Conference Background

With pressure building to churn out more successful new products in less time with fewer resources, many companies have chosen the safe path – often investing more in product line extensions rather than innovating truly new products. And although this generally means less risk, it also more often than not yields significantly fewer financial returns.

Therefore, companies looking to elevate their innovative efforts, sustain competitive advantage and develop the next big product are taking a more serious look at the fuzzy front end – specifically, how to map out their ideation process, add structure, ensure that new ideas with merit are not overlooked and measure their innovation capabilities.

With so much riding on a company’s ability to achieve and sustain rapid innovation, Management Roundtable’s 9^th Annual Metrics Conference, Product Development and R&D Metrics: Metrics from Ideation to Commercialization, September 28 – 30, 2004 in Chicago will examine how leading metrics experts and advanced industry practitioners are deploying metrics further upstream to capture new product ideas faster and speed innovation efforts.  By participating in this session, you will learn how to:

• ensure that new product ideas are captured and reach the decision-making level for review
   

• choose between (and leverage) new opportunities
   

• develop a repeatable ideation process and measure your innovation capacity
   

• evaluate and effectively manage your IP – how to extract value from your non-commercialized IP
   

• assess internal versus external resource capacity – when is it more feasible and profitable to partner?
   

• engage in successful co-development efforts and measure partnership performance from the onset

However, to fully realize the benefits of a well-defined ideation process, you must also have a key set of metrics in place to drive the execution of your portfolio and ensure that the products with the biggest potential payback get properly resourced.  This year’s event will offer a special track examining best practices on metrics for pipeline and portfolio management – specifically focused on:

• how to more accurately gauge your resource capacity – know what resources you have and when they are available
   

• how to determine the value of R&D and other intangible assets
   

• how to identify where the real economic leverage is in your portfolio —metrics for portfolio analysis
   

• key strategies to help you more dynamically allocate (and reallocate) resources

This year’s program format will include keynote addresses, industry implementation/how-to case studies, facilitated Q&A, pre-conference workshops and networking sessions – affording you multiple opportunities to interact with speakers, metrics experts and conference participants to ensure that your individual questions can be answered.

If you have any questions about this event,
please contact:
Tracey Kimball, Conference Program Manager
email: [email protected]
tel: 781-891-8080 ext. 214