Process 2020 Innovation SatNav

The key to the success of the UK process industries is rapid innovation chain progression, more specifically from new product identification to delivery and launch. The track record within the sector, to date, is not promising, as worldwide loses of over 80bn annually due to poor process design and delay in product deliverables and launch are incurred. Traditional project management and engineering techniques, which focus on integrating and reducing the lead-time for each functional activity, has resulted in no major improvement (Loch & Terwiesch, 1998). The process industry is now asking, how can we help our people make decisions which reduce the new product development lead-time, whilst maximising the overall output in terms of value? Using a decisional and complex systems perspective, the proposed project will deliver to the UK process industries, a flexible and adaptive innovation SatNav that can help technical teams and organisations navigate the complex business and technological terrain. This step change improvement in process and decision making will reduce lead-time and costs, whilst maintaining high levels of creativity and innovation. The project will integrate and support the introduction of new products to the markets, which will be underpinned by a multi-level process improvement strategy. This approach will help the UK process industries to competitively bridge the gap between an idea and reality. It will do this by helping them to follow the most parsimonious and effective path of decisions that the process could take, whilst also ensuring that that path enables innovation, creativity and satisfies business drivers and constraints.