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Budget Planning for Innovation During Changing Economic Times

As the budgeting season kicks off, the C-Suites are issuing guidelines and financial targets despite unpredictable market conditions. Their goals for success lie in the adaptability and strength of their resources across the Innovation Portfolio.  From the Harvard Business Review article “An Agile Approach to Budgeting for Uncertain Times,” here are the curated questions your team should ask while planning for projects in the year ahead:

What are the outcomes that will be most important for strategic success?

Where should resources go? For example, running the business (operations) versus changing the business (innovations)?

Within innovation, what’s the right balance of resources going toward incremental innovation versus breakthroughs?

How much should go to various customer segments?

How much should go to different sales and distribution channels, geographies, business units, brands, or product lines?

How much of our technology resources is properly spent on keeping current systems running versus developing new features or improving architecture?

What hypotheses must be true for these resource allocation strategies to work, and how can we test them most quickly and efficiently?

Once your leadership has explored these questions, executives responsible for innovative outcomes should reevaluate resources to achieve the most resilient, calculated risk model for the future. We also suggest you review:

Innovation Strategy Consulting

Internal Resources and Innovative Teams

Technology Scouting Services

External Challenge / Open Innovation 

Innovation Resource Management Software

Innovation Conference Education & Networking

Professional Affiliations & Memberships

Lab Facilities or Accelerator Lab Spaces

Go-to-Market Sales & Marketing Budget

SME Consulting Fees, Internships & New Hires

Accounting for Variation in the Innovation Portfolio

Ezassi connects your C-Suite, R&D, and Innovation Teams with continuous innovation management tools to seize valuable market share of adjacent technologies and obtain future opportunities in disruptive products and services, despite uncertain economic times. Your business ecosystem is defined, strengthened, and synergized to align with a planned budget, but it can also pivot or adjust when changing economies dictate.

Leverage technology to innovate faster through open innovation. Curate an expert network of solvers and connect with strategic partners in the field. Ezassi Technology Scouters will help you to build these collaborations.

 

Synchronize corporate strategy with a robust innovation strategy and include R&D costs in your budget planning. If necessary, replace a full-time employee with a smaller, variable cost for technology discovery services with Ezassi.

 

Expenditure on R&D projects is rarely confined to one fiscal year, and it can be several years before a new product is finally manufactured. By breaking down the R&D budget into product-related investment streams, the link between revenue growth and R&D spend can be modeled. If your Innovation Portfolio needs to grow, having a resource management tool to track the ecosystem is beneficial. Ezassi’s project platform will bring continuity and collaboration across your project teams.

 

Analyze risk through comparing competitors and trends of the future market. R&D labs traditionally focus on solving for technical risk only. Technical risk is about whether a company can create new technologies and make them work. In contrast, market risk is about whether customers will buy and use the product, even if the technology works. Innovation needs to solve for both, and Ezassi’s datamining tools include global metrics to better help make these decisions.

A constantly evolving Innovation Portfolio is comprised of a collaborative group of companies, skilled assets, new technologies, and project pipelines. Let’s Talk about how to better connect these resources.

Innovation Resource Management to Support your Business Ecosystem

91% of CEOs agree that business ecosystems have increased the resiliency of their company. The efficient management of these partnerships is the differentiator between successful businesses and those that struggle in turbulent economic times.

A recent survey from consulting group EY (EY Ecosystem Study) shows a 12.9% cost reduction and 13.3% rise in incremental earnings when at least one ecosystem business model is implemented to drive innovation and strategic collaboration.

At Ezassi we use our proprietary tools and method to offer technology discovery, ideation, and innovation resource management designed to unearth new, disruptive solutions and innovators in less than half the time and cost with top results.

Our tool can assist your R&D Department who’ve been asked to deliver the same quality level of competitive tech discovery but with a smaller team or budget. Ezassi’s Technology Scouting and Landscaping Services can also replace a traditional R&D FTE through outsourced tech discovery to our trained team of researchers. 

If you are seeking a flat rate cost to identify subject matter experts in a specific field, facilitate outreach to start-up partnerships, or crowdsource ideas for a technical challenge in your industry, trust in the team at Ezassi to guide you throughout your innovation horizon.

Innovation Budget Planning and ROI Assessment [ROI2 Infographic]

The infographic below contains the three benefits of innovation through technology scouting on your portfolio management bottom line and budgeting.

Cost Savings – Technology Scouting saves time and adds needed workflow efficiency with full time R&D employees to help reduce costs through improved supply chain and production capabilities.

Revenue Opportunity – Positive Return on Innovation Investment with increased speed to market and new products and services through innovative tech discovery.

Risk Mitigation – Identify emerging technologies before your competitors and eliminate future obsolete tech from your portfolio to maintain or gain market share.

How will the most competitive companies succeed in ever-changing economic times?

Adaptable synergy across an organized system of innovative problem solvers.   

  • Ezassi provides access to data-driven insights to help chart your course into the future
  • Our project platform provides the power to partner and collaborate across the technology ecosystem, driving innovative ideas forward
  • Innovation Resource Management tools give your company the advantage to deliver beneficial worldwide innovations 

 

In summary, the benefits of innovating with technology scouting will reduce costs, increase revenue, and mitigate risk in your business. Develop a competitive strategy for your portfolio of products & services by partnering with the Ezassi Innovation Solutions team.

Let’s Talk About Planning an Increase in ROI2

Collaboration & Ideation

Private and Public Groups

Configurable Collaboration Kanban

Workflow Engine to Automate Tasks & Notifications

IP Protection Capabilities for External Ideation

Review Calculators and Analytics

Ranking, Leaderboard & Gamification

Searchable File Repository - Including Documents

SSO for Platform & APIs for Ideation

Tech Discovery Module for Emerging Technologies

Trend Alerts