Growth Equation Framework – Leveraging Flow to Drive Growth through Innovation

If you work in a company that manufactures highly engineered products, there’s a good chance you are making a sizable investment in new product innovation. U.S. companies alone invest over $280 billion in R&D annually. We hear innovation success stories all the time from companies like Apple and Nvidia. But back here on this physical plane, it’s a different story with only 55% of companies seeing the kind of return they expect on that investment.

So what can mere mortals like us do to get more out of that investment and fly a bit closer to the sun like the top performers? Quite a lot actually.

There are four levers you can pull to increase your growth through new product innovation. These levers come together to make up our Growth Equation Framework:

The four levers of the Growth Equation Framework are:

1. Frequency or flow: The number of new product programs that you launch each quarter, year, etc.
2. Predictability: The percentage of new products that you launch when initially promised and with all of the features initially requested.
3. Time-to-Revenue: The cycle time it takes your new products to go from proposal to generating cash flow. Time-to-Revenue is in the denominator so it should be decreasing.
4. Market Impact: The cash flow or throughput increase that your new products deliver.

This article will focus on the first lever -

Launch Flow/Frequency

This article will focus on the first lever, Launch Flow/Frequency which measures how fast and effective you are at bringing new products through all of the steps required for launch. The better you are at managing innovation resources and navigating the internal and external obstacles, the more new products you can launch each period.

The biggest impediments to flow are.....Read the rest of my Industry Week article here