As one of our guiding principles to contribute positively to our community and environment, we dedicated a service day to assist the Foothills Animal Shelter. Sopheon employee volunteers walked the dogs, cleaned the facility, and made delicious pumpkin dog treats. Read More

Every serious innovation program should have some form of system in place to solicit and find ideas that will help the organization to achieve its goals. These systems, if used properly are very effective at finding nuggets or premature concepts that can be fed into the innovation funnel for... Read More

This is the first in a three-part commentary addressing how consumer firms can leverage a new approach to “Agile” innovation to reduce their cycle time from consumer insight to market launch, and create a steadier stream of higher-value new products. In this post, I'll describe how the current... Read More

For the past three decades manufacturing firms have embraced supply chain management as the backbone of a scale-driven, competitive, and increasingly global economy. The value of a streamlined process was first demonstrated when Sakichi Toyoda implemented the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the... Read More

Lately, it seems like most innovation writers scorn sustaining innovation, those incremental product changes that enable marketers to flag their products as New and Improved! Apple is everyone's poster child for its mastery of disruptive innovation and its ability to repeatedly invent new markets.... Read More

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Since the very beginning in the 1980s, Stage-Gate has evolved many times. At the beginning, Stage-Gate was a process to ensure project teams did their projects right. One important finding from the early days has been the significant emphasis on the early or “homework” stages. Over time, the gating... Read More

I have heard some great stories over the last few years about how companies have leveraged top-down resource planning and “what if” portfolio optimization techniques to quickly and more confidently make decisions that deliver better product, portfolio and shareholder value. In the past, companies... Read More

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It's fair weather season once again in Minnesota. In preparation for the auto racing season, I was writing my to-do list of activities needed to perform on my Mazda Miata in preparation for the autocross racing events. I've got wheels and tires, suspension parts, radio, timing electronics, trailer... Read More