Посты с тэгом: innovation

Five Industries Ripe for Innovation

Published date: December 30, 2014 в 10:54 am

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The economic outlook for 2015 is, by most accounts, “slightly better than 2014.” That, of course, depends on what industry you’re in. For some, that outlook could be a lot better with an injection of good, old fashioned innovation. Here is my short list of five industries most ripe for innovation in 2015.
1. Commercial Aerospace: I may be biased because I’ve worked in this industry, but I’ve always considered the aerospace industry the most complicated and difficult of any. Think about the conditions that airlines, for example, work under. They’re heavily regulated, union intensive, recession sensitive, fiercely competitive, fuel price sensitive, and operationally complex. Putting thousands of full airplanes safely in the sky everyday is no small feat. And it’s not just the airlines that face challenges. The aircraft and engine manufacturers like Airbus and GE face enormous technology and business risk when building new equipment.
It’s these challenges that make the aerospace industry ripe for innovation. Tight constraints are a necessary condition for creativity, and this industry has it more than any. We should expect a significant focus on innovation from this sector next year, especially in creating many small, incremental innovations rather than seeking the big disruptors.
2. Pharmaceutical: The pharma industry has many of the same attributes as aerospace in terms of the regulatory scrutiny and long lead time development risks. But this industry has been turned upside down by a series of independent events. Changes in how new drugs are discovered, the shift to generics, the move to personalized medicine, and the shrinking pipeline have conspired to create the “perfect storm” for this industry. Drug companies are moving past just hoping for a billion dollar, blockbuster drug to save them. They need to find relevance beyond the prescribers and pharmacies that dispense their products.
We should expect to see big pharma companies innovate across the entire value chain, from pill manufacturing all the way into the patient’s home. Big brands what to become a household name, not just an clinical industry name.
3. Food: Pressure on this industry isn’t just from the FDA and other regulators. Consumers are on high alert like never before about what they put in their mouths. It’s not hard to see why. The obesity epidemic has tainted our image of sugar, once thought of as sweet, but now seen as deadly and addictive. Constant media reports about food poisoning and listeria outbreaks make consumers nervous and suspicious. Changing consumer trends in taste and ingredients create a moving target for ingredient makers and food processors. Even Bill Gates has weighed in on the need for innovation in this industry, noting that our approach to food hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years. “It’s ripe for innovation.”
I expect to see the big food companies like Kraft and Cambell’s step up their innovation efforts in everything from manufacturing lines, packaging, and retailing. Like the pharma companies, they need to bring more relevance to the consumer once the product reaches the home.
4. Higher Education: Like aerospace, this industry is a hot button for me because I’m in it. Universities are under constant scrutiny, from outside and from within, about the many challenges they face. Type into Google, “the problem with universities” and you’ll get 200 million results. What’s interesting about this industry is how long it’s been around, how well understood the problems are, yet how difficult it is to make progress. The university model faces issues around the tenure system, the role of a university in terms research versus teaching, and most importantly, relevance – are universities producing the right product for our society, or have they become so insular and out of touch in preparing students?
We should expect to see more innovation outside of the university model that will put pressure to change inside. New educational models, social learning, corporate learning resources, and revised expectations of the consumer about college and its costs will isolate universities to the brink of change.
5. Consulting: Consultants can be their own worst enemy in forgetting to take care of their own business model while working to improve their client’s. As with the other ripe industries, market forces are causing cracks in the seams of this one, too. The biggest change is transparency. Consulting firms used to live behind a shroud of brand reputation, where executive selected a consultant to reduce risk to their own stock. Now clients want to see more of what goes on inside, and it is changing the way they hire consultant, pay them, and use them. Customers don’t want to pay too much for features they don’t value, especially when they have unprecedented access to the same information and Big Data as the consultants.
We should expect consulting firms to innovate new ways to deliver faster results, and to take more accountability for those results.
Bring on 2015!
 
