Here are a few design and design thinking related articles that caught my attention recently. Enjoy.
From Fast Company’s Think.Design blog by Ken Musgrave:
Note: This article is written from the perspective of technology development and leading R&D teams.
Developing technology is a relatively simple task when compared to the challenge of getting it diffused and adopted throughout the intended ecosystem. Although there are others, understanding customer needs, wants and overall psychology is one of the big hurdles that has to be overcome for success. This journey starts at home with your Customer Support team. Yet, there tends to be a gap between R&D and Customer Support teams during the innovation process. Here are my experiences on where the gaps can occur and strategies that worked for me for closing (or, when needed, widening) them.
On the road to your product release, you may be tempted to prioritize Customer Support behind everything else. After all, what could be more important than schedule, cost, functionality, … Believe me, it will happen, I have been there. And everyone in the program team will agree to that prioritization…. However, for new products and innovations, it is the wrong decision. Innovation is about change. Your Customer Support team is there to help your customers manage that change effectively. By prioritizing Customer Support low, you are under valuing the role that they play in supporting and hand holding the users of your products.
I have been blogging since October of 2006. Below are my top 10 articles since the start of this blog. What do you think? What else should I write about?
I am behind my reading….. However, these two articles from the Innovation Playground got my attention while I was quickly browsing thru the Google Reader.
The Six Most Common Approaches To Innovation. Tell Me Which One Works For Best For You?
Idris Mootee highlights the 6 most common approaches to innovation. As I think about my past experiences, even within the same organization, I utilized different innovation approaches based on the changing problems and context. And, I would agree that ‘Throw-Plenty-Of-Ideas-Around‘ is my least favorite method. In some cases, combining one or more of these approaches could further focus your innovation process, such as refining the killer idea by prioritizing problems.
In this blog, Mootee tackles the challenge of defining sustainability. You can also read my ramblings on this topic: There is more to sustainability that just being green.
“The first problem I have with is the narrow definition of sustainability. …
If all of this sounds not confusing enough, there’s more. It is basically a humanity issue more than an environmental issue. We are not seeing the whole if we only see environment. How do we provide a decent life on this planet is a problem facing all humanity? Well I am making the problem too difficult to solve. This is a wicked problem; it is both systemic and maybe the ultimate challenge.”
– Idris Mootee, Innovation Playground
How do you innovate within an established corporation? That is the dilemma of intrapreneurs. A company, regardless of its size, can become complacent, stalling innovation. This often happens after their first success, when all hands turn to process management for optimization.
Hopefully these personal insights will help anyone in need for little strategy to successfully maneuver around the blockades in the system. Please share your own strategy and insights on what works for you.
As I mentioned before in Small steps… Big leaps, with every small step and by using tipping point leadership principles, we can all create giant leaps. Innovation comes in different shapes and sizes. It is a multidimensional concept where the innovation can happen in varying dimensions and degrees: technology, process, product, service, business model, value-delivery, brand, design, quality, culture, market, customer/segment, … So, start small. Choose an area that you not only care about, but one in which you can also be successful: success breeds success. If things don’t go as well, practice resilience, take your learnings and start again.
Change is a journey. It is multi-dimensional. Following the uncertainty principle, it seeds its own story of successes and failures. Many have written on the topic of change and change management. Perhaps, Franklin Covey summarizes the best.
Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.
– Stephen Covey; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
At the end of the day, our energy flows to where our attention goes. If you are a manager tasked with improving teamwork between silos, ensuring the decision-making process incorporated all the right individuals from different groups maybe more important than the decision itself. If you are implementing new processes, providing training and tools are great, but not enough without the proper incentives to ensure people are utilizing it.
Change Cycle
The change cycle starts with awareness. Whether you are using the ready-aim-fire or ready-fire-aim method, change is a process of trial & error coupled with reflection, which drives needed course corrections. Just like a treasure map, the change process guides its followers through a complex network of interactions, activities and deliverables. Given that, it is crucial to define and communicate your change process, whether the desired change is cultural, procedural, organizational or any other type. This not only provides a structured methodology to what may seem like a chaotic process, but it also builds-in accountability and engagement for all. (more…)
Note: This is a repost from my www.kitetail.com site.
As many innovations and new product development (NPD) projects succeed, many more fails. In my research study “Innovation Management in Multi-Divisional Firms: Factors that Lead to Successful Development of New Products“, I look at why projects succeed or fail, and what can you do to improve their success rate.
A few years back, I conducted a research study on the topic of “Innovation Management in Multi-Divisional Firms: Factors that Lead to Successful Development of New Products” as part of my Management of Technology Masters degree. The unique part of the research, at least at the time, was to analyze the new product development success factors from the influence of newness: newness of the technology and/or newness of the market.
You can access the research and its findings here. However, a quick summary would be worthwhile to share. Please note that, the projects used for this research took place in a single firm, within the computer and peripherals industry.
Note: This is a repost from my www.kitetail.com site.
The profitability equation is quite simple: when a firm’s revenue from selling its product or service is greater than the cost of offering it, then it is concluded that the firm is profitable on that given offering.
Profits = Revenues – Cost
If we further analyze this simple equation, then we recognize that the revenues are a function of the quantity of a product or service sold at a price that the customer is willing to pay. This price is chosen based on the attractiveness of that product or service to the customer, i.e. its attributes. On the other hand, the cost is also a function of product’s attributes and the quantity it is produced at. For profitability, the ultimate goal of a firm is to offer products with differentiated attributes that customers are willing to pay high prices for, while keeping costs low and competitors out.
What does that mean for your innovation? Innovation is about implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value: value for the firm, and value for the consumer. Innovations come in many forms, and the research on innovation and innovation types can be quite confusing, as each author has his/her perspective and terminology. Unfortunately, this is further exacerbated by the fact that innovation has become the latest buzzword or Holy Grail for firms as they look for growth.
MIT Sloan Management Review recently posted about a new working paper from Researchers Viral Acharya, Ramin Baghai-Wadji, and Krishnamurthy V. Subramanian. Their findings (based on their study of labor laws and patents and citations from the US, Germany, UK, France and India) suggest that national labor laws that make it harder to dismiss employees have a positive effect on innovation — and even on economic growth.
The authors report that they found evidence that strong labor laws in general foster innovation but have a negative effect on economic growth. However one aspect of such laws — more stringent laws regulating employee dismissal — had a strong positive effect on both innovation and economic growth in a country.
Why would laws that make it more complicated for employers to let workers go have a positive effect on innovation? One reason, the authors suggest, is that such laws may make employees more willing to take the greater risks associated with attempting innovation.
This topic sparked my interest, but I do wonder about their conclusions… Here are my thoughts. What do you think?
First, it seems like the study defines innovation and innovativeness based on inventions. While it is true that a patent’s value is measured through the number of citations, I don’t equate patents to innovation. Successful commercialization of patents is what drives economic value.
Also, there is no universally accepted definition of innovation or how to measure innovativeness. Take a look at few of the recent studies measuring global innovation. (more…)
Innovation is not synonymous with new product releases. There is certainly an overlap, but innovation is not just about making new stuff. Otherwise, we would be in the perpetual cycle of: think ⇒ make ⇒ waste. Wait, we are… But, that is a topic for another post.
Many firms use the percentage of revenue from new products or number of new products launched as a metric to gauge the success rate of a firm’s innovation capability. Measuring innovation is certainly challenging. Inherent with any metrics program, there could be unintended, negative side effects. There is an article on Freakonomics blog regarding this complexity that is worth checking out: How Can We Measure Innovation? A Freakonomics Quorum.
Should the New Product Development (NPD) process be adopted as a framework for innovation management? In organizations where innovation is managed in an ad-hoc fashion, that certainly seem to be the case. Here is an hypothetical scenario on how innovations can be managed using the NPD process. Does this seem familiar?
(more…)
practical ideas on innovation and technology management.
