Product Development tools and Innovation
Ok, so now you have been in Innovation Management awhile my friend blurted out over dinner and wine…So, invent the killer product of the future, he posited. You know what the trends are and you now know how to build products and develop new business models...
What is holding you back?
My answer to this challenge is simply this. While I may have the desire, passion and intentions to build new products that address emerging trends, not everyone in the product planning cycle are of the same idea and neither are companies organized to truly utilize innovation management theories to their fullest. Most companies still have old product development tools based on gating systems and six sigma mandates that at times can kill product innovation.
Innovation management, at least my version of it, is a super fast continuum with ideation at one end and product pilot testing at the other. The idea is to try new ideas and concepts and “fail them fast”, as it were, so as not to waste inordinate amounts of resources on products and services that may not bear fruit and meet the pre-prescribed financial measurements. New, digital technologies, certainly lend themselves to this type of product road map, and for sure agile, start-up partners can support in this process.
For innovation to flourish, the existing legacy systems and legacy minds and methodologies have to evolve in order to advance truly revolutionary (most often hyper-evolutionary) products and services. No one is advocating the elimination of these legacy systems, but merely creating hybrid knowledge systems that accommodate innovation theories.
We are living in a time where companies rise and fall in three years; the same time that some product development philosophies allow for the development of new products.
So, the good news is that things are changing and companies are reacting because they have to. The bad news is that there is no sense of urgency and the adaptation is taking too long.
Battling 24 hour working schedules in China and India, and competing with new hyper-driven entrepreneurs with something to prove will not be easy. Much less so with product development cycles, mindsets and theories rooted in the old analog World. This has to change and change fast.
What is holding you back?
My answer to this challenge is simply this. While I may have the desire, passion and intentions to build new products that address emerging trends, not everyone in the product planning cycle are of the same idea and neither are companies organized to truly utilize innovation management theories to their fullest. Most companies still have old product development tools based on gating systems and six sigma mandates that at times can kill product innovation.
Innovation management, at least my version of it, is a super fast continuum with ideation at one end and product pilot testing at the other. The idea is to try new ideas and concepts and “fail them fast”, as it were, so as not to waste inordinate amounts of resources on products and services that may not bear fruit and meet the pre-prescribed financial measurements. New, digital technologies, certainly lend themselves to this type of product road map, and for sure agile, start-up partners can support in this process.
For innovation to flourish, the existing legacy systems and legacy minds and methodologies have to evolve in order to advance truly revolutionary (most often hyper-evolutionary) products and services. No one is advocating the elimination of these legacy systems, but merely creating hybrid knowledge systems that accommodate innovation theories.
We are living in a time where companies rise and fall in three years; the same time that some product development philosophies allow for the development of new products.
So, the good news is that things are changing and companies are reacting because they have to. The bad news is that there is no sense of urgency and the adaptation is taking too long.
Battling 24 hour working schedules in China and India, and competing with new hyper-driven entrepreneurs with something to prove will not be easy. Much less so with product development cycles, mindsets and theories rooted in the old analog World. This has to change and change fast.
Comments