 
Copyright 2014 Drew Boyd

What China Must Do to Innovate

Published date: October 27, 2014 в 3:00 am

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Innovation is an essential ingredient to the growth and success of China’s economy. The use of methods such as Systematic Inventive Thinking will accelerate that growth. But where should China focus its innovation efforts? Professors George Yip and Bruce McKern make the case that China should focus on the following:

  • Cost innovation: Cost innovation occurs when changes in the product design, production or delivery process, technology or materials result in reduction in production or delivery costs. Using Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), the Task Unification Technique tends to produce ideas that are resourceful and cost effective.
  • Process innovation: Process innovation occurs when a company creates a new process for producing or delivering an existing product or service. In China, much process innovation seeks to reduce the cost of production. For process innovation, the Division Technique helps break structural fixedness and create new, transformational processes.
  • Application innovation: Application innovation occurs when existing products (or services) or technologies are combined in a new way to produce a new product. The humble but ubiquitous sandwich, and also the credit card, are classic examples. The Task Unification Technique forces the innovator to consider ways that existing resources can take on additional jobs, leading to clever new applications.
  • Supply chain innovation: While China has become critical in the global supply chains of foreign companies, supply chains inside China still have much room for improvement. Infrastructure is needed to catch up with the country’s very rapid growth. Here, the Subtraction Technique forces the mind to remove essential elements of a supply chain to help see new opportunities and unique replacements for those elements.
  • Product innovation: China has produced relatively few product innovations that are truly new to the world. But based on extensive experience with incremental innovations, Chinese companies are moving from incremental toward radical innovations. The Attribute Dependency Technique is great for taking exisitng incremental innovations and converting them to “smart” products.
  • Technological innovation: China has yet to produce high-impact technology innovations with global significance. But we have seen examples of minor but world class technology being implemented to create innovations. Here again, the Task Unification Technique is especially effective for taking raw technologies and seeking new and novel uses in a wide variety of domains.
  • Business model innovation: In China, most business model innovation has started by taking a Western model, adapting it to China, then further innovating the adaptation. Although Alibaba.com, for example, copied the eBay platform with its competing service Taobao, it quickly overtook eBay, based on its earlier B2B platform experience and innovations to suit the Chinese customer. To innovate a business model, use the Multiplication Technique. It challenges the innovator to consider key parts of the business model in a whole new light.
  • Non-customer innovation: Non-customer innovation occurs when a business is able to serve a customer segment not previously served in this category elsewhere in the world or in a particular country. The so-called “adjacent market” appears attractive as a new source of growth, but these can be distracting. Consider instead applying most or all of the five techniques of SIT to an adjacent space before diving in.

As the professors noted, Chinese companies are adept at exploiting all of these forms of innovation due to their relentless focus on customers, their search for unmet needs, and remarkable speed. Adding in the use of systematic methods of innovation would take China even further.

It’s Back! Innovation and Design Thinking MOOC

Published date: September 22, 2014 в 3:00 am

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The University of Cincinnati’s Massive Open Online Course begins October 16th. The course is free and open to all.

You should take this course because 1. you can do it even while you are traveling, and 2. ALL the content is optional. Just surf the content that is most important for your needs.

The course will help you master the tools necessary to generate new ideas and quickly transform those concepts into a viable pipeline of new products and services. Participants will learn the highly effective method of idea generation called Systematic Inventive Thinking used by many global firms across a wide variety of industries. They will also learn a suite of design thinking tools to take new concepts and put “life” into them. Generating ideas is not enough. Design thinking takes new ideas and sculpts them into market-winning products and services. Participants will learn the mechanics of each S.I.T. tool, and practice the use of each on a real product or service. Additionally, they will learn from a panel of seasoned practitioners and experts in the fields of innovation, new product development, and venture start-up.

The course is taught by two industry-practitioners-turned-academics. Drew Boyd is a 30 year industry veteran. He spent seventeen years at Johnson and Johnson in marketing, mergers & acquisitions and international development. He is co-author of Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results. Jim Tappel has over 25 years in industry in the engineering and design. This unique perspective from the commercial/marketing side (Drew) and the engineering/design side (Jim) creates a complete picture of what companies need to do to drive innovation and promote organic growth. Both are now full time faculty members at the University of Cincinnati.

