iGNITIATE

Friday, 29 April 2022

Innovation Doesn't Have A Creativity Problem ; It's Got A Commitment Problem

Innovation, the bastion of progress ( and often intense disruption by it's proper definition ) always faced many critics. But creativity isn't one. Commitment in the face of sometimes impossible odds is.

Recently with research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of San Diego, and Yale university ideas surrounding creativity and as connected to innovation have led to an interest in biases which can exist and are can cause challenges for optimization. Innovation however ( breakthrough, disruptive, and game changing design and engineering efforts, funded by those who have the capacity and the " who dares win " attitude to execute on said efforts ) does not often face, such roadblocks. Why? Commitment to do and use no matter what.

While innovation ( in it's most specific and true to form definition of a disruptive and often specific chain breaking effort utilized to either optimize output or, most likely, create fully new, patent protected ways of doing X ) is focused on teams and groups of people who have been empowered to do just that. Creativity for the sake of innovation, without stakeholder ( or a specific person's commitment to drive said creative effort to fruition ) is often just creativity for creativity sake and not what organizations, specific functional execution teams, or corporations are focused on which is maximizing output. Maximizing use.

This also means that social stigmas, implicit bias, subconscious blockages and creativity biases are all real and valid. Where we see this the most is when person(s), teams, and organizations are not prepared, and willing to risk it all financially and time wise ( for their own carriers and thus the departments and firms they work for ) to make the change uncovered, designed or created into reality. In the case of those who are committed to realizations uncovered and defined, engineered and ready to go, biases, stigmas and blockages tend to be water under the bridge.

Innovation's job is not only uncovering areas for change, designing, and creating new paths, it's exactly specifically the role of taking the arduous often perilous journey, time and always resource intensive, " long walk " through all the engineering, R&D, and ready to go efforts so that X makes it into the real world. It's then that larger next steps of full usability by many can be a reality and often with a larger organization to do that. Rome ( innovation ) obviously was not build in a ( creative ) day.

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Wednesday, 30 March 2022

Origin Conundrums? Not In Innovation

With breakthroughs, the idea can be that anything from X can change the world because it might have once - designs holy grail of idea origin. But not with innovation.

Examined at great length in Country of origin: A competitive advantage? we see how in competitive markets prices that reflect perception of quality for available products via a large longitudinal data set for many different products suggest that for certain products, country of origin ( and here the supposition is that in Firms Of Origin ) that this might be a valid cue for relative product quality and yet what we see, statistically, is that it really has no significant impact on value. Where previous studies of such influences on behavior suggest what we call xOO ( x being country, firm, lab, etc., ) actually has an effect on choice behavior is less pronounced than the effect on perception of quality and so with a lack of strong effect it's unlikely to play any significant role in pricing, value, and interaction and not the expected result from initial cursory efforts.

What becomes even more interesting is that due to the experiential nature of many products, and with specific details of physical product attributes often based on the perceptions of a sample of experts, which are often tainted by the known or assumed country, firm, lab, etc., of the products that too is not statistically necessarily the case.

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Monday, 28 February 2022

Breaking ( Industrial & Consumer ) Success Barriers Means Radical Launch Redesign

The ability to launch powerful industrial product success is directly related to seeing the timing capability and usability needs of industrial vs commercial usability and where radical redesign can be the key to that success.

Over and over through the introduction of vastly different products and services utilizing advanced technologies we see that once the math and the science has been completed, it’s much longer of a haul to be able to witness the capabilities of that math and science, through the physical and material science gauntlets onto electronic and software design and production before the industrial use of said efforts creates usable and valuable successes.

Incredibly well known examples are ones such as the Apple I and Pebble Smart Watch down to the unbelievably complex Tokamak fusion reactors ( originally conceptualized theoretically in the 1950’s ) and which have only been able to come online and operate in a semi-useful / semi-consistent ways recently thanks due to the only recent last 10yrs of Artificial Intelligence computational breakthroughs. These examples are prefect representations of the way that breaking industrial & consumer success barriers means radically different ways of looking at the usability and behavior of end users. Essentially they are almost as separate not as apples to apples but apples to trains.

