Notes from My Digital Compost Heap

I make a lot of notes as I survey business or technical literature. Sometimes they form the basis of future work, and sometimes they just gather digital dust. Rather than allowing so many bits and bytes to forever languish on my hard drive, I've decided to start publishing them as blog posts. Who knows, maybe my germ of a thought can add to your next breakthrough idea.

First retrieved from my digital compost heap are notes I made after reading Innovation is Not a Strategy (BrandingStrategyInsider.com, Sept. 8, 2009) and the comments following the post. Personally, I think innovation can be a strategy.

First of all, what is innovation? Innovation isn’t invention, nor is it adding “nice to have” features to existing products. My best definition of innovation is filling an unmet need in an entirely new way in which the customer finds substantive value. This may be a new-to-the-world product (TiVo*), transforming an existing product into something that operates very differently (Glad Forceflex*), or the total re-invention of an old idea (Swiffer WetJet – it’s really just a mop, but by eliminating the need for a bucket, the whole process of cleaning the floor changes dramatically). All of these ideas introduce something new to the world and customers recognize and value it.

When invention meets value, it becomes innovation. It may take a long time for that value to be realized, but for innovations like the internet, which took a long, long time for invention to meet value, the magnitude of the value when it does “hit” quells any doubt that it was innovation.

Although sales can be an indicator of value, value is not sales. Fads sell, but there is no substantive value to the consumer. Value is defined as relative worth and return on investment. I suspect most former pet rock owners became disenchanted with Sedimentary Fido soon after purchase.

So, can innovation be a strategy? I think it can, but it only works within a larger vision.

Pepsi, which cranks out inventions regularly, seems to lack vision. It builds the soft-drink version of the pet rock repeatedly. It responds to trends like health consciousness and environmental responsibility superficially with small variations on existing products. I think this cheapens the brand image, although a brand like Pepsi has been around for so long that maybe it can sustain the knocks of repeated innovation failures on the chance that something will hit.

Google or Apple, on the other hand, have strong vision and are able to translate invention into innovation over and over again to the acclaim of pretty much everybody other than Microsoft. They have failures, but they're overshadowed by the big hits. They start by saying things like, "If X were designed today, what would it look like?" They don't use their existing products to tether them to a starting point; they start from scratch every time. Yet, the pieces all fit together because they align with the larger vision.

Pepsi, Apple, and Google all are profitable and have power brands, but a reputation of innovation also draws passionate consumers that are not only the source of sales dollars but unpaid marketers of the brand with their fierce loyalty. They draw in other consumers and make each product launch a phenomenon. Innovation as a strategy? Looks like it to me.

For some companies, it may be the dominant strategy at times and a crucial factor in maintaining the brand. For U.S.-based manufacturing companies whose products have become commodities, it must be.

The innovation strategy may be cannibalistic (i.e., trade-up) or it may be redefining the product portfolio because technological advances obsolete the old products (however slowly). The latter requires a company to look very hard at its core competencies and decide how best to apply them beyond the company's traditional boundaries. Consider how brilliantly Amazon did this.

With good leadership and strong vision, a new innovative product, even one that in no way resembles the old (“big time innovation”*), could be the new flagship of the brand. Why not leverage a strong brand for a strong new product? Of course, this must be managed expertly, or you're just Pepsi with another useless sku.

Of course, I'm no expert. Just a businessperson and a consumer.

* Special thanks to Jeannie Chan who provided the examples of TiVo and Forceflex as innovations in her comment to the BrandingStrategyInsider.com post that I referenced, above. She also used the term “big time innovation,” which I also re-used – the term has been used by others, but she should have credit for inspiring me to use that term in this post. Make sure you scroll down past the BrandingStrategyInsider.com post and read her comment, among others.

Technorati tags: Branding Strategy Insider, Derrick Daye, Brad VanAuken, Jeannie Chan, innovation, strategy

What people really want is a Star Trek tricorder

Star Trek Classic Tricorder
Photo by David B. Spalding

While searching for information on the elements of good design, I came across this post from September 2009 by IDEO CEO Tim Brown. Brown talks about bridging Six Sigma with his trademark innovation mantra, Design Thinking.

