Commentary by Praveen Gupta

Success through Innovation Conference - Part II

Success Through Innovation: “Profitability and Competitiveness
in the European and World Markets” - The EIPC Management Council Meeting

Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 10, 2007 (www.eipc.org, www.ipc.org)

After lunch, Konrad Wundt, General Manager of Multiple International Europa talked about the European PCS industry and its impact on the European EMS industry.

Growth rate in Europe is 2.7% while it is about 10.4% in China. Europe and USA are still experiencing decline while China and many Asian countries are growing faster. New growth areas are optoelectronics, and renewable energy segments. Standard PCBs are experiencing no growth. Interestingly, German companies produce 1/3rd of PCBs in EU, and number of PCB companies has reduced by nearly 50% in EU.

Konrad Wundt

The final presentation was given by me on the topic of measuring and managing innovation for building value based customer relationships. Summary of my presentation included the following:

1. Commit to sustained profitable growth by driving innovation
2. Achieve excellence in idea management
3. Invest in building customer relations to learn customers’ ‘love to have’ requirements
4. Innovation is mandatory to deliver value to customers

Allow employees to give ‘funny’ ideas freely without fear for engaging them intellectually. Three initial measures of innovation are the following:

1. CEO recognition of employees for innovative value solution
2. Number of employee ideas
3. Revenue growth with innovative products or solutions

Learn the following about customers to create the opportunity for delivering value through innovation:

• Forces playing against customers
• Customer’s inconveniences
• Customer’s customer needs
• Customer’s own application and needs
• Customer’s cost of ownership model
• Customer’s pain points
• Customer’s preferred or ‘love to’ have requirements

Build relationship with customers based on the following:

• Compete on value, not just the cost
• Emphasize usefulness and appeal of the solution
• Build strategic relationship with and invest in the customer
• Create customer confidence in your capability and reliability
• Demonstrate priority to customer needs

The Management Council meeting ended with a roundtable discussions emphasizing need to continually developing innovative solutions.

Roundtable Discussion

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