Innovation & New Product Development

We help you to innovate and make significantly better decisions

We bring together the knowledge across your organisation needed to create elegant and reliable new products and services which delight your customers. Our services cover end-to-end delivery.

S23M is built around a powerful methodology for gaining a deep understanding of your business and its future potential. Our logo symbolises the complementary roles of commonalities and variabilities in the search for patterns and hidden opportunities in customer requirements, market demand, product portfolios, and economic and technological trends.

The philosophy of our global team of trusted advisors is Collaboration for Life:

• We help your team to understand your customers' needs and perspectives
• We translate your knowledge into exceptional products and services
• We assist you with strategic and tactical operational decisions
• We have an intimate understanding of your industry and speak your language
• We have a global footprint

Examples of the value that we co-create together with our clients:

• Four times faster data service development: S23M worked with a multi-national client in Switzerland and used MODA + MODE techniques to achieve a four-fold application development productivity increase. Domain experts with no software engineering background are able to develop complete applications.
• Three times faster software product configuration: Our team used domain analysis techniques and domain engineering tools to help one of the world’s largest industrial automation system vendors to achieve a two to three-fold improvement in productivity. The organisation believes the medium and long-term quality gains are even more significant.
• Twenty times simpler product specifications: S23M’s leading insurance industry expert used MODA + MODE to fully unlock the tacit knowledge of a life insurance company and improve business agility of the organisation by orders of magnitude. New life insurance product specifications are now 20 times smaller and the new premium calculation engine runs 100 times faster than before. The organisation now measures new product development cycles in days and weeks rather than in months.
• From prototype to new SaaS product: S23M provided Livestock Improvement Corporation with the know how and the roadmap needed to transition from an initial prototype to a viable commercial product and to a fully staffed product development and support team.
• From concept to fully functional insurance business in 18 months: In the 1990s S23M’s founder Jorn Bettin enabled a start-up direct marketing insurance company to go live on schedule with working software systems for direct telephone marketing, premium calculation, quotation, policy management, and claims processing – within a fixed 18-month time frame. Agile techniques and regular validation of software under construction by domain experts was used to deliver on target and within budget. The end-to-end solution featured a unique full-text search feature that was significantly faster than the systems of competing direct marketing insurers.
• Agility in digital service delivery: S23M used MODA + MODE software product line engineering principles to help The Economist increase the level of agility in online service delivery.
• Product portfolio consolidation and rationalisation: Aderant relied on S23M to transform and rationalise a global product portfolio of timekeeping and billing software that had grown through mergers and acquisitions into a coherent product line.

S23M can offer clients decades of unique experience in cross-functional team leadership, transdisciplinary collaboration, and in the cultural gear shifting that is needed for growing into new markets and supporting increasingly diverse and complex product lines. Our consultants have worked with teams of all sizes, from start-ups to distributed product development teams with more than 300 team members in larger organisations.

Along the developmental trajectory our experience allows us to advise clients on when to shift gears:

• when to shift from an exploratory start-up culture to a mature structure with clearly understood boundaries between new product development, product management, sales, and product support
• when to tweak and adapt specific practices
• when to replace specific practices and habits that are no longer useful
• when to introduce product platform development as a distinct work stream alongside product development
• when to shift from a simple product development mindset to a product line engineering culture
• when to consider outsourcing or insourcing non-core activities
• when to consider growth by acquisition, and what due diligence activities to conduct before and after an acquisition
• when to consider cannibalising, divesting, or sunsetting specific product lines, and how to avoid confusing customers and losing internal momentum

Whatever your current product development challenge, there is a good chance that some of the highly experienced members of our team have worked through a similar situation in a different industry or geography.

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