Professor Prasanta Dey, Aston Business School, joined KnowledgeBrief members at this month’s Innovation Day to discuss how organisations can map their supply chain to uncover key innovation partners.
Innovating successfully often requires organisations to collaborate, yet working across organisational boundaries can be fraught with difficulties and risks. Aligning internal and external strategies is crucial, as is managing the many trade-offs between being efficient and being responsive to partner requirements.
Process efficiency is key to working across organisational boundaries, especially the supply chain. Firms that communicate effectively with suppliers and consumers, and involve stakeholders across the value chain are better able to achieve an optimal balance between supply and demand, efficiency and responsiveness. Firms and their suppliers should look more systematically at their timeframes and initiate co-creation earlier in the contract.
Use the supply chain decision-making framework to map your supply chain:
- Find the balance between supplier and consumer: Determine how you manage information, product and funds
- Understand your competitive strategy: Focus on synergies between actions taken to satisfy customers alongside supply chain strategy
- Understand the trade-off between efficiency (supplier) and responsiveness (customer): Different supply chains must reflect that customers are looking for different levels of responsiveness between, for example, online and physical stores
- Be efficient across all key supply chain drivers: Balance all variables and complexities in order to align with competitive strategy. A top down, transparent approach is important, as is the ability to continually remodel and refit.
Shared innovation values across organisational boundaries are important to establish a common ethos that people can buy in to. People must know what they are trying to achieve, where they want to go and how to get there.
Participants included Airbus, RBS, Environment Agency and NHS South East CSU. Next, this group will explore Manage the Unexpected. For more information and to join, please view the event page.