From Idea to Impact: Building a future-ready innovation ideation and prioritisation ecosystem for a global dermatology leader

Our client recognised the integral role of innovation in achieving both short-term growth goals and long-range strategic ambitions. However, their existing ideation process had proven insufficient in generating well-assessed ideas and opportunities to effectively feed the innovation pipeline. The lack of structure behind this process had resulted in continuous challenges, including conflicting global and regional priorities, resource constraints, SKU complexity and a limited ability to both monitor and replenish portfolio sufficiency.

To address the challenges, the innovation and portfolio management expertise of Skarbek were drawn upon to:

• Develop a structured ecosystem for generating, evaluating and aligning ideas and opportunities to be translated into global and regional innovation projects.
• Establish standard criteria along with defined roles & responsibilities for prioritising these global and regional innovation projects into a focused set of well prioritised and aligned initiatives ready for initiation and execution.

Skarbek partnered with our client to create a structured innovation funnel ecosystem, to translate concepts from initial ideation into prioritised innovation initiatives ready for execution. While this ecosystem sought to leverage existing governance forums, business planning drumbeat and resourcing models, as part of this project several new components were introduced to drive greater creativity, process clarity and efficiency. These included:

• A novel innovation ideation organisational construct tasked to accelerate the idea and opportunity exploration process. This focused on bringing the best thinking and capabilities together in order to mine new territories, explore possibilities, and bring the best innovation ideas to life in a structured way.
• An evolved Governance framework, increasing accountability for the ecosystem and ensuring the sufficiency of new ideas relative to pipeline needs.
• A structured pre-portfolio bank and associated processes to capture a pre-prioritised list of innovation initiatives ready for execution, ensuring each idea has been pre-screened for its value-add.

The intervention had a major impact. There was strong engagement and alignment on the ecosystem from Senior Leaders across the business, with very positive feedback shared on the actionability of this new process as well as opportunity for large-scale impact and “quick wins”. Our client decided to roll-out the new ecosystem to the broader organisation at their next Innovation Summit, 2 weeks following project close-out.