November 1 Readings

The Art of Innovation: Chapter 1

• There are 4 key reasons for companies outsource product development: raw capacity, speed, lack of expertise, innovation
• Innovation is the centerpiece of corporate strategies and initiatives
• Innovators should examine collaborative innovation as Butch Harmon views Tiger Wood’s swing: “We’ve built his swing together, so it’s pretty easy to tweak if something goes wrong.”
• Success depends on both what you do and how you do it
• 5 fold method to IDEO Madness
• Understand the market, the client, perceive constraints
• Observe people in real-life situations
• Visualize new-world concepts and their target customers
• Evaluate and refine the prototypes
• Implement the new concept for commercialization
• The fastest development teams in the world can’t win the race to market if the decision process bogs them down
• ABC television show had them innovate the shopping experience in one week
• All people have a creative side and it can flourish in an encouraging culture

This chapter made me focus not on the organizational structure, but rather the first fold of the IDEO method – understand the market. I think the observation technique better helps collaborators understand opportunity than brainstorming. Brainstorming just builds upon those opportunities. I think that it would be interesting to view the line of innovation though. The shopping cart was completely changed, including the basket. It looks great, but would that shopping cart be used in all Whole Foods stores nationwide? When I lived in Ireland, the Tesco store was so small, there wasn’t any room for carts, even if they did have baskets. As a marketer, I want a brand that has the potential to expand to multiple territories. Is there a line for innovation? Should we fulfill our innovative vision completely or only partially? Also, in what way can we decrease the decision making time? Success does depend both on what you do and how you do it and I want to know more details regarding how to implement this process.

The Art of Innovation, Chapter 2

• David Kelly & Dean Jovey started IDEO in 1978
• David believed that if he hired people he liked and respected, everybody would have fun and get work done
• IDEO was a workplace filled with pranks, but employees felt the pranks gave people a sense that they belonged to something larger than themselves
• Innovators require an innovative environment
• David’s first job was the Lisa computer and its iconic mouse
• Being old and wise isn’t always an advantage; you have to be bold enough to make educated guesses
• Pranks created an atmosphere where you naturally took changes and solved problems. Failure is okay as long as you fall forward

The Google environment follows the Silicon corporate culture, much like IDEO. I always felt that work was fun. A wise manager once told me that if you’re not having fun at work, you’re in the wrong business. I liked that the corporation had themed off-sites and parties, colorful bouncy balls and walls. The atmosphere made you feel that you were in an innovative environment and not in a boxy CPG firm. On the flip side, I think one has to be careful with pranks. Pranks can supplement or be a detriment to the corporate culture, especially as the company hires women (who typically are not pranksters). I would rather this chapter went further in discussing how the office worked together, in more cases. This would help me find greater insight in my workplace.

The Art of Innovation: Chapter 3

• Innovation stems from the actual people who use the product, not the ‘experts’ inside the company
• An example of product use misconceptions is the ‘one-handed’ Advanced Cardiovascular heart balloon. Doctors almost always used both hands with the device, so why fight nature?
• Innovation requires uncovering what comes naturally to people and having the strength to change the rules
• It is not enough to ask people what they think about a product or idea, because ‘fine’ is a four-letter world. Secondly, people can’t always articulate what exactly is wrong or missing from the product
• Customers do not always accurately predict results. One example is 3Com and the failed but ‘demanded’ networking card for multibus-compatible computers
• “Human Factors” is seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears in order to improve or create a breakthrough product. Atlas Snowshoe company took off when Perry Klebhan had to use snowshoes and realized their heft and clumsiness and fixed it.
• The best way to break through personal habit, is to pay attention to your impressions and reactions when in a new-to-the-experience activity (like traveling to a new country)
• Use the “being left-handed” principle to develop empathy for consumer needs and remember that not everybody is the same. This principle results in a bigger toothbrush grip for children and a roller-ball mouse.
• Don’t just observe nuances of human behavior, but infer motivation and emotion. This helped NEC develop the Versa laptop product line to cater to Japanese business men who didn’t have desk space for a PC.
• Innovators require finding rule breakers who have method to the madness
• Successful innovations recognize that people don’t always do the ‘right’ thin or make the necessary leaps to bridge the gap between familiar and genuine new ideas
• It can also be useful to think of products in terms of verbs rather than nouns – not cell phones, but cell phoning. Think of the product actually is used, such as a cell phone that still buzzes when silenced or a biker’s water bottle that requires 2 steps to drink. It is critical to watch people in motion.