The course features guest videos by practitioners in the field who are experts in innovation, design, new product development and venture startup. They are:

  • Cindy Tripp, formerly the Director of Global Design Thinking at Procter & Gamble. Cindy led development of P&G’s Design Thinking application for business strategy, organizational design, commercial and product innovation to generate previously unimagined solutions.
  • Doug Ladd, Chief Marketing Officer, EndoChoice, Inc., one of the fastest growing medical device companies in the world.
  • Sally Kay, Principal, Strategic Product Development. Sally has extensive experience in innovation as a practitioner (25 years) and a consultant with particular focus on the front end of the innovation process. She is active in The Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) for the last 25 years. She chairs The Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award Program.
  • Dr. Michael Clem, Vice President R&D – Medical at Kaleidoscope, a leading innovation and design firm. Mike is an innovation leader with a successful track record of developing and leading teams to deliver winning solutions. He spent over 20 years in technology and R&D programs with Johnson & Johnson companies.
  • Elizabeth Edwards, CEO at Metro Innovation and author of Startup: The Complete Handbook for Launching a Company for Less. She is a venture capital and economic development strategist focused on helping cities and regions develop stronger entrepreneurial ecosystems.

RegisterParticipants who successfully complete the course and enroll as a new student at the University of Cincinnati will receive graduate credits that can be applied toward either an MBA degree from the Lindner College of Business or a Master of Engineering degree through the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Join us on October 16, 2014 for the start of Innovation and Design Thinking.  Content links will be available approximately one week prior to the course’s start date. The course will start on October 16 and be completed on November 20.

Decluttering Innovation

Published date: August 11, 2014 в 1:28 pm

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People need time to innovate, but corporations tend to “tax” employees with time-wasting bureaucracy. As reported in The Economist, clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity.

“Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.”

Endless meetings aren’t the only forms of corporate clutter. Complex organizational design forces people to waste valuable time and energy figuring out how to get things done. Emails overload, especially when employees don’t know how to use filtering techniques. Status reports dull the mind and waste energy by forcing employees to regurgitate old news

To fight through the clutter, I recommend the following:

1. Develop an Innovation Competency: Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone and applied systematic. Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership.  A innovation method such as SIT, for example, gives an employee the ability to “innovate on demand.”

2. Drive Innovation as a Process: Defining innovation as just the NPD process is too limiting. Leaders need to sponsor cross-functional teams using systematic innovation tools that feed concepts into the NPD process.  This will eliminate the “fuzzy” in the front end to create sustainable process of generating new opportunities.

3. Innovate Under the Radar: In the Harvard Business Review, Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg make a great point in their article, “The Case for Stealth Innovation.”  Savvy innovators know how to operate under the radar and nurture innovation programs through complex bureaucracy.  Thomas Bonoma’s classic HBR article from 1986, “Marketing Subversives,”said something similar:

“I found that under conditions of marketplace change, success depended heavily on the presence of marketing subversives in a company.  Subversive marketers undermined their organizations’ structures to implement new marketing practices….And no matter what higher management had decided to allocate to various marketing projects, the subversives found ways to work around the official budget.  They bootlegged the resources they needed to implement new, more appropriate marketing practices.”

The same can be said about innovation.

Copyright 2014 Drew Boyd

Innovation Through Task Unification

Published date: June 30, 2014 в 3:00 am

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The famous inventor, Thomas Edison, lived in a beautiful home. But something was unusual about the gate that led into his house. His visitors had to push the gate very hard to open it, and then again very hard to close it. It seemed odd that such a successful inventor like Thomas Edison wouldn’t fix his gate. Rumor has it that Thomas had attached a pump to his gate so that every time someone opened or closed it, they were pumping fresh water into the plumbing system of the house.

This is a great example of the innovation technique called Task Unification. Task Unification is defined as the assignment of additional tasks to an existing resource. That resource can be a component of a product or service. Or it can be something in the immediate vicinity of the product or service.

