Competency development: the fuel for innovation

Prepare your R&D organization today to ensure future success

Great innovations do not happen on their own, especially in today’s rapidly evolving markets. In order to drive growth, you must be able to tap into an R&D competence pool that is dynamic and flexible. One that includes people with the right skills that make it possible to quickly take the lead in making optimal use of the newest technology. This is essential to handling new market opportunities in a creative way.

The right competencies at the right moment

It’s impossible to acquire market leadership unless your organization can familiarize itself with new opportunities quickly and exploit new technologies faster than others. For this, you must first be able to identify upcoming areas of expertise that will be important later, and equip yourself with the required competencies early on. This requires deep and far-seeing understanding of technology spaces, as well as the ability to define where new technology can help uncover innovative market opportunities. Philips Engineering Solutions helps organizations acquire deep understanding and insight into all these factors and link them to a competence structure that is relevant to them and their business.

Integral competency management support

At Industry consulting, one of the key areas of expertise of Philips Engineering Solutions, we have decades of experience in competency and innovation management.  We are specialized in creating and facilitating tailor-made competency development dialogues throughout organizations – from the strategic, through to the group/department and employee levels. This ensures the interaction that’s crucial to achieving maximum synergy between individual, departmental and business goals. We then apply our technological and analytical expertise in combination with practical experience to create clear, actionable competence-development plans that pave the way to your goal.

Tailor-made development program

The extent of our support depends on the needs of our customer: these will be different for a company that wants to shift complete strategic direction and another that just wants to quickly grab new opportunities.

But the way we define direction and create focus for achieving optimal, ongoing competence management – in terms of business, portfolio or products – involves the same key elements (see figure 1):

• Achieve transparency of the competencies now in your organization
• Convert your business strategy into R&D programs/activities and, consequently, into competence management directives
• Create dedicated competency development programs that bridge the gap between actual and future competences
• Align across different teams as well as vertically in the R&D organization – from the individual to the strategic level. (see figure 2)
• Establish ongoing technology monitoring for early identification of those that may become relevant for your business.

More information?

We would be pleased to more specifically discuss how we could help your company get ahead – and stay there – in terms of innovation competency management. For more information, contact our consultants directly

Cindy Copier
Consultant innovation management

Jose Loeffen
Consultant innovation management

Read more about our service Roadmapping, Architectures, Portfolio & competence management.

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