CPH127

The notion that ideas aren’t all that is a fairly old one business. Back in 1977 Jeffry Timmons writes in the standard MBA textbook New Venture Creation “a good idea is nothing more than a tool in the hands of an entrepreneur,” and “the truth of the matter is that ideas are inert and, for all practical purposes, worthless.” And what do venture capitalists invest it? Teams, not ideas. Why? Because ideas are cheap and common. Execution intelligence is what’s rare, and that is only found in people. This notion however seems to be new in design—hopefully it catches on.

I’ve often heard P&G as an example of the power in innovation. Yet I can’t think of any real world examples of P&G’s great innovations and how exactly they are so innovative (Swiffer maybe? But that’s just a disposable mop, and perhaps I’m in the minority, but I don’t consider taking a common item and making it disposable innovative). More to the point I’ve never heard anyone who uses P&G as an example of innovation’s power explain exactly what is so innovative.

Your provocative statement is certainly that, but you don’t support it. What do you mean we have an innovation surplus? What led you to this conclusion? What proof can you offer?

John Carroll in Making User offers a much more approachable and practical discussion of wicked problems than Buchanan does (I even think Alan Cooper talks about them as well). He goes on to suggest that wicked problems are in fact design problems. Too bad wicked problems scare the crap out of most people in business, who want certainty and think of the fuzzy front end of things as an obstacle to overcome rather than full of opportunities to capitalize on.

I think we’re just seeing the beginning of the ramp-up at P&G - they’ve really only been at it for a few years. You may not see the Swiffer as that innovative (I personally think it is, though it doesn’t appeal to me as something to buy, and I don’t care for the increased disposability), but they are doing some pretty interesting stuff with expanding their brands in new directions. Look at what they are doing with Mr. Clean, what has traditionally been a boring old floor cleaner brand.

By “innovation surplus” I mean that there are more innovations around that companies can - or should - actually implement. This is a new development. I don’t have hard data on this, for right now I’m going based on 15 years of experience working with clients and seeing what they have. One of my main clients right now is a major wireless carrier, and they have a TON of really interesting ideas, but they don’t necessarily have a good idea of how to filter them for best business impact.

I’d agree to a point that execution is at least as important, though I take a broad definition of that term, not just how well a design gets implemented through to production. Apple in the 1990’s had loads of interesting ideas and could have implemented the hell out of them (and often did). But the ideas were simply not vetted against a broader strategy, and ultimately were too distracting. Apple of the last 5 years is by contrast very focused, and is implementing generally extremely well.

By your response it seems that P&G’s innovations are actually just product branding adjustments. So I’m afraid I still don’t see what’s so innovative—clever public relations, slick promotions, skillful package design and shrewd product re-positioning—all of which are fairly common marketing issues. So I still don’t get it.

And to take the Swiffer example, perhaps you could discuss what about it you find innovative. For years we’ve had disposable diapers, disposable razors, disposable pens, disposable bakeware and even disposable cameras. A (partially) disposable mop strikes me as formulaic rather than innovative. But then I don’t buy Swiffer products (I’m bothered by too much disposability too), so perhaps I’m just missing something?

I think I see what you mean by innovation surplus. Looking at your language though you seem to equate innovation with “interesting ideas.” Ideas are cheap and plentiful (even disposable?). But I don’t think ideas equal innovation. I’ve always felt that innovation is where the rubber meets the roads, where you’ve got a market viable solution to a problem people experience. I think you might agree that having mentioned the problem your current client is having filtering for “best business impact”. But this would make an interesting idea merely a possible innovation seed rather than an innovation itself in full bloom. So perhaps the real surplus is in ideas (an assertion much business literature would agree with) rather than innovation. (of course we could really be saying the same thing here, and I’m just splitting hairs).

I think Niblettes is rather harshly splitting hairs - which is a great thing. Better clarification in Adam’s post is needed.

I stumbled over the same assertion that ideas=innovation. It seemed that innovation was more about what Niblettes describes as the idea becoming a design concept versus an abstract one.

However - I find it odd that we can’t consider innovation as something happening within an organization, and that innovation is only relevant when a consumer product. P&G definitely fit Adam’s description of owning too many ideas - with over 30,000 patents to their name, but they only use around 10% of them in their actual product lines.

Does innovation exist if no one experiences it? But ideas can. So I think we can assume that there could be a lot of tasty innovations inside P&G that we’re not even seeing as consumers.

I don’t agree that we’re all sitting around with tables full of innovation wondering which one to work with - even those of us at IDEO, frog and so on - I think innovation is still about as tricky to manage and deliver as it used to be - and ideas still continue to be bad, good, great and plenty but nothing much if they don’t get a chance to meet a problem they can solve.