Think back to the story of Thomas’s gate. The gate has its primary job of letting visitors through, but it also has the additional job of pumping water. That’s not all to the story. The guests coming to visit Thomas are also a resource. They have their primary job of being friends of Thomas. But now they have the additional job of activating the gate to open and close it.

To use Task Unification, begin by listing the product’s internal components as well as the external components, the things right around where the product is being used. You select a component and assign it an additional task. That creates the virtual product. Using Function Follows Form, you look for potential benefits, and you modify or adapt the concept to improve it.

There are three ways to apply Task Unification:

One way is to have an internal component take a job of another internal component. Think of it as that component is stealing the function of the other component. Here is an example.

  • CmWhat you see here looks like an ordinary coffee maker. In fact, this product has a clever little innovation inside. The coffee maker’s filter has the additional job of measuring just the right amount of coffee to use given how much water was put in. It gives you the perfect brew every time.

You could also have an internal component take the job of an external component.

  • EasyfillNissan, the Japanese auto maker, has a nifty idea to make it easier to fill your tires with air. The car’s horn will beep to let you know when you’ve reached the right tire pressure. It’s called the Easy Fill Tire Alert. In this example, the car horn steals the job of the tire pressure gauge.

You could also have an external component steal the job of an internal component.

  • SubwayHere’s an example from a grocery store in Korea. They placed billboards in train and subway stations that show their products on the shelves just the way you would see it in a store. Commuters use their smartphones to scan the products they need. That shopping list is sent to the grocery store so the commuter can stop by on the way home to pick up the groceries. In this example, they assigned the subway billboards the additional task of becoming the point-of-sale. Very convenient and it saves times.

PlaypumpHere’s another example of an external component being assigned the additional job of an internal component. It’s a concept called Play Pump. It’s a child’s merry-go-round, the kind you would see on a playground. They don’t know it, but as they play on it, they’re also turning a pump to pump fresh water out of a well and into a holding tank. It’s used in small villages in sub Sahara Africa where finding and pumping water is difficult. The kids of the village have the additional job of providing water to the community.

That almost sounds a lot like Thomas Edison and his water pumping gate! And that’s why Task Unification can lead you to some pretty clever ideas.

LEARN the entire S.I.T. Method at Lynda.com…

Innovation and Design Thinking: Getting Your Program Started

Published date: November 25, 2013 в 3:00 am

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“Nothing is stronger than habit.”
Ovid

 “The key to success is to make a habit of doing the things you fear.”
Vincent Van Gogh

This week, we explored the questions related to how as well as key factors in creating an innovation culture.  From the Pro’s comments:

  • Francis Milbower

“The first thing a company should do is have the full commitment from management”

  • Francisco Javier Zambonino Vázquez

“Since risk taking must be encouraged -innovation is a risky activity-, management must act as guidance an support. Without their initial full involvement and commitment the initiative is doom to failure. Clearly, the responsibility, commitment, and guidance fall on the management’s shoulders.  But what leader, in their right mind, would not publically support innovation in words and actions?  Words like synergy, collaboration, innovation, empowerment, proactive, paradigm shift, and our favorite thinking outside the box have become common vernacular in speeches, memos and annual reports from management for decades. So obviously we have to go beyond the words and look at the actions and behaviors.  If management is not sold on innovation, or at least not to the degree of the rank and file, there are other methods perhaps.”

Innovation and Design Thinking: The Role of Leadership

Published date: November 18, 2013 в 3:00 am

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“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.”

— Roger von Oech

What’s the role of leadership in innovation and design thinking? The focus this week’s discussion was the role of organizations, management and business leaders in promoting, supporting and driving innovation. From participants in the course:

  • Frank Auffinger

“It depends on the level of the leader in the organization. At the upper levels, it is the leaders responsibility to define the corporate strategy, which plays a large part in the progress of innovation and establishes the direction of development activities. At the middle level, leaders need to be more active in progressing innovation according to the strategy. When an innovation has potential, it is up to leadership to remove blockers that could inhibit development of the innovation, or to determine if the innovation has merit and deserves contributions of time and resources. These dynamics play a significant role in innovation and design thinking. Finally, leaders should act as mentors and facilitators and should guide the organizational implementation of innovation and design thinking.”

