I had the opportunity to listen to Dominic Fried-Booth, European Marketing Research Manager from Nokia Mobile Phones some weeks ago at the 50 years´anniversary of the Danish award for research in marketing, 2005.
In general it was interesting - as discussed here at CPH127 before - to hear that others than designers are discussing user-driven innovation and to get their perspectives on the matter. Basically, it´s logical for marketers that the user-driven part of the innovation process is their domain, as marketing is the customers voice inside the company. Marketing people is also seeing the benefit of in-the-field, contextual, qualitative market analysis methods and I believe we will see them incorporate them more and more in their practise in their coming years.
In particular it was interesting to see how Nokia was integrating marketing and development of new products in cross-functional teams focusing on simplicity (hmm…seems like a technology trend…). Dominic Freid-Booth highlighted the benefits and challenges with ethnographic research & analysis saying that it was fruitful if done with thouroghness, but it was a very demanding process which also needed multiple-checking and re-checking of the results to conclude anything.
It became really interesting when he introduced (at least to me - I hadn´t heard of the method before) genetic algorithms (GA) as a method to create multi-objective solutions to innovation challenges. As the approach was new to me, I did some quick research on the subject and found out that it is a method inspired by nature, used primarily within compute science. However, I got the notion that Nokia was using the approach to solve more general business issues and that´s why I became curious.
Have any of you heard about the use of GA as a problem-solving method on non-technical business concept issues? Do you have any cases you can share?