Damien, You bring up an interesting point or two here - it is a fact that P&G is sitting on any number of patents that they’ve been looking to commercialize but those would be better termed ‘inventions’ or ’seeds of inventions’ rather than innovations. And your second point that niblettes also touches upon, which is that ideas are not enough. They also require effective and successful implementation to be truly innovative. Implementation can mean many things, as Adam says, not just the actual design of the product per se. Just taking P&G’s example - Swiffer arose from a technology patented by P&G that revolved around the material developed that would pick up dust particles by static electricity. Developing that into a product that could be used by the end user resulted in the Swiffer. Which by itself, seems not to be an innovation, per niblettes, but the disposable cloth - and I’ve used cheaper house brands as well as P&G’s is a patented technological invention. Could the innovation then be said to be the means by which this technology has been adapted for use by the person who cleans a house? Yes. for it *is* a novel means to clean the floor (invention) AND it’s been embraced by the user (sales figures).

Ok thanks Niti. The big innovation is in the fabric’s unique ability to attract dust and particles and commercializing it, not just its disposability. As a non-user I had no idea.

Usually when I ask people why they think P&G is so innovative I usually get “that’s a silly question, look at how many brands they have,” which is more of a dodge than an answer. Asking for specifics is a good way to separate opinion from knowledge (for instance, I now know something about Swiffer that I didn’t before.)

Now I’m not saying P&G isn’t innovative (I honestly don’t know). I just think we need to question our assumptions and accepted wisdom more.

I also agree with Damien as he questions restricting our definition of innovation simply to consumer products—I didn’t mean to suggest such a restriction. Actaully, I made a rather crude first pass at exploring this question a while back (http://niblettes.com/blog/2006/01/05/theory-of-product-innovation-part-iv-innovation-matrix-areas-of-innovation/). Clearly there are many areas of innovation and solutions to wicked problems that consumers simply cannot experience directly yet still benefit from.

Even non-innovations that are new to a market, though not unknown to it, can get the same sentiments levelled at it. I started New Zealand’s rst international fashion magazine; it also happened to be its only monthly. A lot of people thought I was nuts, and I had a lot of criticism of it. And this was only in 2004—hardly the dark ages, and not a time when people did not have access to international media. Now, there are several titles touting their international fashion slant. I’ve created a “new normal”, but, as your quote says, I had to ram it down people’s throats with marketing. Before this year, few were ready to treat it as a great idea.

And, niblettes, that is where the concept of ‘platform’ innovation comes into play - you take the basic invention in the form of the disposable cloth and you can then create a series of products based on the ‘platform’ i.e. gloves for dusting, clothes imbued with wood polish for furniture, the material adapted for spiderwebs on the ceiling - it sounds silly in the context of thinking of innovation and invention in grand terms of changing paradigms such as the internet and the airplane - but as a loyal Swiffer user, I beg to differ
Disclosure: a few hundred years ago I was a finalist in their search for a “director of asset management” i.e. someone to go through their patent portfolio and come up with ways and means to commercialize it. Fool that I was, I turned down the final interview. *bangs head against wall*

that’s ‘cloths’ with wood polish, not clothes

Sorry about the confusion of ideas and innovation - that’s perhaps a hazard of leading with a quote, as it can lock you into a certain terminology.

My intent here wasn’t to try and define innovation - I don’t really have a very good one that is widely applicable. People throw it around pretty loosely, obviously, and one person’s innovation is another person’s triviality, as we’ve discussed here.

I agree with Niblette’s statement that ideas are not equivalent to innovation, but they are the seed of it. At the risk of confusing things more, an analogy might be that ideas are to innovation as concepts are to design. Once plants the seed, the other brings it fruition. Several ideas may stack up to create a single innovation. But it’s a very blurry line obviously. Many companies just generate lots of patents (are these ideas or innovations?) simply to lock them down so they can prevent other companies from pursuing them, even if they have no intent of using them themselves. I don’t know if P&G does this at all, but it’s rampant in the telecom industry, and some companies use the income from lawsuits and licensing as a revenue stream.

I’ll stand by my statement that companies have more innovations than they know what to do with. This is not universally true, but it is true enough of the top competitors in any given category that it changes the importance of raw innovation in the overall business climate. If you remember the article that stirred a lot of controversy a couple of years ago called “Does IT Matter?” in which the author argued that information technology was no longer a competitor advantage for companies - simply having it didn’t constitute the advantage it used to. I’m not ready to go to such as an extreme with innovation, but the average innovation ability of companies is rising and becoming more equalized.

(Let’s take a nod here to Larry Keeley and acknowledge that we are implicitly talking about product innovation, and that there are other types of innovation where the same arguments may well not apply.)

But let me be more precise about this notion of innovation surplus (and no, I don’t just mean idea surplus). It definitely does not mean that innovations are just lying around like apples fallen from a tree, and it does not mean that they are easy to come up with. It’s still hard work. But the quantity at any given point is pretty high, certainly higher than it was ten years ago. (My perspective on this admittedly is influenced by the fact that I primarily work with Fortune 500-size firms, and things may be different at much smaller companies and start-ups. Perhaps others can provide a broader perspective on this.)

