Visit the Applied Marketing Innovation Wiki to see a collection of inventions across a wide array of product categories as well as information about innovation consultants. The information is from students at The University of Cincinnati taking the graduate course, Applied Marketing Innovation. Here is what you will find:
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.
I am asked often by colleagues at Fortune 100 companies to recommend or suggest an innovation consultant. Choosing one is challenging for two reasons: the client is not always clear what type of innovation they want, or they are not sure what type of innovation a consultant offers. Here are three factors to consider when choosing an innovation consultant: 1. TYPE of consultant, 2. METHOD used, and 3. ROLE of the consultant.
The innovation space has become so crowded that I group them into four types:
INVENTION: These are consultants that help you create new-to-the-world ideas. They have a particular expertise in creativity methods or idea generation tools. Their main focus is generation of many new product or service ideas.
DESIGN: These are consultants that take an existing product, service, or idea and put some new, innovative form to it. They have a particular expertise in industrial design or human factors design. Their main focus is transforming the way a product is used or experienced.
ENGINEERING: These are consultants that help you make the new idea work in practice. They have a particular expertise in technology, science, research, and problem solving. Their main focus is building it.
ACTUALIZATION: These are consultants that help you get the innovation into the marketplace. They have a particular expertise in marketing processes, brand, or commercial launch of a product or service. Their main focus is selling it.
The challenge is many consultants claim to be all of these. While true for some, my sense is that all firms started off as one type and then expanded to cover the others. The question to ask yourself is: would you be better off matching your need to their original core expertise, or would you be better off going to a one-stop shop...a firm that can do it all even though their core expertise is, say, design. How do you know what type the firm really is? Study the biography of their founder. What was the founder's education, experience, work background, interests, etc. The founder is where the core orientation of the firm begins. The other practice types get bolted on later.
Step Two is understanding their method. The first question I ask consultants is, "Do you know how to innovate?" The second question is, "How?" I want to understand their method of innovation, and I want to be able to explain it to other people. I want to know the efficacy. Has it worked in the past and will it work on my project? Show me the data.
Step Three is understanding the role of the innovation consultant. Is this a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach where you are given some software or other resource to create innovation on your own? Is this a DIWY (do-it-with-you) approach where the consultant leads and facilitates groups of your employees to innovate together? Is this a DIFY (do-it-for-you) approach where the consultant takes your problem specification and comes back with their recommended solutions? Or, is this training? All of these roles are valid depending your need.
I am impressed with the talent and variety of the consultants in the innovation space today. It becomes even more impressive when you select the right one for the job.
I've come full circle on the notion of improvisation as a source of innovation. I just finished a three day improv training program at The Second City to try to find direct application to corporate growth. I found it.
My pursuit of a method of innovation started with John Kao's book, "Jamming," which compared innovation to the process of musical improvisation. Jamming is a group activity where one musician lays down the foundational tempo and key for the other musicians who, one at a time, add their own interpretation of it. At the time, I thought this was innovation nirvana. But I moved away from it. Improv and "jamming" in the Kao mindset seemed too much like brainstorming which is usually LESS productive than simply thinking of ideas by yourself. It seemed too unstructured. Bottom line: it didn't work.
Now I've learned a more systematic approach to improv from a place that has launched the careers of more comedians than any other. What I learned can be boiled down to: 1. The Commitment Principle, 2. The "Yes, and..." Principle, and 3. The Relationship Principle. When applied systematically, these yield very funny comedy sketches from anyone. My belief is they can be used the same way in corporate innovation.
Commitment Principle means commit to both the role you are playing and the process. The "Yes, and..." Principle means always take what line or idea your partner has given you and add value to it. Match the energy and direction of your partner, but then add significant context or information to keep the dynamic going. The Relationship Principle says to establish the connection and accountability to your partner above all else. Without this, improvisation is impossible.
Comedic improvisation is a disciplined, structured, team activity. My goal is NOT to become a comedian. Rather, my goal now will be to merge these lessons from improv with Systematic Inventive Thinking to produce even better innovation, on demand.
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