In Brown’s post, he quotes Chuck Jones of Whirlpool, who compared design thinkers to quantum physicists (concerned with multiple possibilities) and everyone else (including Six Sigma practitioners) to Newtonian physicists (concerned with defined measurement). Brown confesses that, because of these differences, he once was highly skeptical of Design Thinking's ability to operate in a Six Sigma environment, thinking that Six Sigma was toxic to innovation. He now thinks that Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster by improving product quality and functionality in the implementation phase. He also suggests that perhaps we should cycle between Design Thinking and Six Sigma in the product development process. He wraps up by saying, "…the biggest challenge will be to build business cultures that are agile enough to incorporate both."

In the reader comments, someone posted what I was thinking as I read his post, that Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) may be an attempt to marry Design Thinking with Six Sigma. However, I'm not sure if DFSS, which, as I understand it, relies on the voice of the customer, fully integrates the concept of Design Thinking, or more specifically, the component of breakthrough innovation.

Lorenzo Kidd and I were discussing innovation the other day and the difference between the smaller product innovations that significantly alter a common action (via a systems thinking approach) and the huge innovations that change the entire game, moving all of us in a new direction (via something more akin to complexity theory, perhaps?).

My favorite example of a smaller, albeit breakthrough, product innovation is P&G's Swiffer® WetJet®, which fundamentally changed the way we keep floors clean. There’s still a need to mop the floor the old-fashioned way periodically for a more thorough cleaning than WetJet® provides, but one can maintain a much cleaner floor between full moppings while feeling the need to drag out the old mop much less often. WetJet® removed the biggest pain of floor-washing: the bucket. This substantially lowered the user’s resistance to cleaning the floor. I suspect that P&G didn't frame their goal as creating a better mop or floor soap, but as finding an easier way to achieve a consistently clean floor. Did customers articulate this need? Maybe. But if they'd asked me, would I have said I would be willing to mop the floor more frequently? No! Yet that's exactly what people do, quite willingly, because it is just so darn easy to have consistently cleaner floors via a minute or two of effort here and there with a WetJet®. So, despite being somewhat counterintuitive, WetJet® clearly satisfied an immediate, unmet, hard-to-define customer need in a new way.

But what about those things that aren't so clearly tied to voice of the customer? Things that make us scratch our heads for years and say, "Why would anyone ever use that?" The things that businesses first shrug off as irrelevant or disruptive to operations? Things that are endlessly criticized in the news? Things that, years after they are introduced, become so integrated into our lives that we wonder how on earth we survived without them?

You know, like the internet.
Personal computers.
3G phones.
Rechargeable batteries.
Social media.

The needs behind these breakthrough innovations were so far from anything the customer could have possibly fathomed or articulated that, in a business environment, where products are determined by voice of the customer, the breakthrough ideas behind them could have died in their infancy. These ideas were so incredibly ahead of their time—radically predating what I suspect most product development teams would have been capable of relating to the voice of the customer. But, if they wouldn't have been developed as early they were, we would not be benefitting from them today.

And these ideas changed everything.

I think the true breakthrough innovations come from accurately figuring out what the customer will need, but can't possibly understand yet. It requires seeing much further down the road of progress than anyone else can. It's figuring out in the late 1960s that what people really want is a Star Trek Tricorder even though it seems like ridiculous science fiction (Lorenzo's example) and pursuing it until it doesn't seem so unattainable after all. Maybe it's more like listening to the whisper of the customer's subconscious than the clear and lucid voice of the customer.

How do we do that?

Technorati tags: Tim Brown, Chuck Jones, IDEO, Design Thinking, Six SigmaDesign for Six Sigma, Breakthrough innovation, Innovation, Swiffer WetJet, Star Trek, Tricorder, Voice of the Customer, Lorenzo Kidd