PDMA Blog

Now that I’ve been studying user-centered innovation for some time, I began to wonder where the first insight into this phenomenon came from. So I did some research and found a very detailed interview with Eric von Hippel in which he describes the genesis of his Lead User theory. I’m copying and pasting the portion I found most relevant but the whole interview is probably just as insightful:

Well, when I first came to MIT, ideas about how new products and services should be developed were based upon a manufacturer-centered innovation model. This model, in essence, instructs manufacturers to “find a need and fill it.” The basic idea is that it is the manufacturer’s job to accurately understand your needs, and then make the perfect product for you. In fact, this is still the standard model of the innovation process taught in business schools today, which is one reason that understanding of user-centered innovation is still at such an early stage.

Before I went for my Ph.D., I was an inventor and participated in a startup - and tried to rely on the manufacturer-centered innovation model as I had been taught to do. Full of confidence, I went off to talk to suppliers saying, “Well, here’s a need I have for a new product you do not currently make.” The uniform supplier answer was, “No, you don’t. You need what we sell.” It was just so funny.

For example, once I needed a fan that was higher-performance and smaller than anything out there. And so, I asked this company to develop it and sell it to me. I said, “I need it.” And they said, “No, you want our standard one,” and I said, “No, I don’t.” And then they said, “Well, it is impossible to build what you want - it’s against the laws of nature - so you have to take what we have.” So, I went to Princeton with my problem and I got an aerodynamic specialist there to design me the fan. I then took it to the manufacturer who said, “Well okay, we’ll make it, but you have to buy the tooling. And you have to pay for them 10,000 at a time, and so on and so forth.” So, we did all that. The fan was wonderful; it did exactly what we needed in the fax machine we were designing. (The startup I worked for made fax machines.)

A few weeks later, the fan company reps called me up and said, “You know, it turns out a lot of other people want your fan too. Can we use your tooling to produce it for them?” I said, “Sure, talk to our manufacturing guy, and I am sure he will arrange something.” The arrangement was made, and shortly afterwards that company put out these ads saying, in essence, that “via our deep understanding of your needs, we knew you needed this new type of fan. And so, of course we developed it for you, our beloved customers.”

I found this so interesting. I thought to myself, clearly the manufacturer-centered innovation model did not work in this instance. But there is such a strong belief in that model that the fan supplier thinks it did.

Anyway, I brought that insight with me to MIT. I began my own research with the idea that, probably, it was really the users who were the innovators, and often not the manufacturers. That was way back in 1976, and things just built from there. I then realized that I had to join with other innovation researchers to build a big enough playground of data and concepts in the arena of user innovation to make it attractive for other people to be able to do their own work. That is, we had to generate enough findings related to user innovation, and create a robust outline of a theoretical framework, so that other people would be interested and would start to plug into it. All that took a long time, but eventually, we got here.

Starting about 2000, user innovation related to the Internet, blogs, and open-source software began to become very visible. As a result, many people began to think, “Oh gosh, maybe the manufacturer-centered innovation model isn’t the only way to go. Maybe innovation is really user-centered, and ‘user-developed content’ really does matter!”

At that point I and my academic colleagues were in a position to offer an academic framework to help people in their early efforts to make sense of a user-centered world. Anyway, that’s my view of how things have evolved. As my colleagues can also tell you, it has been a really long slog. Wonderful colleagues who have helped are many. Some who have been very important during the past several years are Professors Dietmar Harhoff, Nikolaus Franke, Joachim Henkel, Christian Luethje and Karim Lakhani. It’s much more fun to do this kind of early work with good friends. We can cheer each other up when our work gets dissed, as it regularly did in those days.

Thank you Tom Austin for doing this great biography. Here is a link to his complete article: http://www.gartner.com/research/fellows/asset_172822_1176.jsp

The annual Maker Faire is on for May 3-4, 2008. It’s a great place to see what creative people are doing in the yay area.

Maker Faire: http://www.makerfaire.com/

I went two years ago seeking to understand creativity: http://innov8or.blogspot.com/2006/04/art-or-invention.html

Today’s client generally wants a product that is economical to manufacture, elegant, and robust. Robust products have an advantage in the market place. This is especially true in this age of the easy accessibility to user reviews over the Internet.

According to the Wikipedia,

Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance. A system, organism or design may be said to be “robust” if it is capable of coping well with variations (sometimes unpredictable variations) in its operating environment with minimal damage, alteration or loss of functionality.

Why is robustness important? Robust products perform as expected in a wide variety of situations, environments and contexts. Robust products often outperform expectations and delight users. Robust products have significantly reduced warranty returns. These products leave a positive impression on the user. Customers often respond by becoming local, or internet, evangelists for the products. These customers may also become life long users and purchasers of the product, or service.