Recently I read the book Blink. It discussed the concept of first impressions and new products, such as the Herman Miller Aeron chair. The production of that chair examined people in action, realized that not everybody is the same, and spoke to rule breakers. What was produced was something unlike any office chair people had seen before. Yet it took a while for the sales of this skeleton-like chair to take off. The key point that struck me from that vignette that I saw represented in Chapter 3 is that people’s first impression of a new product can be negative not because it is bad, but because it is different. A bad product is always a bad product; but a new product doesn’t fit any existing considerations, which makes people think it is bad. Blink recommends that new products use the expert testimonial because they do have the vocabulary to determine whether the product is good or bad or to clarify what it is lacking. Often innovators get discouraged by initial public opinion, but I think it is important to bear in mind human behavior.

Embracing risk to learn, grow, and innovate

• In the world of ‘design thinking,’ acknowledging risk is the first step towards taking action, and with action comes insight, evidence, and real options
• Insight #1: Designers don’t seek to mitigate risk, they embrace it. Some failures can provide critical feedback
• Insight #2: Designers take risk to learn
• Insight #2: Designers take risk, but their thinking process mitigates it. This results in 3 behavioral building blocks of thinking design – empathy, prototyping, and storytelling
• Empathy involves serving customers’ latent needs. Cultivate an unreasonable obsession with desirability to determine what real people want. Cultivate desirability by using visceral, behavioral, and reflective elements
• The goal of prototyping is to accelerate feedback and failure. The real risk lies in not prototyping items. Waiting for perfect data is a risky move. You need to use what you have and your informed intuition
• Focus on storytelling ensures that the core of the value proposition is communications and understood in a functional manner. This reduces risk because they have a common vision.
• To mitigate risk, list five or six assumptions you about a potential solution. Then build something that will help you test it. When you test, look at how long it takes to get feedback on your Big Idea from another human being.
• Constraints enable designed to get a bit of scope regarding which constraints require constant energy
• Consider money as a positive constraint – can you still implement the project if you lost a 0 from it

I think that it is beneficial to embrace risk, but even with innovation, I think one does need the budget constraint. Risks can be exceptionally costly to the corporation. The greater the risk of a project, the greater its cost and possibly the greater the benefit. I do not quite understand what this article means by ‘their thinking process mitigates risk.’ The examples given only reduce the risk of going off course, not on the project at hand. The article also doesn’t mention public perception of designers. Often times people consider designers ‘artsy’ but unrealistic. Runway fashion designers produce clothes that people don’t wear. Granted, those clothes are very risky and push the limits, but I have yet to see those fashions enter traditional society. However, I think one would be naive to not consider and embrace risk. Knowing risk, while it may not decrease the fear, decreases the fear of the unknown and allows people to more easily forge ahead.

TED Video: IDEO

• At IDEO, status stems from quality of ideas and nothing else. It doesn’t have any titles or assignments
• There is a difference between a designer and an inventor. The inventor of floss designed the floss. A designer designed the floss dispenser.
• The team is eccentric with diverse backgrounds
• You need to hire people who don’t listen to the boss
• The trick is to find ‘real experts’ because you can learn about the product much more quickly than if you try to do everything yourself
• ‘deep dive’ is a total immersion in the problem at hand
• You need to have some wild ideas and then you can build upon them. If everybody gave you the same thing, you wouldn’t have any launch pads for innovative concepts. Enlightened trial and error defeats the lone genius.
• Being playful is critical to innovation. Try things and ask forgiveness instead of permission before trying.
• One motto is to fail often in order to succeed sooner

It was really interesting to actually see the special instead of simply read about it. I felt that I gained more from the ABC News special than I did the article. It is more fun to see the innovation process at work and how everybody interacts with each other. With innovation, it is as much the workings of the mind as it is the workings of the product itself.