Having lots of innovations around can actually be a distraction and a sap on resources unless very carefully managed. I like Howard Reinertsen’s notion of a “design factory” (http://tinyurl.com/7jf3j) in which product concepts sit like inventory on a company’s books until released to market where they can start earning back the investment. Like Dell, you want “just in time” inventory of innovations - you don’t want to be financing more innovations than you really need.

But in the feeding frenzy over innovation, the quantity of innovation has ramped up without being matched by an ability to really identify the best/most appropriate innovations early (which is what the Aiken quote is really about), and feed only those ones into the “factory”.

Google is a company that appears to have a huge amount of innovation surplus… but it’s obviously not slowing them down at the moment. They are very cannily expanding into new areas with a wide array of innovations, and at the same time craftily progressively revealing how these stitch together into a master plan. Without knowing the master plan it’s hard to say how much surplus they actually have. And perhaps the surplus that a pure web/services company can carry is different than for a hardware manufacturer? I’ve heard that Capital One, the credit card company, “prototypes” over 200 new “products” a year, but this is quite different for them than for a car company, for example.

The details help. Thanks.

So without trying to define innovation here, perhaps it’s fair to assume that there is a connection between innovations and solutions? For instance, the Swiffer solves the problem that people experience when a broom doesn’t do a good enough job, and a mop is just too much trouble, yet they still want a tidier floor–a problem exacerbated by the increasingly popularity of hardwood, bamboo and polished concrete floors.

Also, if we accept that there is a surplus of innovations, then the greatest value one can bring to a company is market execution intelligence–because creating innovations isn’t in short supply, but the ability to monetize them is. Either creating or monetizing must be scarce otherwise nearly everyone in business would be successful, or success would be entirely a matter of luck—a giant game of musical chairs.

So if you already have most of your customers’ problems solved (innovation surplus), then it’s just a matter of monetizing the solutions, which means you need marketing expertise (monetizing) rather than design expertise (problem solving).

Now looking beyond simple product innovation to innovations of supply chain, finance, and organization, we see areas that designers simply haven’t the domain knowledge to be effective. This further restricts design’s role in what little of the innovation game remains.

So, where do you see the future of the design profession in this picture? Will it be better to hire business-savvy designers, or design-savvy marketers? Or have I mis-characterized things here?

I posted a rather lengthy follow-up comment a couple of days ago, but for some reason it didn’t show up… So I’ll do a briefer one instead!

Certainly there should a connection between innovations and solutions, but innovation surplus doesn’t mean that you’ve got all your customers’ needs figured out. It just means that you’ve got more innovations available to you than you should or could bring to market at any one time. Chances are there will still be unmet user needs. And new solutions tend to create new needs, so it’ generally a self-regenerating cycle.

You are correct that as the need for innovation grows beyond product into supply chain, etc., that it’s less familiar territory for designers. But design thinking can still be very valuable here, and these are new areas for learning tools, frameworks and language. Some designers, perhaps many, won’t be interested in going down that path, while others will treat it as a replay of what designers went through with engineering and human factors and ethnographers. At first it’s unfamiliar and difficult, and then gradually each side learns to adapt to the other, and the combination becomes stronger than the individual disciplines.

that’s ‘cloths’ with wood polish, not clothes.

Apologies for joining in so late, but… better now than not.

Firstly, I disagree with Adam’s opening provocation about there being an “innovation surplus”. Sure, there may be a surplus of dusters and shavers in some organisations, but there’s a huge shortage of really good innovations in the areas of housing, education, transport, energy and so on in large parts of the world.

That said, I do agree with his suggestion that designers need to step beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries and innovate their way into new territories. However, this automatically implies they abandon the “individual genius” approach and adopt a participatory & facilitative mode instead. To all of us who got high on creative ego at d-school, this would be a tough switch.

In a paper presented at EDGC Cardiff (http://www.devstud.org.uk/studygroups/design.htm) last year, I advocated repositioning design as an “ideas discipline” and enabling designers to become “curators of great ideas” rather than “individual geniuses” - which, as we all know, is a privilege reserved for the very few, and over which no one really has much influence.

In the emerging “innovation economy”, if organisations turn themselves into “innovating organisations”, we just may see designers becoming CEOs too!

The Wicked Witch of the Problem Space

A while back on cph127 Adam Richardson of frog raised the issue of wicked problems. I’m really glad he brought it up because I’ve always felt they are central to design as a professional practice. Curiously though there isn’t much talk in de…

Can anyone atest to the service?

[…] of these models remind me of to Wicked Problems, a framework I was excited to encounter (though admittedly I haven’t found any way to apply […]