Developing criteria to gauge the robustness of a product can difficult. Some industries and user contexts (such as military) already have specifications in place to gauge the robustness of a product. Unfortunately, many industries do not think in terms of robust products. Robustness can be a broad and vague requirement, especially if the approach to defining qualitative (and subjective) terms is not organized and methodical.

A good way to understand robustness, is to look at areas that are impacted by the robustness of a product. One area that robustness impacts is manufacturing. A robust product tends to be easier to manufacture because it is less sensitive to tolerances and other small variations in the process. When a product is less sensitive to changes in the manufacturing process, it is usually less expensive to manufacture. Robustness at the manufacturing level is often the result of well planned and executed design that avoided “mission creep”.

Robustness at the user level is manifested in many ways. One example is having the product perform as expected on a continuing basis. An example of a robust design is the ignition switch in your car and the key to turn the switch. This switch is often used twice a day for ten or more years. The key that you started your car with today is probably in your pocket, or purse, as you are reading this article. That key is constantly (while carried in a pocket or purse) in contact with other metal objects such as change and other keys. Many times, at the end of the day, keys are tossed into a bowl or other container for overnight storage. Car keys see constant wear and abuse from the user and the environment. However, when you walk out to your car you, expect the key to turn the ignition and the car to start. The devices are used in a wide variety of environments from cold weather in the winter to hot weather in the summer. The user may be wearing thick winter gloves. Keys also must be adaptable for use in a wide variety of environments from a man’s trouser pocket to a woman’s purse. They must be small enough to fit in a purse or pocket. The car key and ignition switch are examples of two very robust devices that function very reliably for an extended period in wide variety or circumstances and environments.

Robustness must be designed into the product from the beginning. One way to develop robust products is to determine (in the beginning of the project) exactly what product it is that you really wanted to design. Products must be well defined and targeted. Mission creep (the addition of unnecessary or previously unanticipated features) is the enemy of robust products. Mission creep is where the product design mission is expanded from the initial, targeted product. Mission creep diverts resources and time away from the appropriate product in an effort to extend the product into areas, or features, that aren’t critical for the success of the product. This lack of focus can result in extra product features at a cost to the robustness of the product.

Robustness also comes from a commitment to integrity in all stages of the design and manufacturing process. Customers expect robust products. Companies delivering robust products exceed the expectations of the customer. They are also creating an environment that encourages repeat purchases from satisfied clients and that is good for the bottom line.

Montie Roland is President Emeritus of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is also President of Montie Design, a product development and prototyping firm in Morrisville, NC and the RTP Product Development Guild. You can reach Montie by email at: montie@montie.com

I have always been a proponent of companies not cutting their budgets on innovation during market downturns.  Cost cutting can only go so far and companies who do it repeatedly without developing any new innovations in the pipeline are only dooming themselves to commoditization and eventual loss of market share.  One only needs to look at the Motorola Razr as a recent poster child for what can happen to you.

One has to take a strategic look at their products and services and be a little paranoid (for some of you maybe a lot).  Is there a disruptive technology looming on the horizon?  Do we have a competitive roadmap or are we just relying on more sales which will commoditize our brand?  Do our development cycles give us the agility to respond to fast changing markets and consumer preferences?  Do we really think our competitors are going to do nothing and just let us take market share away?

During my time at Intel one of the great things I admired about Intel’s senior management was that they were strategic, paranoid, and decisive in their actions.  Getting out the memory business and into microprocessors was a huge strategic inflection point (to use Andy Grove’s term).  Craig Barrett’s decision to invest billions in manufacturing after the Internet Bust in the early 2000’s allowed Intel to meet the increasing global demand that occurred after the recovery.  Of course Intel made some strategic mistakes along the way such as staying too long on the Pentium 4 architecture but it merely highlights the fact that you must always be innovating whether it’s good times or bad.  It also points out the willingness of a competitor to seize you by the throat if you don’t innovate.  So go ahead and tighten your belt during this economic downturn and practice operational excellence.  But don’t tighten up too much on innovation because that would be a noose around your neck not your waist.

I would like to hear if you’ve experienced the same thing in your industry or company.

In product development we are typically working to provide more value, to add more features and functions to simplify the user experience and provide additional product value. But in many cases the task is slightly more complicated when developing products for emerging markets. In these markets the value of a person’s time is not nearly as dear as is reducing the outlay of cash for things that low priced employees can do on their own.

