During a recent Sopheon Webinar broadcast, Mark Thut, a Director in PRTM's Innovation Practice for Sopheon, shared best practices and real-life case studies of some of today's most innovative companies and how they're successfully applying Lean practices to product development. Attendees learned how they could reduce cycle-time, increase throughput, and increase the value of their product portfolio to gain competitive advantage in today's marketplace.

Insight into how well a firms new product planning and product portfolio management activities might be doing is hard to come by.  Quarterly or annual revenue and profit reports provide post-performance results but that can be a little late to adjust to competitive and environmental changes.

The buzz around innovation is expanding to monstrous proportions. Nowhere is this frenzy more evident than in the pell-mell rush to metrics. Where once managers obsessed about measuring quality and cost, they now focus on measuring the innovation process. A wise use of metrics can improve a company's innovation "hit rate," and help companies make the right choices, faster, with less risk of failure.

Next year, the Institute for International Research (IIR) is taking its leading event, the Front End of Innovation conference, to Europe!