Innovation management

The success of companies relies on the ability to identify customers needs and promptly create products able to satisfy them, manufactured at low cost and different from those produced by competitors. To attain those objectives is not sufficient only to tackle problems of marketing, design and production, but is essential successfully manage innovation.

Innovation is bringing to market new products or to implement new processes with a significant technological improvement. This is the spirit by which in Labor we manage innovation process. The holistic approach to science, technology, organizational, financial and marketing, makes us able to lead step by step a brilliant idea into a successful business.

Our mission is to provide our customers with all sufficient tools to innovate their products or services with the aim to gain new competitive advantages in their market segment.

The challenges of the innovation management:

  • Investigation of innovative ideas: the mission of the innovation management team starts with the search and selection of the best innovative ideas, in terms of industrial applications, in the most important research center and universities in Europe.
  • Identification of customers needs: is a very delicate task to make sure that the product is focused on customer needs. Almost always, in addition to those identified to be explicit, also latent needs must to be identified if you want to provide concrete support for the product specifications and ensure that no critical need will be excluded or forgotten.
  • Product concept definition: it is certainly the most delicate stage of the process, following the generation of the ideas and preceding the architecture and detail design. By each of the ideas gathered and by means of brainstorming activities conducted with our customer, many product or service concepts born in order to satisfy their needs.
  • Test of the product concept : sometimes happens that a valid concept is not well implemented in the following development phases, but it is almost impossible to modify a bad concept during the product development to attain commercial success. Every concept generated with the customer is analysed in its potential, assessing both scientific aspects and industrial appeal, identifying target markets and business opportunities. Only one of the generated concepts will describe the product.
  • Project financing and partnership building: often our customers are small and medium enterprises with the need to improve their competitiveness on the market. Almost never they have the force to self finance a new product development. The innovation management team in these cases is able to lead the customer in finding the best financing program for the research activities or technological transfer at European or National level while defining with the customer the strategic partnership for the product launch.
  • Research and development project definition: once identified the financing source, both public or private, our innovation management team is able in a short time to write the project documentation with its business plan to be presented to the financer and to coordinate following technical activities. This skill allowed us to participate in 40 research projects in the last 5 years and to be involved in 19 project of the Seventh Framework Programme of European Research (FP7), supplying our technology transfer service to more than 200 companies.
  • Project Management: once the project is financed, we burden all project management activities, keeping under control times, costs, technical objectives and coordinating all tasks both internal and those assigned to other partners.