There is not such a strong emphasis on the efficiency of people’s time, but instead the limiting factor is often the outlay of cash. Anything that can be done in emerging markets to reduce expenditures is often the first choice when the value of human capital is so much less expensive than what we are used to in the US. Take a look at these Matrix of Key Economic Factors in the Top 20 Economic Powers - such as the average GDP per capita (this is typically the closest approximation of average annual salary) and you’ll get an idea of how much it costs to get an employee to perform a task – or on the other side of the equation, how much disposable income an average consumer may have to spend, by country.

I’ve done a great deal of market research within the US as well and I can tell you that the same operating theory is at work in companies with employees of vastly different incomes in the US as well. In companies where the environment is full of lower paid employees, management is less likely to make significant cash outlays in order to save a few minutes of time for a lower paid employee. However, at the other end of the pay scale (with doctors, or attorneys for instance) management will make great expenditures to save just a few precious minutes of an employee who may be paid $150K to $250K a year. It’s only logical that the value of an employee’s time should be balanced against the cost to the company for a certain task to be automated v. done manually. A great example of this tendency is a new phone which is targeted at emerging markets.

The Herald Tribune recently reported on the People’s Phone, which is made by Spice Limited, out of Nodia, India. “Wireless, No Flips, no Folds – Just a Phone”. The “People’s Phone” selling for just under $20 is a very simple phone with only one function sending and receiving cell phone calls. Nokia and LG are also looking into Emerging Market phones with the most basic features. However, this doesn’t mean that an emerging market product is simply a stripped down version of an American or Western European product. In many cases international markets have unique needs or preferences that can be a showstopper just as quickly as an over-feature/over priced product.

That will be the topic of another blog soon. Here’s the whole Herald Tribune article if you’re interested: Herald Tribune: “No flips, no folds - just a phone”

Know Thy Customer,

Chris Hawkes

Market Research Resources

Universities around the world make some of their money by commercializing the results of their research. A professor has a scientific breakthrough, a grad student develops a technology based on that breakthrough, and a company spins off to commercialize that technology. It happens in the hard sciences all the time, so why not the soft sciences too?

Commercializing Management Science is how I’ve always thought about what I’ve been doing since business school. In recent years, the academic leaders of Innovation Science, a sub-field under Management Science, have produced scientific breakthroughs that have advanced our understanding of how innovation works. Professor Eric von Hippel discovered Lead User behavior, Professor Henry Chesbrough discovered the Open Innovation phenonmenon, and Professor Clayton Christensen discovered Disruption Theory and the Jobs-to-be-Done framework. These discoveries are the scientific underpinnings of the technology powering my company’s products and I owe great thanks to these fathers of Innovation Science for their contributions. Thanks guys!

Soft sciences that focus on understanding human behaviour are gaining more and more credibility as legitimate scientific fields. I’m proud to be helping the cause by showing that these scientific fields also have technology based on their breakthroughs that can be commercialized and put to good use by industry.

In high school I interned at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs on their Human Genome project. The project, along with others like it, aimed to sequence the human genome. It was estimated to take over ten years and it ended up taking about that long.

One project I worked on was: Adaptation of Commercial Robot for Genome Library Replication. What a cool job for a geeky teenager. I mean programming a robot to assist in one of the most important scientific initiatives of our time, how cool is that!?

Anyway, now that the human genome has been sequenced it is beginning to enable what some people are calling Personalized Medicine. Imagine if drugs were tailored to match your own genetic profile? That’s what Personalized Medicine is all about and it wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible work I did in my spare time as a high school student…just kidding.

Seriously though, I was thrilled the other day when I bought my first product based on the the human genome project. It’s a gene analysis kit for detecting your genetic susceptibility to heart disease. You scrape the inside of your cheek 20 times with a swab and sent it away to the company for their analysis. Then they send you a report. I guess it seems cool and I’m thrilled to buy a product based on this emerging science but do I really want to know? Either it’s going to tell me I’m susceptible and I’m going to feel even more obligated to live a healthy lifestyle. Or it’s going to say I’m not susceptible and I’m going to slack off and end up getting sick from an unhealthy lifestyle.

Oh well, when it comes to innovative products I have a hard time saying no. So here goes…scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape…

The first PDMA/IIR Corporate Portfolio Management Conference in Clearwater, Florida in February had speakers from the financial services, medical device, computer, and consumer industries sharing their portfolio management experiences. It was full of great speaker presentations and opportunities for me to network. Reflecting on my experience there led me to a curious observation. Have you ever noticed the commonality of business stories regardless of industry? It got me thinking about that famous quote from management guru Yogi Berra, “This is like déjà vu all over again.”

