Lazy Innovation

Katie Konrath at getFreshMinds.com tackles a common mistake in innovation - packing new features into existing products as a way to innovate - a problem I call "feature creep."  Her main point: people pack products to the brim with features to be more innovative.  Many believe this is the only way to innovate.  Katie believes feature packing is a lazy way to innovate.

Why does this happen?  The major culprit is too much reliance and emphasis on the traditional PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION approach to innovation.  We spot a problem in an existing product, service, or situation, and then we "solution seek" a way to fix it.  We usually end up adding additional features to the existing product, service, or situation. 

Here's an example.  A friend of mine occasionally needs to push his large, heavy entertainment center away from the wall to make changes to the connections.  He had a clever idea over coffee yesterday: what if you created a space under the wall unit so you could deploy retractable wheels (much like an aircraft lowers and raises its landing gear)?  This solution certainly solve his problem...at higher cost and more complexity. 

This is the traditional view of innovation.  What fuels this view is an over-reliance on voice-of-the-customer as a source of innovation insights.  It is the belief that if we can understand what customers want, we can solve their problems with innovative solutions.  The problem?  Customers don't always know what they want.

Here is an example.  When my wife picked up her new IPhone, she spent the first twenty minutes pressing all the buttons.  She seemed irritated - she was looking for the Help Function.  I told her the IPhone did not have a Help Function.  In amazement, she said, "Finally...a product that really understands my needs!"  Now imagine if Apple's market research department had called our house seeking Voice-of-the-Customer data about what it would take to build the most awesome cell phone on the planet.  My wife would have said, "Easy.  It must have the most awesome Help Function on the planet."  The Point:  Customers only know what they know.

In competitive markets, we face even more pressure to add features to keep up with competition or leap over them.  Worse than feature-creep, I call it "feature wars," the ongoing battle to win customers with ever more new things added to their product.  The problem is that over-featured products begin to outstrip the true needs of the customer.  They find it too hard to continue using and keeping up with the product.  They find themselves having to take out the user manual or find support groups to answer basic questions.  How many of you reset the time on your VCR or DVD player...without looking up how?

Innovation methods that emphasize the SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM approach avoid feature creep and lead to elegant and more useful innovations.  These methods take an existing starting point (product, service, strategy, organization, person, etc), and manipulate it to create something very odd and seemingly useless.  This "pre-inventive form" is then matched against potential problems that it might solve or benefits that it might unlock.  My belief, based on observation, is that people can match more problems to solutions than they can match solutions to an observed problem.

There is a good type of Lazy Innovation.  George Neil from Adobe Consulting contests that laziness, usually considered a bad behavior, is a virtue that can identify opportunities for innovation in user-experience design.  He believes the "search for laziness" can create short-cuts to finding the opportunities for innovation.  Ethnography uncovers lazy "solutions" people take when doing a task.  The key is to match those solutions to the benefits and problems they address.  Robert Passarella tells a great story about this phenomena in the context of how stock exchanges innovated the way they clear stock trades more efficiently - the story of The Killarney Rose Pub.

Katie Konrath continues to be one of my favorite bloggers in the innovation space because she is the "real deal."  She is classically trained in creativity and innovation.  She knows HOW to innovate, she takes a customer-centric approach, and she sees the big picture on what organizations need to do to start innovating.  No laziness in Katie.

Comments

[amnon]

Lazy innovation reminded me of a wise and amusing book, written by two children of one of the heroes of the now-looked-down-upon Scientific Management movement.
Here is Wikipedia on it:
Cheaper by the Dozen is a 1948 book by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey that tells the story of Time and motion study and efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, and their twelve children. It has twice been adapted to film.

When Frank Sr. arrived at a factory to consult, the first thing he used to say was "Show me the laziest man in the place." He would then proceed to observe the lazy bum , recording his movements carefully, thus learning the least energy consuming way to do the job.
So lets keep watching all those lazy innovators, Drew, and see what we can learn(:

[Chris Stiehl]

The question is NOT what solutions can customers give you, but what problems do they have that can inspire you to innovate. You mix these two in your stories. The "Voice of the Customer" is a description of their problems and pains, not solutions they want. It is NOT the customer's job to come up with solutions. That is your job.

[Drew Boyd]

Chris, thanks for your comments and for reading this blog!

I agree that VOC is not solutions, but rather the problems of the customer. That is where I have a problem. Customers only know what they know. My wife wanted a great Help Function in her IPhone to address her problem of not knowing how things work. She could never have offered the solution of taking out the Help Function entirely.

I agree it is our job to innovate. A very good way to do that is to start with Solutions then work backwards to Problems. Sounds weird, but it works!

[Adam]

Drew:

As usual, I agree with you - about halfway.

I think going feature crazy is lazy but I'm not sure the primary culprit is a problem to solution approach. I think laziness itself is the culprit. Or shortsightedness or small-mindedness. Whatever.

BTW, VOC seems to be a term invented by engineers who magically stumbled upon people one day and were amazed that these things could talk and tell us useful stuff. It's what P&G just called marketing.

But I digress.

You are doing a great disservice to what you call the problem to solution approach. Yes, people don't always know what they want. But it is our job to interpret data and infer customer needs. This is just basic social science. Psychology, some sociology, much of anthropology deals with this all the time. We're just too shallow with it in the business world.

But that doesn't mean that starting with customer needs or wants is a bad approach. It just means we are not doing it well.

I'm actually a little surprised at you here. If someone told you a story about a couple where one started yelling at the other for what seemed like a small issue, you probably would be sensitive enough to realize that the outburst was really about something else. And you'd start asking probing questions to find the real issue. We can do that in business as well. We don't have to always give people a faster horse.

[Drew Boyd]

Excellent insights, as usual, Adam. Thanks for sharing. Let me offer two comments back. I may be coming off two harsh on the Problem-to-Solution approach when in fact I believe it is quite useful. It's particulary useful when you have a well-defined problem and when you have a situation where it must be solved. A good innovation program will have a mix of the two approaches.

Second comment is about VOC. I agree that VOC is really useful especially in the development stage of the innovation. Customers are good at telling you their preferences. Interview techniques can help uncover the real issues as you point out. VOC is particularly useful for the Solution-to-Problem approach to innovation. In fact, you can't really do it without some customer orientation of the customer. A great approach to this is to actually involve customers in innovation workshops so you can immediately gauge their reactions and insights in real time. The difference here is at what stage you use it.

[Yauhan Mehta]

Dear Drew,

I was browsing through your website and exploring your thoughts on Creativity and Innovation. I enjoyed reading several of your blogs and I felt that your ideas on Innovation were quite insightful. I am an Innovation Research Assistant at The DeSai Group- a consulting firm that focuses on the domains of Strategy-Driven Innovation™, Leadership, Learning and Execution capabilities for continuous growth and optimal business results. Feel free to visit us at http://www.desai.com

I would like to take the liberty to welcome you to our “Community of Friends” at the DeSai Group. We look forward to inviting you in on-going research and collaborative conversations in the future.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Best Regards,

Yauhan Mehta
Innovation Research Assistant
ymehta@desai.com / (860)-233-0011 x818
The DeSai Group: http://www.desai.com
Blog & Downloads: http://www.strategydriveninnovation.com