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Increase R&D effectiveness and improve design quality

The digital era has changed global competition, making manufacturers transform how they innovate and bring products and services to market. Digital technologies touch every area of your journey, from research and development, manufacturing processes, and distribution, to customer engagement and advocacy.

Be true to your customer: Listen deeply

Deep customer insights lie at the heart of future rapid innovation. That means manufacturers must innovate with an eye toward customers’ experiences and aspirations. In this new paradigm, customers are at the center of innovation, rather than your products and services.

What does that mean to your R&D? Traditional listening tactics are obsolete. Customers no longer provide their most meaningful feedback about products in focus groups. Rather, you must be able to gather and analyze customers’ digital footprints in the cloud from their thousands of interactions with products and services. These insights are the linchpin of an effective R&D strategy.

Now that you’ve built an effective listening framework, you can make use of machine learning to unlock deeper customer insights. This can help you uncover customers’ spoken and unspoken needs and wants. In addition, you want to focus on building strong customer connections through social channels, customer engagement and advocacy, and other intentional strategies.

Design, test, and innovate—faster and for less

After you’ve listened to customers and developed multiple concepts, you need to design and test your products in the marketplace.

Digital simulation capabilities like digital twin technology can help you test concepts quickly. Rather than build expensive prototypes or wait to launch a pilot project to test new ideas, digital simulation is a cost-effective way to test product designs and make rapid improvements to a product without investing dollars in production.

Rapid innovation strategies like these can help accelerate your ability to bring new product and services into the marketplace—and improve the final design quality of products. The Microsoft digital advisory team can show you how to apply these and other digital strategies to increase your R&D effectiveness.

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