How can companies digitally transform product innovation to improve the way they conceive, design, and develop products to improve profitability and achieve or sustain market leadership? We surveyed over 150 companies to find out. Our new survey report, Improve Product Innovation and Profitability through Increased Digital Maturity, shares how digital product innovation is fundamentally reshaping the industrial landscape and creates an opportunity for industrial companies to leapfrog their competition. Companies that digitalize are gaining competitive advantages, disrupting markets, and challenging the status quo by driving new levels of innovation, agility, product performance, and quality.
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To see how your company stacks up against the leaders in innovation, take our Digital Innovation Assessment.
Table of Contents- Digitalizing Product Innovation
- The Digital Innovation Imperative
- The Business of Innovation is Challenging
- Innovating and Developing Products is Hard
- Identifying the Top Innovators
- Top Performers have Higher Digital Innovation Maturity
- Innovation Leaders Leverage Digital Twins
- Higher Performing Innovators Employ a Digital Thread
- Top Performers Exhibit Digital Manufacturing Maturity
- Top Innovators Adopt Digital Innovation Platforms
- Conclusions
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
The Digital Innovation Imperative
Digitalization is Disrupting Everything
The message from strategic advisors is clear. Go digital or die. Andrew Vaz, Global Chief Innovation Officer for Deloitte, predicts that “In today’s world of exponential change, organizations that get too comfortable with the status quo are at major risk of disruption.” Accenture’s CEO, Pierre Nanterme, shares that this is already happening, “Digital is the main reason just over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000.” This is a fundamental shift that can’t be taken lightly.
Digitalization is Mandatory
Digitalization is impacting industrial companies regardless of whether they produce a piece of equipment, a device, a vehicle, a marine vessel, a consumer good, a building, or some other physical item. We believe this shift will have major consequences. Our research concludes that “the manufacturing industry is changing rapidly and companies have to digitalize or risk losing their market position.”
Digital Product Innovation is Compelling
Many companies struggle, however, with where to begin their digitalization journey. Innovation is a smart place to start. Few things impact a company’s bottom line more than the results of their product innovation and product development processes. In fact, three-quarters of executive respondents report that product innovation is one of the most important factors impacting their company’s success and profitability. What could be a more strategic place to begin?
Top Performers have Higher Digital Innovation Maturity
Analyzing Top Performers’ Innovation Advantages
Researchers used the performance bands to understand how digital maturity correlates with innovation performance. In addition to financial performance, Top Performers report higher capabilities compared to their competitors in their ability to:
- Get new / changed products to market quickly
- Design innovative products
- Meet market cost requirements
- Develop high-performance products
- Deliver high-quality / reliable products
Analyzing Top Performers’ Digital Innovation Maturity
Researchers also used the performance bands to compare the approaches Top Performers take to product innovation. The research finds that Top Performers are more digital than Others, specifically that they have more mature capabilities in four pillars of digital product innovation maturity:
- Digital Twin
- Digital Thread
- Digital Manufacturing
- Digital Innovation Platform
Conclusions
Industry is Transforming
Digitalization is fundamentally transforming the manufacturing industries. The shift is allowing manufacturers to improve quality, agility, and innovation to disrupt their markets. Companies that embrace this change will find new opportunities and distance themselves from their competition. Those that continue to focus solely on tactical issue will fall behind.
Top Performing Innovators have Higher Digital Maturity
Digital product innovation is critical to company success and profitability. Digitalizing product innovation helps companies better bring new / changed products to market, design innovative products, meet market cost requirements, develop high performance products, and deliver high quality / reliable products. The end result is significantly greater revenue and margin growth. Top Performers are achieving superior levels of performance with higher digital maturity, including increased adoption of digital twin, digital thread, and digital manufacturing techniques.
Support Digital Maturity with a Digital Product Innovation Platform
Top Performers support digital approaches like the digital twin with digital technology. These leading companies are digitalizing data and processes to improve product innovation performance. These capabilities are available from digital innovation platforms that combine digital data and processes with the right capabilities to design, optimize, and validate products. In addition, these platforms bridge the gap to help companies ramp up production effectively and efficiently.
Digital Opportunities Extend Beyond Product Development
The analysis from this survey investigates the benefit of improving product innovation and product development through digitalization. The benefits of digitalization, and digital innovation platforms, go well beyond this into the full lifecycle of a product. Digitalizing product innovation is a great place to start and build a foundation to grow on.
This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. A link to download the full report is available above.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us using the “Contact” link below.