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How to Innovate

Ok, you agree that innovation is necessary and vital to the continued competitiveness of your business. But how do you do it? More importantly, how do you do it in a cost effective manner that brings real results? The innovation process is usually poorly understood and more often poorly executed by most companies. In a nutshell, it is the process of devising new (at least for your company) solutions that address unmet customer needs. Of course, much easier said than done. Note the material here is a brief summary of the techniques and strategies presented in our Effective Innovation course. Contact us for details on taking the course.

The first step is to align this process with your business strategy. Are you looking to start a new market or enhance your position in a market for which you are already making products? If you are going to enter new markets with the innovation, how much of a risk you you want to take? The more novel and unprecedented the innovation, the more potential for competitive advantage but also the more risk in pulling it off successfully. In any case you should adopt an attitude of risk, adventure, and open mindedness.

Once you have determined the scope of the innovation, you must specify why you are doing this. You must determine what customer needs you are addressing. This is done without considering any technologies. Define the users and then plan to involve them from the start and all along the way. Identify their unmet needs. However, the crucial point here is to focus on what the user does, not on who he or she is. Do not ask the customer what they want in a new product but instead observe and provide specific scenarios to elicit user opinions. Focus on the tasks the user performs to reach a specific goal. This focus on customer tasks and activities will become essential when we begin to design the interaction of the product with the customer.

Now specify concrete objectives of the innovation that correspond to providing solutions to selected unmet needs. These objectives are not a description of the implementation of the solution, but rather a task oriented statement of an improved element of the task.

Once the specific customer needs and their solution objectives are stated you must determine the critical technologies underlying the solutions. You must determine where those technologies are going so you know where the opportunities for technological innovation are. This requires technology analysis and forecasting, determining the trends and implications of those technologies.

If these technologies are not currently part of your core competencies you must decide how you will acquire them. Possible methods include buying a company with the competencies, developing the competencies in house, hiring contractors skilled in the areas, and licensing it from another source, i.e. technology transfer.

Only now do you start to discuss how to achieve the solution objectives. The ideation process must stay focused on the solution objectives but otherwise be as free as possible. Back into ideas from a clean slate rather than trying to move toward it through constraint relaxing. Free yourself from the constraints of the current technologies and businesses. This will allow you to consider the widest range of solution implementations. Constraints can be layered on once promising implementations of solutions to user needs are defined.

During the ideation process also anticipate user reactions to the use technologies and its implementations. Technology is not developed or used in a vacuum. Users react to the technology. They can reject it, or, more likely, accept some aspects and reject others. People's behavior can also be affected by technology as users adopt their behavior to use the technology. This generates new new trends and opportunities as the cycle begins again as shown in the Society - Innovation Interaction Cycle figure on the right. Companies that monitor and exploit the cycle will continually uncover new opportunities for innovation.

Once innovative implementations of solutions are defined, real world constrains are gradually applied. Some of the constraints will be determined by the area in which you wish to compete with the new product. Some areas include price, features, and usability. As you layer the constraints onto the solution, you must monitor the effects of the constraints on the innovativeness of the solution. You must find a way to maintain the innovation in the solution while making it meet the real world constraints. This process is itself fertile ground for more innovation.

The Technology Transfer Process

Technology Transfer from Wikipedia

Technology Transfer: Process & Trends