As organizations come up with new ideas? And how they use these ideas into successful new products, services, business solutions and create?
To answer these questions, a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York spent time with the observation of radical innovation projects like IBM's silicon-germanium devices, GE's digital X-ray, GM hybrid vehicles and DuPont biodegradable plastics. to find your keys? Most of the ideas that came from behind these projects"Happy accidents" rather than to generate some ideas running process.
were in more than a few cases, individuals or small groups simply "freelance" work, to ideas on their own initiative rather than under the direction of some "new venture" idea board or other management system.
"Almost without exception, the idea generation methods have been sporadic, rather than systematically applied continuously and strategically," concluded the Rensselaer researchers. "No way we [white] has established an ongoing process that regularly requests those ideas. What we have observed unique activity or new systems available, the breath remains unproven set. "
It is no wonder that so many good ideas do not come once to the attention of management. Or that so many die soon develop – and miles from the commercial success. In most companies today, the "practice" of innovation in order to compare the mating of pandas: rare, clumsy and often ineffective. HisPractice is largely unchanged from 20 years ago. While the world has drastically and organizations are proud to be changed for a process for anything, remains the process of innovation, ad hoc, piecemeal, incomplete and confirmed seat of the pants, and, as the Rensselaer researchers, highly dependent on luck.
Creative, game-changing ideas always have an element of serendipity to them and will never be presented to produce on demand. But come today's current economic climate to a haltGrowth and fewer ideas (growth in the number of patent requests in recent years stagnated) caused a small but growing group of organizations has to rethink how to test happened ideas and what they can do to improve the innovation performance processes . implement
Attachment of the Idea Factory
Three quarters of companies are consistently disappointed in their innovative activity results, according to global survey of executives. But a minority of organizations – the innovationVanguard recognize – the need for change when improving their results. Put simply, if good ideas do not get hatched, they will not get started. The "vanguard organizations, 23 of which we examined for a recent book idea to create more plants by cultivating the conditions under which the" happy accidents "are more likely to be. The avant-gardes are essentially reinventing inventiveness. If they are paying much more attention to the often-called "Fuzzy Front End" of innovationOpportunities come first light. And they manage these concepts in very different ways, so that large quantities of ideas to fill the pipeline and eventually appear as tangible results.
The review of the unconventional methods of these vanguard organizations, we found that, while innovations and breakthroughs may never be ordered from the top leaders can do much to increase the throughput of the important ideas. And must in fact. We see this leading technology organizations, with seven keyStrategies to strengthen the idea factory:
Invite everyone on the lookout for new ideas.
With their customers in the process of idea generation.
With their customers in new ways.
Focus on to express the needs that customers do not.
Seek ideas from new groups of customers.
Involve suppliers in product innovation.
Benchmark idea for the creation of methods.
Clearly the customer plays an important role in these strategies for strengthening the organizational idea factory. It only makes sense. The goalis to create ideas – the building blocks of the new products, services, processes and strategies – the user the customers are.
Ideation Strategy 1: Refer Everyone in the Quest for Ideas
During suggestion boxes have been around for over 100 years, innovation, avant-garde organizations are wiring their suggestion, making them a strong, energetic force for corporate become creative.
Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), a global pharmaceutical company, notlimit their definition of innovation to activities related to the search for the next breakthrough drug. Rather, he sees a need for new ideas in much broader terms and includes staff constantly on the lookout. BMS has developed a series of suicidal thoughts campaigns for internal customers, under the leadership of the "idea Searcher" Marsha MacArthur and her boss Mark Wright, vice president of the U.S. market research and business intelligence.
If the patent has been around for Glucophage, an oral endsDrugs for Type 2 diabetes, MacArthur helped coordinate a campaign to ideas on how more people for drug use in the meantime you can use request. Rather than classifying this as a marketing problem and let the people in this functional area work on it was a kind of ideation campaign call for ideas to all corners.
The campaign was announced by the staff take a walk Sandwich said: "We are war against diabetes and we need your help!" Town Hall Meetings wereFor the team set to describe the problem more precisely, how we drive patients, their doctors' offices? How do we get patients on the drugs they are currently using the switch?
Tip lines were then established at BMS intranet site so employees could submit their ideas. One idea was to lead a national campaign declaring war on diabetes. Another, to create a museum for diabetics.
"I was really proud of all and the ideas that have been filed," said MacArthur. "Theywere not obvious, such as "speaking doctors." We already do. They were very well thought out. "
The only ideation campaign generated about 4,000 inquiries from 429 employees around the world. In a typical year, coordinated idea Searcher MacArthur 20-30 of such campaigns, both at the level of departments and the enterprise.
