One of the biggest challenges when you have innovation development spread through multiple sites is on alignment. You need to make sure that everyone's progression is visible and aligned - from project's objectives to market and technical specs, financial assumptions to in-market reality, from global design to local execution. The truth is, when you have teams that are distant, with different functions, you need to ensure everyone is working together in the same direction - and that's no easy task.
Just a couple of examples that highlight this:
- a company that has its development spread across 2 sites (one focused on consumer that then briefs the technical site that actually develops the product) soon discovered both of them were not aligned. The technical site was actually working on projects the consumer team had already scrapped.
- it is frequent that in-market teams innovation cases don't reflect the design teams assumptions, especially in areas like net price, as they simply are unaware of them.
Frequent communication between all sites, both formal and informal, is part of the solution. But it shouldn't be the only. The fact is, it is not enough - and that's a hard lesson for single site innovation companies when they grow bigger. You need to go beyond that.
You need to establish a tool that drives alignment. A tool that clearly states the current state of development at multiple levels - stating clearly its objectives, financial and non-financial targets, consumer and costumer requirements and expectations, competitive considerations, technical development. That is very up-front about where the project is in terms of its development stage and highlights next steps and challenges ahead. A tool that is accessed, commented and updated by the different teams at their multiple sites and can, thus, reflect and spread reality throughout all sites.
Though this may seem obvious to bigger multinationals and operating framework experts, many times, the importance of this is not well understood by smaller companies that want to expand rapidly or even by teams that don't understand how key updated and spread out information is. Because, the truth is, this is a crucial step (though not the only one) to help multi-sited innovation to be successful. So, if you are working on innovation development that is spread across multiple sites, take my word, and start working on this tool.
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