Design & Innovation

Another good article from this month’s Inc. was about P&G’s concept for using innovation for growth and how small businesses and entrepreneurs can use this process regardless of their size, industry or product type. The goal is to design processes that will ensure companies continue to innovate repeatedly and reliably. Because most of are still business minded and are looking for a step by step process, I thought this article might helpful for bringing your ideas to life!

The steps identified include:

1. Find out where to play, and playing in a market that is underserved. There are better chances than inventing a new technology that may not be needed or may be only a trend. This involves selecting a strategy that make sense for the small company and not trying to be something that you can’t possibly be.

2. Use your customers to develop your product or service offering. In my case, because we do PR on behalf on many of our clients is to involve them in the marketing plan and brainstorm process so that the most well rounded plan is developed with their customers in mind. The more successful they are, the more successful we are.

3. Generating new ideas through brainstorms. One new insight was “In small companies some people invent and many people execute, but everyone must observe.” The more I read about new ideas for design, the more I think of new ways to incorporate in our business and in my every day life. The article talks about those that generate ideas should partner with another employee to gain feedback on its viability and to hash out details.

4. After the ideas are harvested, the next step is find out which ones are the most promising. Every quarter P&G project teams lay out their ideas and research on a poster board. It is as time for others to comment and ask questions and help to improve the idea. The best ideas may be implemented as a product.

5. Prototyping is the obvious next step, which bring us back to IDEO, Gehry etc. and the importance of design at the beginning stages. The author suggests that the sooner you have a visual the easier it will be to make improvements or adjustments. In this stage utilizing those that will use the product is particularly important because they will be your biggest asset or detriment depending on how well the design is executed.

6. For small business that have good ideas, they might not have the capabilities to take them to market, therefore a really good idea if marketed properly could be developed and manufactured through a larger company. P&G and other major consumer products companies are looking for these opportunities all the time.

7. As the company grows, it is important that the design team grows as the company grows and that they are implemented in all aspects of the business. Design thinking can be found in any discipline, from marketing to accounting to IT. In this stage it is also important to teach the new employees to use the same design thinking process so that as the business grows, each employee learns how to innovate for themselves. Although innovative companies usually are made up of innovative people, those that make the operation decisions must help breed innovation.

In the last edition of Inc. magazine (June 2008), Max Chafkin looks inside what of he calls to be the most innovative small company in the United States. The company was founded by Jake Nickell, a college dropout that saw the opportunity to use customer’s insight and created a company named Threadless. The company uses the Von Hippel’s theory (even though Jake was not aware such theory even existed when he started Threadless). This theory, proposed by Eric Von Hippel, a Harvard graduate, entrepreneur and former McKinsey consultant, was that most product innovation comrs from the customers using it than from internal corporate research and development.

Threadless is now a multi-million company that holds design competitions online among members of this network. The designs are made for t-shirts and submitted to the website where hundreds of participants vote on which one they like best. The winner designs are taken to print and sold online for $15. Threadless sold $30 million of t-shirts las year!

In our visit to California, one of the speakers said that if a company gives people a competition to participate in and let them decide the outcomes then the results can be surprising. Threadless, which operates from a huge warehouse in Chicago, employs this at its best.

Visit www.threadless.com and vote away!