Lesson: Organizations can pool their ideas, adding more staff to enlarge in the process of new product and service suicidal thoughts and to solve vexingorganizational problems. Begin by encouraging them to listen to the customer. Do not allow managers, technical specialists, and purchasing, finance, human resources professionals involved in new product / service / market development decisions, provided they spend at least 20% of their time with the current (or future customers) and suppliers.
Ideation Strategy 2: involvement of customers in your process
New products are most often initiated from customers' ideas, rather thanof in-house brainstorming sessions or developed internally, through research and development, according to a study by researchers Robert G. Cooper and Elko Business J. Kleinschmidt from McMaster University Ontario.
If you immediately think "focus groups" when the object of involving customers talk, you better think again. Vanguard companies are also going beyond techniques as they seek more powerful insights and ideas.
To maintain its market position as the "ultimate driving experienceachieve machine, "Munich BMW must be constantly looking for new technologies and design features that keep them slightly ahead. To this end, throwing BMW conventional wisdom on the road and created what it heard a Virtual Innovation Agency (VIA) calls customers directly. Car buffs worldwide access to the website of VIA and online discussions to share their ideas with other fans around the world – and with the BMW Group.
The submission process enables VIAanyone with Internet access to submit ideas – and ideas are protected. If the idea has potential, it routed to the appropriate working at BMW for the follow-up. was established within the first week of the VIA in July, 2001, 4000 ideas had been received.
Lesson: The traditional focus group needs to focus more. Form advisory boards of major customers as a sounding board for ideas serve. to identify customers to buy the latest versions of your products tend. These lead "adoptive parents" canYou insights into where the market is headed and how your company best positioned.
Ideation Strategy 3: Involving Customers in New Ways
Organizations develop and embrace new ways of doing things at different rates. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way they listen to the customer. Thus, for example, customer surveys, old hat to retailers, but they blow the lids off builders.
KB Home, a leading home builder based inLos Angeles, only began surveying customers in the late 1990s, in a very short time gained knowledge about new forms of business. In Denver, KB Home built houses with a fireplace and basement, provided that what everyone wanted. But some buyers were not biting. CEO Bruce Karatz overheard a sales pitch to prospective wanted to save money. The couple said they did not need a cellar, but they pushed the seller to accept it like everyone else had.
Karatz agreedthen and there to survey customers. Your answers shaken KB Home's preconceptions about what homebuyers want. In Denver, people were more than willing to do, without basement, where they cut the price by leaving out no less than 20%. In Phoenix, where porches were covered just mandatory, less than half of the buyers said they took care of them.
By polling for preferences, KB Home opened up its business to price-conscious buyers. But other discovered more desirable amenitiesthat customers were willing to pay: coffee bars in the master bedroom, built-in home offices and higher-quality windows, for example. These "amenity Customization" appeal to buyers – and traumatic for competitors still in the one-size-fits-all approach to housing closed.
DaimlerChrysler used an experimental approach to try to guess what car buyers wanted fickle next turned to anthropology and ethnography known for a process as "the archetype of the research." The development teamhas a prototype of a vehicle mixing retro and futuristic design elements. But then instead of testing the prototype with traditional focus groups, like young men aged 18 to 24, they chose the people that the entire national culture represented and studied their emotional reactions to the prototype.
The designers realized that participants were to protect against "the jungle as looking outside." The retro / futuristic prototype was too playful, too toylike, they seemed to say,"Give me a big thing like a tank." The revised design: the PT Cruiser, an instant success when it was introduced in North America in 2000.
Lesson: outside their field or industry looking for ideas on how to get customer input. Auto manufacturers, retailers, manufacturers of consumer electronics, for example, are on the leading edge of surveying customers and often the "early adopters" of the ideal techniques considered.
Ideation Strategy 4: Focus on the unarticulated Needsthe customer
Another reason traditional focus groups are inadequate idea generators is that they only give feedback on existing ideas. How do you get feedback on ideas that do not exist?
One approach is increasingly popular to meet the needs of customers unarticulated probe and asked them to consider hypothetical products and prototypes to see how they would react.
Consider the microwave. When asked why they like it, most people would say it is because it heats foodfaster than conventional ovens. Asked how they actually use it to say most people to warm up "my coffee" or "Pop Popcorn." What they say – their unspoken choice – is that when they use their microwave to try to make a "real food" as a roast or a steak, the results of ugly, gray and unappetizing.
GE exploring just such unarticulated needs in 1999 and came with Advantium, a speed oven to roast, steaks and other items. A white hot halogen light brown outsidePart of the meat while the inside microwave cooking. The result: home-meals that are cooked quickly and well.
