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Innovation Imperatives: Best Practice Showcase

Business Strategy Group

Innovation: best practice makes perfect

The SCI Business Strategy Group has organised a conference to explore and share innovation best practices across the whole breadth of SCI industry sectors and beyond. Innovation Imperatives: Best Practice Showcase’ will be held at Henley Management College, Henley, UK on 25 and 26 May 2005.

In his address at the Business Strategy Group’s launch in November 2005, Sir Tom McKillop, CEO of AstraZeneca and SCI World President, stressed how innovation is essential to science-based industries. Pressures to innovate in the global economy have grown rapidly. Low-cost manufacturing, new technologies, 24/7 information, savvy customers and short product life-cycles all conspire to make continuous innovation imperative.

Innovation may involve step-changes or more gradual improvements, new capabilities or customers achieved through collaborations or mergers, or patient cultivation of a knowledge platform. So, when organisations look to innovate, are their actual practices congruent with their strategic objectives? After the inevitable issues of cost, time and competing priorities, major barriers to innovation have been found to be concerned with problems such as lack of market awareness and poor internal communications.

For the Innovation Imperatives event, the programme of invited speakers has been designed to draw out experiences of how world-class multi-national corporations including GlaxoSmithKline, 3M, Unilever, Nestlé, BASF, Air Products, Syngenta and Kodak have successfully innovated — what they do, and what they don’t. A keynote address will be given by Dr Ray Stark, Honeywell’s VP of Technology. Dr Stark’s paper, ‘Innovation: luck or design’ will set the tone for the conference. Organisations surely attempt to design innovation and examples other speakers will address include new models of R&D management, strategic use of intellectual property portfolios, and building strong brands. As for luck, other speakers will discuss creating environments in which luck perhaps comes more readily: the right leadership style, nimble and entrepreneurial cultures, and sensing latent customer needs.

The event will be more than a conference. The Business Strategy Group aims to engage delegates and advance the thinking on strategies and approaches to overcoming or by-passing the barriers to innovation. A workshop session will allow syndicates to tackle the issues and challenges to successful innovation based on their own experiences and insights. Outputs will be collated and reported in the final session of the conference, with further analysis and follow-up.

Innovation Imperatives: Best Practice Showcase is being organised by Alan Baylis, Nuvistix Innovation and Stewart Neal, Responsible Corporation. For more information, contact Jacqui Maguire, T: +44 (0)20 7598 1562, F: +44 (0)20 7235 7743, E: jacqui.maguire@soci.org.