The challenges are so similar in fact that you could replace the company name and industry with just about any other one. For example, “Company XYZ was faced with faster business cycles due to globalization, commoditization, and aggressive competitors. Our current way of doing things wasn’t getting it done. To drive the new change we had to make business improvements and change the XYZ culture. We fought and succeeded after a lot of hard work and support from senior management. Now company XYZ is performing better than ever!” Turn the crank and the cycle seems to repeat itself. Those that don’t make the next turn of the crank become fodder for the press. Over and over again. Does this sound familiar? Shouldn’t we have learned how to do this better by now? After all we have the insight into solutions for organizational change. The same can be said with respect to voice of the customer, stage-gate ™, portfolio management, quality improvement, project management, etc. There’s not that much new under the sun when it comes to process, methods, and tools for quite a while. So why is it always like major life-threatening surgery versus a routine medical procedure?

I believe there are many factors to be considered. The first is that business and product development are socio-technical systems and very complex ones at that. It is difficult to understand all the unintended consequences of change despite what we know (Murphy’s Law is alive and well). Second, we can’t ignore the human factors. We are unpredictable beings who need boundaries (such as process and discipline) but still want to do things our way (the famous “Not Invented Here Mentality”). A third point is that the corporate culture and reward systems focus on the short term results and not on taking the long term view. I heard someone once refer to this as organizational ADHD. Fourth is that while automation is an enabling element for change it has been known to trip up many an implementation. One has to avoid changing the focus from fixing the business problem to managing another IT project. Last, but certainly not least, organizational change requires leadership which is a quality that cannot be bottled and mass produced. It’s been chronicled in books, magazines, and case studies time and time again where good or bad senior leadership has changed the fortunes of an organization.

Despite all this we still seem to succeed (sometimes in spite of ourselves). The common themes for success companies share at these conferences regarding their journey to implementing change are often what we come to conferences to hear. They include senior management commitment, getting others buy-in to the vision, piloting efforts in an interested group, providing the right incentives, and lastly making sure there some recognized business benefit to the organization (though this is often hard to get results in the short term). The most important thing I want to know is “will it stick?” That part can’t really be answered by any presenter.

So why do we come to conferences? I think the success of others gives us hope and inspiration that we can also succeed in our own efforts. The business of change taxes our resolve and energy at a personal level. It’s comforting to draw some hope and inspiration. Such significant undertakings require both insight and inspiration to succeed. Those that have succeeded are also great to commiserate with because they have the same battle scars.

Do you agree or disagree with me? Please share your real world experiences…

If you are an entrepreneur and you have the eureka moment when you experience the flash of brilliance that leads to your new product idea, what do you do?

Well, most people want to ask someone else’s opinion about how whether, or not, the product will succeed in the marketplace. Asking advice from someone you trust is normally a good idea. When it comes to protecting your ability to patent your new product, it is still a good idea to get advice, but you need to use a simple tool called a non-disclosure agreement before you start the conversation.

Patents are only issued for novel ideas that have been reduced to practice and have not been disclosed to the public. Public disclosure can prevent a patent from being issued. One example of public disclosure is where a product is shown at a trade show. Showing a product at a trade show is considered to be an “offer for sale” and thus public disclosure. A presentation of the product concepts, or underlying technologies, at a seminar could be considered public disclosure. A conversation about the product could also be considered public disclosure, depending on the situation.

Conversations with employees are not generally considered public disclosure.

One way to avoid this pitfall is to require a non-disclosure agreement before discussing your product. Non-disclosure agreements are commonly called NDAs. Non-disclosure agreements normally are one to five pages long. Their primary purpose is to agree, in writing, that the first party is going to disclose confidential information to another party, in exchange the other party agrees to not disclose the first party’s confidential information. This agreement (when properly worded and executed) helps prevent the loss of patentability through public disclosure.

A sample NDA can be downloaded at www.montie.com/forms/nda.rtf

Montie Roland is President-Emeritus of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is also President of Montie Design, a product development and prototyping firm in Morrisville, NC and the RTP Product Development Guild. You can reach Montie by email at: montie@montie.com

My partner Dee recently showed me a book on Chindogu, the Japanese art of ironic invention. They should be considered inventions in that they are solutions to problems. However the problem they solve can oftentimes be fanciful or the solution itself may ironic drawbacks that makes them effectively useless. Chindogu is often called the art of unuseless invention (wikipedia).

One that solves a questionable problem is a pair of shoes where the sole of the shoe has dog paws so that the wearer can feel more like a dog leaving paw prints in the sand. That was in the book I read.

I was thinking this morning about my mouse and how it must go hungry all the time. I mean my computer mouse. So I decided to give it something to munch on. I changed one of my desktop icons into a piece of a cheese. I click that icon pretty frequently so it will allow me to feel I’m taking care of my pet.

Maybe I’ll think about removing this blog posting some day. That’s because one of the other properties of Chindogu is sometimes the inventions embarrass the user