Design & Innovation

Another item discussed in The Art of Innovation that I’ve found useful is the idea of prototyping. The company I work for makes a product that is 90% software and so the GUI is extremely important to the overall usefulness of our product. We have had numerous discussions over the years about features that should be added to our software environment. Some of these features are to fulfill customer requirements and some are for enhancements that we think are useful for the market. Generally, our product group takes feedback from sales, goes to work internally and creates something, tells the rest of the company when it will be available and then shows it to us when it’s complete. Often the end result is not exactly what was expected. Product management will defend their decisions and explain their rationale but once they have written the code they don’t want to go back and make changes.

There is no participation by sales/marketing or any customer input during the design process. It would so much more beneficial if our product management group brought others into the design process. I believe we would have opportunities to come up with better ideas and improve the finished product.

I recently read a McKinsey Review interview with Brad Bird, who is an Oscar winning director for Pixar which discusses his approach to nurturing innovation and creativity.  It is a general management overview that has interesting cross business aspects.  Bird discusses the need for the top executives to allow crazy ideas to happen and let the people with “other” ways of doing things have the opportunity to try their theories.  By doing this at Pixar and motivating through the use of scare tactics, Bird was able to produce inherently more complex movies for less.  He also mentions the need for team involvement in the development and design process so that team members can learn from each others mistakes while also offering solutions.  In addition contrary to what many companies say regarding focusing on the customer as the sole purpose of design inspiration, Bird states that to get others to be interested and believe in your product it needs to also be something that you believe in and want to use.  And the most important point of the article was “The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved.”   

To read the article you will need to sign up to be a member (which is free).  It is definitely worth it, there are a lot of interesting and insightful articles.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx