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At Adobe new product development relies on a process that intentionally resembles venture capital funding:

• “the critical resource is entrepreneurial people who know how to plow a path that is not as well defined as it is if you are working on the “nth” version of an existing product.

• “we build a multifunction team. It is not just technologists; it is a businessperson, some number of technical people, and product designers as necessary.”

• “a lightweight phase and gate process [helps managing] those teams and those leaders through the execution of a plan that they put together. We checkpoint their plan to see if they are making progress and if it still makes sense to us.”

• “at those infrequent gate-points, we provide what we call the “entrepreneur-in-residence,” the leader of that project, with the resources to move onto the next phase — whether that is developing a prototype of a product, or doing a pilot, or a public beta, or a first release, or whatever.”

• “every new product project has an executive sponsor, who is the primary sounding board, the person who removes as many obstacles as possible and keeps the corporate antibodies from digesting the team when it is small and fragile, things like that.”

• “the New Product Review Board, which is typically all those same executives but in a group, getting together and looking at the portfolio in the large, and giving feedback to the entrepreneur and to the executive sponsor about what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense, whether or not we are giving the right amount of resources, whether we should be giving more, whether we should be giving less.”

• “if the executive sponsor is a business unit manager, and has complete P&L responsibility for a revenue stream, then often [he/she would be expected] to fund that new product activity out of their contribution margin, out of their revenue stream.”

• “big bet initiatives“: only the CEO, or the president, can commit that kind of resource. It’s a matter of what they believe passionately in. [They manage] a pool of money [for the following two scenarios]:

[when] a business unit manager comes to them and says, “This is a great idea and I really want to support it in my organization. But remember when you put my head in a vise the last time we had a budget meeting? I can’t get blood out of a stone”.

“the other [scenario relates to funding projects sponsored by] executives in functional organizations that don’t have a revenue stream.”

• “Nobody can plan for 10 years in our business. If we’re planning for two or three product cycles ahead and three or five years, we consider ourselves pretty omniscient.”

Read Knowledge Wharton’s full interview.

Ideawicket.com just launched an ‘Open Innovation Portal’ as a  vehicle for innovators to socialize their concepts and products as well as for companies to source innovation from customers. In Ideawicket’s own words:

“We believe that innovation cannot be restricted to just scientists and researchers working in labs and universities or professional inventors toiling over their latest creation. Ideawicket has been started to give a voice to people who during the daily course of their lives envision better products, processes and services that they would like to share with others or bring to the attention of organizations that offer those goods and services. Customers and the general public can be very active contributors towards the development of new products, processes and experiences.”

If you are interested in this subject I would then suggest the following related blogs talking about how Slim Devices delivers innovations based on enabling research communities, Ideagora’s “marketplace for minds” and Crowdsourcing’s focus on consumer electronics design.

Idewicket’s Press Release

New book from PDC - Product Development Consulting:

• “Value Innovation Portfolio (VIP) Management shows how the union of business strategy, innovation, and customer value can create a successful and sustainable product portfolio.”

The book positions “customer value” as the main leading indicator to assess a product’s chances of success. The authors focus on the following questions:

·  “What products do I launch?”
·  “In which products do I invest (and which do I divest)?”
·  “How do I delight customers?”
·  “How do I avoid costly product failures?”

Amazon