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“Designers should be brought into the innovation process at the very earliest stages. Too many companies still make the mistake of keeping business strategy and design activities separate”.

“[Designers] will put prototypes into circulation and share users’ responses and attitudes with the project team, even as the business case is being developed”.

“That enables the company to nimbly adjust to changes in market opportunities long before the product concept is set in stone”.

Read Ravi Chhatpar’s article on this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review.

As an example, Ravi talks about the work Frog Design did for Alltel, an American wireless network operator. Alltel’s Celltop project took 12 months. The ideation process generated approximately 100 concepts around mobile services, content discovery and consumption.

A fair amount of concepts were selected for rapid prototyping, being leveraged as part of usability research conducted with actual end users and Alltel’s partners, such as Qualcomm and Motricity. Once in the marketplace, Celltop users showed data usage growth by 375%.

“To understand the values, needs, and aspirations of consumers in the mobile space, Frog’s analysts pored over Alltel user research and conducted in-store interviews with retail managers and customers alike”.

“Newcomers to the mobile space indicated a growing emphasis on customization, user access to personal media and online data, and social networking capabilities (…) Frog began looking more closely at digital content trends at large, considering how Web 2.0 concepts might be applied to the mobile space”.

“CTIA Wireless, the leading international forum for the mobile space, named Celltop “Best in Show” in its 2007 Emerging Technology Awards. Celltop has also received the BREW 2007 “People’s Choice Award” and the BREW 2007 Developer Award in the “Business/Productivity Application [the Celltop is also the recipient of MEM's 2007 Technology Innovation Award]“.

• Alltel’s Celltop
• Frog Design’s Case Study - PDF download
• Driving adoption through innovation

José de Francisco  Chicago, 16 September 07

Most recent blog Innovation search engine Map of innovation events Innovation newsfeed Blog newsfeed

“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this post: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car; [2] TechCrunch Conference 2007; [3] “Wired Nextfext”; [4] Innovation Networks (2); [5] Sci-Fi Based Scenarios: The City Of The Future; [6] Mobile Blogging (6): Use Your Phone As A 3G Modem; [7] Innovative Mobile Phones: Objects Of Desire; [8] Project Ergofuturo: ErgoTrans (1991 Product Concept); [9] Web 2.0 vs. Renaissance II; [10] Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group

“Companies pour more money into generating ideas and then end up frustrated as innovations simply don’t develop”.

“Most companies continue to assume that innovation comes from that individual genius, or, at best, small, sequestered teams that vanish from sight and then return with big ideas”.

“The truth is most innovations are created through networks — groups of people working in concert (…) when it comes to innovation, the myth of the lone genius dies hard”.

Read “Together We Can Innovate” on WSJ by R. Cross, A. Hargadon, S. Parise and R.J. Thomas. 

If this subject happens to be of interest to you, I suggest first reading “Innovation Networks“. The above remarks are based on a study of 20+ organizations, which revealed deficient practices when addressing innovation:

• in-house talent was not effectively leveraged
• partners’ talent was underutilized
• failure to take action upon new ideas

Some of the challenges hampering collaboration opportunities appeared to be due to:

• organizational silos (unrelated or competing P&L)
• logistics (lack or outdated collaboration tools and cross-site logistics)
• stiff processes (documentation work and project reviews eroding research efforts)
• corporate politics (competing budgets, relationships, report chains)
• risk avoidance (only focus on core competencies, tried something similar before and didn’t work)
• technical determinism (logical fallacies incurred by experts leading to “cannot be done” statements)

Based on the WSJ’s article, the following shows the breakdown of R&D outsourcing at leading pharmaceutical companies:

• research: 30%
• development: 50%

The authors mention that this does not necessarily imply they are leveraging those relationships to their full extent. For instance, one of the case studies talks about a project requiring an innovation network formed by:

• various groups in the company
• academic institutions
• research centers
• other companies

However, there was no “knowledge management” program in place. The project relayed on ad-hoc one-to-one connections, when key employees left the company those networks had to be rebuilt.

Back in 1997 B. Tabrizi and R. Walleigh published a paper under the title “Defining Next-Generation Products”. Their study covered 29 next generation products in 14 leading high-tech companies. Interestingly enough, most of them did not reach project completion on schedule and under budget.

Having outlined some of the issues preventing companies from taking full advantage of their ability to innovate, the following techniques are worth considering:

1. matchmaking: conducting skills assessments to develop cross-functional networks in the company, mentoring programs, working relationships and communities of interest;
2. activity program: using online collaboration tools as well as on/offsite events under a formal knowledge sharing and networking program;
3. cross-pollination: working across projects and company units to deliver innovative point solutions and end to end offers involving the integration of “best of breed” solutions;
4. innovation networks: involve other partners across the value chain, customers, as well as universities and research institutions; do it early, instead of late in the process when there will less room to accommodate new valuable input;
5. emerging technologies group: staff and make resources available to quickly mobilize around a new opportunity (e.g. start small and agile, scale up on a need basis). Prevent budgetary dependencies on units whose focus on existing products and deliveries drive decisions based on short term priorities; enable these teams to move across departments without formal reassignments; 
6. proof of concept: rapid prototyping and technical and market trials as part of the research process (opposed to using these tools just as a technical showcase in the sales process);
7. mapping: map out past, present and future features and products (include gaps, substitutes, derivative and adjacent products); define a “paradigm shift strategy” leading to the successful timing and introduction of the innovation. 

To complete this post I have selected the following quotes from Tabrizi and Walleigh’s paper:

“We have not discovered a magic formula for rapid, successful new-product definition (…) companies are at high risk when they work on new, unproved technologies or architectures. Furthermore, given the volatile nature of their industries, high-tech companies have difficulty predicting how their markets will move over time”.

“Uncertainty promotes bickering among groups within the organization and indecision by managers and leads to chaos in product development. The successful companies we studied had all learned to deal with technical and marketplace uncertainties”.

“Senior marketing strategists with a grasp of technology and feel for the direction of markets and key competitors are best equipped to define new opportunities. Their senior technical counterparts can articulate the possible technological obstacles, cost and time constrains and risks (…) We found that product definition was most successful when initial specifications preceded the final selection of the product development team”.

José de Francisco  Chicago, 16 September 07

“Top 10″ at the time of this post: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car; [2] TechCrunch Conference 2007; [3] Mobile Blogging (6): Use Your Phone As A 3G Modem; [4] Sci-Fi Based Scenarios: The City Of The Future; [5] Crowdsourcing at Crowdspirit.org; [6] Web 2.0 vs. Renaissance II; [7] “Wired Nextfext”; [8] Mobile Phone Concepts: Egy Studio; [9] Crowdsourcing At IdeaConnection.com; [10] Become A Trend Hunter.