In Launch Decisions and New Product Success we see some of the very specific mechanisms and capabilities that allow this to occur and more specifically some of the typical mentalities of those who are involved in such efforts and the ways in which a radical break seems to be intentionally created between the two groups, which in the end, are not intentional at all. It is all due to the disperse ways that these two groups look at usability and effectiveness of the final output: the products that are created from these efforts. A fascinating way to understand how design, and radical design works in just a few of the different paths to ( time dependent ) innovation creation.

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Monday, 31 January 2022

Breaking Barriers = Creativity Capriciousness

When it comes to delivering innovation & unthinkable breakthroughs it's creativity & affiliative humor that leads the pack.

Throughout the design and innovation process, one of the most overlooked capabilities for convergence after a multitude of design and engineering efforts are explored is that of humor, and specifically within the team that is attempting to do the seemingly impossible. This is incredibly well articulated in the study " The Best Form Of Medicine? Using Humor To Enhance Design Creativity " and more specifically in " A Laughing Matter: Patterns of Laughter and the Effectiveness of Working Dyads " where we see how the balance of necessary deign, engineering and finance efforts can create specific and measurable divergence and convergence capabilities in members as well as leaders of teams who embrace the focus to increase affiliative humor specifically.

In an even more specific and quite international set of efforts we see "A Meta-Analysis Of Positive Humor In The Workplace " detailing 49 independent studies connected to 48 others for a total of 8,532 data points showing that an even richer understanding of modes of specific humor: Aggressive, Self-Defeating, Self-Enhancing, and Affiliative - the most beneficial to innovation & design breakthroughs. More we see the way that specific design efforts led with internal team humor achieve an even more powerful form of success than other efforts where the synchronicity of humor and output are not so prevalent. Design on happy affiliative innovators.

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Thursday, 30 December 2021

NPD Success: Does Generic Mean Guaranteed? More Than You'd Think

In innovation ( the truly disruptive type ) success are often 20yrs in the making but not for NPD breakthroughs. This mindset ( true disruption vs. breakthroughs ) is often an intense debate with NPD efforts often focusing on innovation efforts where decisions made in new product launch efforts often require choosing launch decision options consistent with already-made launch choices and not that of the inconsistency situations often presented in innovation activities.

This can be expertly seen via the seminal work In Search Of Generic Launch Strategies For New Products where more than 600 firms were investigated in their efforts to deal with more than 1000 product introductions where almost 60% of the efforts succeeded and more than 41% failed and more than anything where we see appropriate pricing tactics which led to appropriate launch time implementations where offensive improvement launches focusing on improvements on current products were injected into markets with few competitors so as to erect competitive barriers. In these cases technology based ( in IP protection environments ) completely new products early in their product life cycles were able to establish a foothold and thus via broad product assortments, distribution channels using new brand names, meant lower distribution expenditures, and high-price skimming strategies to create average successes with product performance and financial goals met 1st over market acceptance goals

Further, a market-driven and less-innovative addition to existing lines for defensive purposes mentality, later in the product life cycle where many competitors already are present, it was these launches that received the lowest success ratings across nearly all of the performance criteria and something not often seen or accepted in the ( disruptive ) innovation models that many of us are familiar with. It is therefore that possibly, market-driven new-to-the-world projects are more successful with, lower price and a penetration / predatory pricing strategy rather than a high-priced, skimming system often employed by long range 20yr to develop disruptive innovation models.

In the separation and clear understanding of ( disruptive ) innovation and ( proactive ) new product development mindsets are some of the most important factors in understanding how firms who are able to consistently outperform those that mix these two efforts and toolsets thus using the correct magnifying glass for the right time based involvement is a key factor in successful efforts in these areas.

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