An agile strategy is essential to move forward into the world of innovation.

3. Developing an Innovation Culture 

One of the most frequently asked questions about Innovation is ‘How do we create a Culture of Innovation’? People are really asking is ‘How do we create a culture of creativity’ knowing creativity flies in the face of the classic execution culture which delivers highly predictable results. 

We will help you develop creativity through activities such as creative problem solving and developing behaviors such as exploration, collaboration and experimentation which are so essential for creativity. We will help you address risk aversion. 

But that is only part of the story. An innovation culture consists of both a creative culture and an execution culture and this makes an innovation culture complex. An organization structure must allow that co-existence. We will guide you into the best choices on innovation structure. You can Spin Off innovation as a separate business, develop Self-Managed Teams within the business or Sub-contract or partner. These decisions will become part of your innovation strategy. 

We will conduct a culture assessment that enables you to identify the aspects of your culture that require attention. 

4. Innovation Culture Assessment 

We will conduct an Innovation Culture Assessment through a series of interviews with key persons. Typical questions will be, ‘Do we act quickly on opportunities?’, ‘Do we like risk?’ and ‘Do we change course quickly’. Creative behaviors and willingness to change involve risk-taking, experimentation and learning from failure. Execution behaviors involve high focus, being results driven and strong project management. You may need to develop execution behaviors as well as creativity.

We will provide a report showing aspects of culture you need to address. The report is grouped into nine areas which include Exploration, Collaboration, Ideation, Experimentation and Commercialization.

Culture development is a long term activity. We will help you develop a long term plan but also help you to focus on areas that need immediate attention. The Innovation Culture creates the platform from which you can develop your innovation competences.

5. Competence Assessment and Development 

Too often organizations show innovation as a single competence. Innovation Competence should be identified in detail. Critical Innovation competences include. 

  1. Market and Product research to find opportunities

  2. Understanding Complexity to operate in an Ambiguous and Uncertain world. 

  3. ‎Emotional Intelligence to work well with others

  4. Collaboration to leverage collective knowledge

  5. Creativity to find radical solutions

  6. Critical thinking to pick the best solutions

  7. Agile Project Management to deliver solutions

We will conduct a competency assessment which will help you identify where people they will make their best contribution to innovation. We will develop Creative and Execution competences in parallel with the development of the innovation process.

These new competences will give you the ability to compete in the world of Volatility, Complexity, Ambiguity and Uncertainty. 

6. Identification of Areas of Opportunity 

Innovation assessments that we conduct on organizations show that one of the commonest problems is the failure to separate opportunity and solution. Many people think innovation starts with a great new idea, but in reality it starts with an opportunity. 

We will show you how to identify opportunities through methods such as customer feedback, ethnographic studies and competitor research to find unmet customer needs. We will show you the subtle questions to ask potential customers such as ‘where do you waste time’ or ‘where are you having difficulty? We will help you find Innovation Opportunities in areas such as declining offerings, new market opportunities or new technologies. 

We will help calculate and agree the risks associated with the opportunities and set objectives. We will help you create the Innovation Portfolio which Opportunities are fed into. Portfolio Management is critical for deployment of the Innovation Strategic plan. The portfolio enables leadership to monitor progress and adjust strategy. New opportunities are exciting and start your innovation process. 

7. Developing an Innovation Process 

A poll published in Harvard Business Review showed 84% of leaders said innovation was extremely important but 94% were dissatisfied with results and this is most often due to lack of an innovation process. Many people think there is no process for Innovation but there are very definite steps.

We will show you how to develop your own innovation process. At the start of the process we help you explore to find opportunities. We then help you develop solutions, through creative problem solving. We will help you create many alternative solutions, find the value each will create, and then select the best solutions. Selection will be based on time and cost to deliver as well as the degree of certainty of the solution working. 

This is a lot more than a design process and we will bring our extensive experience to help you develop an innovation process that fits with your organization. Your innovation process will also give you that important ‘early win’ as you change to an innovative organization.

8. Creative Problem Solving or ‘Ideation’ 

This is the most exciting step in the innovation process. Traditional problem solving simply makes an existing process more efficient or reliable. Creative Problem solving finds an entirely new product, process or service. Often called ‘Ideation’ or idea creation, this unlocks our subconscious knowledge. 

We will help you build your ideation teams which will need diverse people to provide collective knowledge and disruptors to challenge solutions. We will develop your abilities in alternative ideation methods providing a number of techniques to harness people’s collective knowledge. We will run multiple sessions allowing time between sessions and often the ‘epiphany’ will come unexpectedly when people relax. 

We will help you select the preferred solution after analyzing data on time, cost and risk, together with assessment of supplier capabilities, your own competencies and the ability of a competitor to copy. Ideation will take you into radical and innovative solutions for the complex challenges of today

9. Innovation Tools 

Archimedes said ‘give me a lever long enough and I will move the world’. Tools help you leverage your competences, work efficiently and get quantifiable results. We provide a wide range of tools and examples are: 

  • SWOT Analysis

  • Culture Assessment

  • VUCA Risk Analysis

  • Objectives Matrix

  • Portfolio Management

  • Self Assessment

  • Customer Experience Mapping

  • Ideation Methods 

  • KPI Chart

  • Value Proposition

 

Tools are required at the many decision points in managing innovation. 

We will help you select which tools are most useful and we will show how to use those tools in your own organization. We give will you tools which are easy to understand and easy to use.

 

10. Innovation Metrics 

‘If you don’t keep score, it’s only practice’. ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure’. You hear many sayings about the importance of measurement. However, you don’t measure everything, or you will drown in a sea of data. It is vital to focus on measuring where we will gain data and information and so create knowledge to enable good decisions. We will help you select metrics that matter.

We help you set long term measurable objectives for innovation and high level indicators such as RoI from new products, cost savings and new IP value. You need these when you develop strategy and they give you important knowledge about outcomes. 

However, they do not drive innovation and we need indicators, such as the effectiveness of enablers, employee engagement and number of ideas developed to drive these future outcomes. We will explain and guide you into these very different metrics

We will ensure your Measurement Plan is focused and that data is analyzed to enable future decisions. A measurement plan that is focused and easily understood will enable you to drive innovation outcomes.