Innovation and Design Thinking: Building Innovation Capabilities

Published date: November 11, 2013 в 3:00 am

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“The world leaders in innovation and creativity will also be world leaders in everything else.”

Harold R McAlindon

How does a company build enough innovation capability to be the leader in its industry? That was the focus of this week’s discussion in our course, Innovation and Design Thinking. Some of our experienced participants said it best:

  • Francisco Javier Zambonino Vázquez:

“A very simple way to innovate is opening your eyes and seeing how others innovate around you. Getting insights and inspiration from others and adapting those innovations to your own world (namely, your business) is as simple as observing. The inspirations make you think about how to transfer that innovation to your particular scenario and how to provide additional value to your customers by copying, modifying and pasting it. That’s also innovation -and not mere incremental one- because you are having the opportunity to enhance your performance and better satisfy your customer by using methods and processes utilized by other businesses or industries. If done, you’re prepared to a quantum leap by releasing new services and features which none of your direct competitors is providing yet. Simple, cheap and efficient.“

Now, Twitter Must Grow

Published date: November 7, 2013 в 11:32 am

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It’s official. Twitter is a publicly traded company, and it will face constant pressure to innovate and grow. Let’s look at how innovation methods can be applied to Twitter to find new opportunitues.

We’ll apply the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking
to Twitter.  Our goal will be to create new features and innovations
with the main Twitter platform as well as to create completely new
applications related to Twitter.

To use S.I.T., we start with the components of Twitter:
1.    Profile
2.    Photo
3.    People followed
4.    Followers
5.    Hashtags
6.    Tweets
7.    Re-tweets
8.    Groups
9.    Search
10.  Feeds
11.  Client
12.  API

We
apply each of the five templates of S.I.T. one at a time to create new
configurations.  We work backwards to identify potential benefits or new
markets with that configuration.

1.  SUBTRACTION: Removing an essential component

  • Virtual Product: Twitter account without the “tweeter” (person who owns the account).
  • Concept:  Your Twitter account pulls in and aggregates interesting
    factoids from around the social web and creates a tweet automatically.
    It “auto tweets.”
  • Potential Benefits:  Creates a more dynamic Twitter presence, likely leading to more followers.

2.  MULTIPLICATION: Making a copy of a component but changing it in some way

  • Virtual Product: Create multiple Twitter accounts under one user.
  • Concept: An app that allows the Twitter users to compose a list of accounts and
    distribute their tweets, choosing their release in one or more of their
    accounts.
  • Potential Benefits: Broadens re-tweeting as it links to the Follower network of each account.

3.  TASK UNIFICATION:  Assigning an additional task to an existing resource

  • Virtual Product: A Twitter client that automatically fetches content for you.
  • Concept: An app that resides on your desktop, and it pulls in Twitter feeds along with any other feeds of interest (much like RSS).
  • Potential Benefits: Convenient, one place to look for all your social feeds.

4.  DIVISION:  Dividing a product or component either physically, functionally, or preserving (maintaining characteristics of the whole)

  • Virtual Product: Divide your Twitter followers into relevant groups (much like Google Circles).
  • Concept: An app that sends instant messages to groups of friends in
    real-time. You can join in on conversations about topics that interest
    you, or start your own conversations.
  • Potential Benefits: Keeps track of all your social web activity in relevant groups.

5.  ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY:  Creating (or breaking) dependencies between two internal attributes or an internal and external attribute.

  • Virtual Product: The information pulled in about a follower depends on what other social networks they belong to.
  • Concept: A browser plugin that allows you to view the social web
    profile for each of your friends simply by mousing over their name in
    your Twitter stream.
  • Potential Benefits:  Better informed about Followers.

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