Developing life cycle oriented innovations within the turbulent business environment

Generating successful innovations is a key factor for companies to survive within today’s business environment in the long term. When developing new products and processes the integrated perspective on their whole life cycle gets increasingly important nowadays for various reasons. The last couple of years showed several examples of innovations that did not enfold their full potential or did not even work at all. However, these failures can not really be explained through previous innovation research. Therefore, the Life Cycle Innovation framework is proposed in this paper which shall integrate and extend previous approaches in a holistic description model. Different life cycle phases are practically represented by different actors within an extended supply chain network – this system is identified as most relevant for a successful development of innovations. Whereas the network is additionally strongly influenced by external factors, each one of the involved actors has specific requirements regarding all innovations within the system. To avoid unforeseen failures and tap the full potential of innovations all of these requirements urgently have to be considered as early as possible in the innovation process. Idealistically this could lead to different effects potentially resulting in more and better innovations with less resource input. To validate the ideas of the framework and to derive recommendations regarding system design and optimal strategies the theoretical description framework was transferred in a simulation approach in the next step. Based on this model first simulation experiments were also conducted.