"CIRAS helped provide structure to the decision-making process, especially when you’re looking at capital investment, building expansion, or acquiring a different company - anything where you’ll have a substantial investment."
- Brian Setchell, Vice President of Operations, Iowa Spring, Adel
Implement an Innovation System
Experience tells us that the best innovation strategy for Iowa companies involves a proper mix of innovation, improvement, and line expansion. Innovations can involve new product development, but also can mean new services, processes, business models, and/or marketing.
Innovation services at CIRAS focus on the four main phases of Innovation:
- Definition: Creating, documenting, refining and selecting ideas. It can encompass literally hundreds of ideas that may ultimately be the foundation for future innovations.
- Discovery: Choosing or vetting a smaller, more manageable number of ideas. We take a deeper look at an innovation’s real-world potential, including the opportunities to grow and diversify, balanced with risks.
- Development: Our experience is that most Iowa companies have a core product development process in place, so we focus on helping them improve portions of that process to meet current business needs.
- Delivery: We make sure Iowa businesses have processes in place to get their innovations to market.
In each phase of the cycle, CIRAS can work with company leadership to understand needs, select the best research-based tools for the business, and help implement them. Some of the tools that we offer are:
- Innovation coaching
- CREATE sessions to apply a variety of research-based tools to developing new ideas
- Real-Win-Worth evaluation to help determine the risk of innovations
CIRAS will work with an organization to determine opportunities, develop a customized plan of action using best practices, create new and better offerings, and/or establish a fully customized innovation system.
To seek guidance through CIRAS innovation services or to schedule a no-cost assessment, contact your Regional CIRAS Strategic Advisor or Marketing Strategy lead Paul Gormley.
CIRAS provides several related services, including: