Innovating today is harder than ever: 75-85% of consumer product launches fail. New book, Untapping Innovation® (Practical Inspiration Publishing), by three former Procter & Gamble R&D experts, provides practical, flexible tools that help teams make better decisions earlier, ensuring products connect with the people they’re designed for.
Grounded in decades of hands-on experience inside global consumer goods companies, authors Deirdre Walters, Sally Kemkers and Suzanne Allers give R&D innovators simple, agile and reusable tools to unearth deep user insights, translate them into winning products and tell stories to connect them with users in a way that resonates.
After leaving Procter & Gamble in 2012, Walters, Kemkers and Allers started Untapped Innovation to help CPG giants develop breakthrough products and stories. Now their book, Untapping Innovation®, condenses their knowledge, insight and experiences that have shaped some of the world’s biggest products and brands into a handbook to reduce rework, focus investment, accelerate time to market and translate technical excellence into products that succeed.
Organised into four parts, Untapping Innovation® is designed as a practical guide to act as a partner in the reader’s innovation journey, making it easier, faster and more rewarding.
In the first part, the authors set the scene and discuss why so many innovations miss the mark and the root causes of this. Exploring specific R&D challenges, this section addresses what could be done to improve innovation rates of success. The second part introduces the solution through their Connected R&D Playbook, explaining how linking products more closely to the people who will use them makes all the difference. Part three is the playbook itself, a practical guide to take readers through the eight agile tools. This section also comes complete with thorough case studies and the authors’ personal tales from the frontline, along with top tips to help teams make the most of the tools highlighted. Finally, part four looks at how to put this into practice, and how trends like AI are shaping the future of R&D.
Untapping Innovation® is a must-have guide for R&D professionals, cutting through the complexity of product development and dissecting how to turn deep consumer insights into faster innovation, stronger user understanding and successful decisions. With the energy, creativity and expertise that goes into R&D, Walters, Kemkers and Allers provide a capability handbook which supports and solidifies the huge effort that goes into developing new products, offering tools to align R&D, marketing and leadership around what truly matters in an era that is more demanding than ever.
Untapping Innovation: An R&D playbook for products and stories to sell® is available on Amazon and in all good bookshops from 2nd June.
