It’s hard to talk about product design without talking about innovation. Whether you believe that innovation is just another term for new product development, an overused business buzzword that has already peaked, or THE essential element of success, the topic of change in markets can’t be ignored.
Over the years, I’ve been collecting and categorising the different conversations that are going on about innovation. It’s stayed steady at eight for a while now, but I’m excited at signs that a ninth is emerging.
It’s easiest to think of these as four pairs – one of each pair with more of a “creativity” focus and the other with more of a “science and technology” flavour. These aren’t mutually exclusive – you can participate in lots of these conversations at the same time.
The Creative and The Inventor
These are your oldest ideas of innovation, where positive change is synonymous with an individual person. The creative has artistic vision and integrity that places them in opposition to the mainstream. The inventor is locked away in their garage, churning out idea after idea, never giving up or giving into failure. Hero. Iconoclast. Self Made and Self Reliant. For every Starck and Dyson, there is an endless stream of late-night informercials and broken dreams.
Teams and Labs
Not convinced by the solitary life? Then interdisciplinary groups are where it’s at. These conversations about innovation focus on getting all the right ingredients (i.e. people) into the right context and unleashing the magic. Books like IDEO’s The Ten Faces of Innovation give you a checklist of archetypes to fill, while traditional management literature focuses on “breaking down silos” and “empowering teams.” As with a Skunkworks, it can still be a visionary quest, but this time, we’re all in it together.
Prophets and Lead Users
If the Creative lives off in their own world, uninterested in bringing others along on the journey, the Prophet is the voice crying out in the wilderness, “Here, follow me.” Gurus, seekers, and challengers of the status quo, prophets are awfully fond of asking “the right question” and getting people to shift their perspective. Lead user innovation is also about following, but in a different direction. This is about finding the people or organisations in your ecosystem that are so fed up or overstretched that they are inventing their own solutions. Industry becomes a facilitator for commercialisation.
The Creative Process and Open Networks
Last but not least, we have probably the two most dominant conversations at the moment. Process-based innovation takes the weight off the people involved (“anybody can be creative”) and instead focuses on the steps any team can follow to build an innovation pipeline. Some of these steps may take special expertise to facilitate, but the journey of acquiring these tools and methods is as much the point as the specific innovations that arise. Open network innovation flips that proposition, by telling organisations to let go of control, and let external sources work for them. Whether it’s open source code, crowdsourced ideas, or networks of collaboration, the system does the work, like a giant hive of bees.
What Next?
I’ve flirted with and used all of these modes of innovation, but never stopped looking for something that seemed to be missing. It can’t just be about your innate talents or what you do in a stage-gate process. There seemed to be a missing piece that activated sophisticated knowledge about people and culture and transformed it into intentional business strategy.
We started trying to carve out some of this territory with our use of advanced semiotics in design, but reassuringly, other voices are starting to whisper and build into a real conversation.
Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation model does a great job of differentiating the territory from other approaches. Grant McCracken is also pushing forward with Chief Culture Officer, highlighting the risks businesses face when they ignore cultural knowledge and understanding as a competitive advantage.
I don’t have a name for this area yet – it’s important that it not get confused with user centered design and consumer-driven innovation models. It’s not about knowledge transfer from consumer to producer, but about knowledge creation in a more sophisticated way.
So, in the spirit of all conversations, I’m asking a few questions? Are you talking about my ninth way of innovating? What do you call it?
What else are you hearing out there? Do you think I’ve missed an important conversation about innovation?
What other new conversations need to get started?