Another major innovation vanguard organization is Callaway Golf, the maker of Big Bertha. Callaway's innovators went out to country clubs and public courses, watching golfers approached the game, Quizzing them how they felt about their abilities . Observers discovered that many golfers frustrated and intimidated by the game. The inarticulateNeed was simply to succeed in something they loved.
Callaway's Big Bertha breakthrough Club has a large and forgiving "sweet spot" and a longer shaft, leading golfers on the ball to make for easier – and hit it further. As a result, took the new players to the sport – and old players traded in their drivers for Big Bertha. By focusing on customers' unarticulated needs, Callaway's innovators created a blockbuster.
Lesson: Learning from customerheard by observing what they do not do what they do not say. Recognize the sources of their frustration and find ways to eliminate possible.
Ideation Strategy 5: Seek ideas from new groups of customers
Most organizations should have a good idea who their customers. But if you expand your definition of customer, you can expand your ability to win in order to generate ideas.
The medical products division of Netherlands-based Philips Electronicshad accepted his only customers were doctors in hospitals because they are those decisions about medical care were. But Philips manager looked deeper changes in the health industry and saw that more services would be in non-traditional environments, such as in ambulances, in the family, and even on the street for the homeless.
By wondering what might need these customers in the non-hospital environments, Philips came up with such products asStethoscope with improved acoustic filter out voices, traffic and other background noises, making it easier to hear for caregivers in chaotic settings on heart murmurs or breathing problems.
Lesson: Search for your customers 'customers and your competitors' customers. Instead of only the present, look to the past (former customers), and the future (someone whom you do not have businesses that have not happened). Ask how They meet the needs of customers.
Ideation Strategy 6:Traders in Product Ideation
Suppliers may be key partners in the idea of creation of process, but many organizations have their information only sparingly with suppliers (who might, finally, with the partners of the competition as well be). Other barriers are cultural differences, lack of cooperation, lack of resources and lack of vision – the inability to conceptualize, new opportunities.
The chief buyer for a leading global consumer products company used to visitSuppliers and try to promote ideas by saying, "Do you have new ideas or technologies you think we would be interested, please let us know." Result: zero new ideas.
Now he brings his problems, his suppliers, "What I need to know, for example, if you are ill, perhaps an adhesive that would work well on older skin, sensitive skin, broken skin, skin have, and five other types of skin that we have identified. "This approach encourages suppliers to contribute to societyidea-creation process, reports of the managers. "Even one of our suppliers developed notoriously noncreative two proprietary materials for the company in the last 12 months. It is unbelievable how excited to get some of our suppliers, if we ask them to be creative on our behalf." And the seemingly routine procurement process added value to other departments in the organization of R & D to commercialization.
Lesson: (to your customers for new ideas, such as the recognitiontheir unarticulated needs), think of your organization as your supplier's customers. Also you have unarticulated needs. Try to articulate them and get your vendor idea-generation plants, which, in consultation with you.
Ideation Strategy 7: Benchmark methods ideation
Innovator organizations actively manage ideation process through the examination of the effectiveness and the question of how the ideas-to-results process could be improved. Ideation is not somethingshould be left to chance.
Ideation specialists may be asked to teach new techniques to shake things up and inject Maverick thinking in the process. A cutting-edge ideation specialist Doug Hall, a former product manager at Procter & Gamble, the idea of running sessions Eureka! Ranch outside Cincinnati, Ohio, for companies like Celestial Seasonings.
Hall's replicable, quantifiable process for inventing breakthrough ideas include a combination of fun, "sensory overload" andanalytical rigor. The goal, as many new product ideas as possible: No idea is too radical, he tells his groups. "Breakthroughs are to contradict history, we must break rules," he says. Eureka! Ranch sessions promise 30 customers economically viable ideas in three days.
Lesson: Organizations, the innovation need to seriously examine the climate in which representation takes place, and put a person responsible for making the process more moreproductive and innovative. Innovation-adept firms invest in ideation sessions, read books, attend seminars, and constantly try to improve their skills.
Monday morning at the Idea Factory
As the world changes faster and faster, ideas and ways of operating that were appropriate yesterday is no longer sufficient. Given the rapid changes, the rapid standardization of products, and the convergence of strategies, the companies that rely on yesterday's ideas,Products of yesterday, and yesterday's assumptions are much more vulnerable.
Organizations must create a constant stream of new ideas when it exciting and prosperous futures. But in most organizations there is resistance to the concept of innovation policy change so that the status quo. Most companies today have allowed their methods of promotion, to languish care and acting on new ideas, while on more immediate concerns, such as focusing on costs from existingProcesses and products and services.
But because of the current economic climate, companies are increasingly willing to rethink their central processes: innovation, how to reach them.
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