Innovation Portfolio and digital management. Qualitative research on performance metrics and designing of BI dashboard

Abstract

Umicore has a long-standing reputation in global materials technology and recycling group. Besides its well-known fact, Umicore dedicates most of its revenue and effort in R&D efforts to continue innovation. Progressing towards innovation Umicore is dedicating into clean technologies such as emission control catalysts, material for rechargeable batteries and recycling with the mission of “Materials for a better life “ Umicore NBI group is an attempt to bring innovative ideas from all business units together and manage them through the NBI innovation management system. The project is about Innovation and Incubation Management Within Umicore’s CTO-organisation a new business incubation initiative that was launched in H2 2019 aiming at accelerating the process from idea generation towards business success. Among the challenges of NBI were, what are the industry best practices on innovation portfolio, innovation funnel, and M&A radar and how to design and implement a KPI-driven dashboard in the Umicore SharePoint environment with benchmarking of critical KPIs? To solve the challenges Umicore expected of a management tool that will allow submitting an idea and also track the progress of the project through the visual display of measurable metrics. The approach to identifying the hypothesis was divided into three segments: Industry benchmark, data analysis, and prototyping. The first refers to studies of data gathered from research literature of innovation experts in order to understand practices across industries and to understand how these practices can fit into Umicore’s innovation strategy. The benchmark was investigated by looking at websites of competitors of Umicore and conducting interviews with innovation managers in the R&D department of different companies. Second data analysis, which was a crucial part of the implementation of the Sharepoint management tool, was performed on three input files of the project portfolio, connectivity funnel, and M&A radar. As part of data analysis, we conducted interviews to understand data more deeply and collected data by connecting with Umicore employees of various departments. In the case of data unavailability, we invented and prepared mock-up data and performed data analysis along with some rudimentary visuals of data. The prototyping and implementation phase is done by transforming and visualizing input files on power BI. Before visualizing data transformation, data modeling relationship is established between all three input files. The result of the analyses shows that there are some KPIs that are very difficult to measure but adopting approaches such as building an efficient roadmap, NPV calculation, and adopting hybrid methodologies such as the agile-stage gate model will help Umicore in the idea management process. Also, by performing data analysis it shows that there are gaps in data collection methods, and data is not properly stored, and therefore, because of missing data, it is a bit difficult to calculate the quantitative measure of metrics. The report also finds that flow must undergo some structural changes if the company wishes to see the progress of innovation projects and effectively use R&D investments. The main recommendations made are : 1) Adopt Scrum methodology to bring all busines units’ innovative idea together and it will boost up the idea submission at fast pace and thus saves time which could be reinvest in product development phase. 2) Establish the proper database management system to store data in a structured way.