Successfully introducing new products into the marketplace is a notoriously challenging endeavor for most manufacturers even as they promote the importance of innovation to their companies' growth. And simply having a good idea is not enough. "It is easy to have ideas; there's no shortage of them out there," says George Coulston, vice president, global research, development and engineering for tooling producer Kennametal. "It's much more difficult to define an opportunity, build a business case around that opportunity, really vet out customer requirements and then work your way through all the commercialization issues."
Indeed, opportunities to misplay innovation extend well beyond the ideation phase, but so, too, do opportunities for improvement. The challenge, then, is to translate those opportunities to misplay innovation into opportunities to improve the business side of innovation.
