In an interesting example of targeting new product innovation at non-consumption as outlined in the Innovator’s solution by Clayton Christensen, I learnt from Putting People First that Philps have launched a low cost a series of new portable, compact patient monitors that provides a reliable, yet affordable means to observe and care for patients. Now available to healthcare providers in India, the new Philips SureSigns VM3 is the first Philips patient monitor designed for emerging markets.

The Philips SureSigns VM3 offers ECG, respiration and pulse oximetry in one user friendly, compact monitor that helps provide quality care in almost any clinical setting. It offers vital signs measurement and monitoring in an easy-to-use system that can be used in various departments throughout the hospital, nursing homes, private practices and rural clinics, as well as ambulances and mobile facilities.

This product is a great example of taking a system which has been far too expensive for an emerging (non-consuming) market and using technology in a creative, and dare I say, targeted, way to provide real mutual benefit. I like it.

At the FDIN conference on Breakthrough Innovation yesterday, I learnt about a more precise and reliable way to identify and engage with influential lead users to generate Breakthrough Innovations that really deliver brand growth. The presentation from TNS, highlighted an approach which can help you to screen for and work with people who are both “connectors” and “new consumers” in your target category (e.g. mobile phones, coffee, soft drinks etc.). A lot of the thinking here comes from books such as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (incidentally a pretty good read) but also from consideration of the “adoption chasm” wherby many products used by early adopters never make it to the mass market. So, what should you look for to identify “connectors” and “new consumers”?

Connectors

• Have a big social network and act as hubs within it
• Tend to have more friends
• Talk about new things they’ve found
• Are curious

New Consumers (for a specific category)

• value authenticity and originality
• are well informed and care about the category
• are individualistic (they want things done “my way”)
• are time poor
• are socially responsible

By using a screening questionnaire against these traits it is possible to identify “future shapers” for your category. Typically “future shapers” are much more likely to identify ideas for future brand growth than “early adopters” who are often quite fad driven and can drop new ideas very quickly. Some stats were presented showing that there is a good correlation between high “future shaper” rating for a product idea and actual brand growth, whereas, there is a poor correlation between “early adopter” rating and brand growth. If it is true, they are really onto something, given how unpredictable Breakthrough Innovation often is!

You can use “future Shapers” in two ways, as participants (as opposed to traditional market research respondents) in idea generation and development/screening or you can engage them fully in your innovation task. TNS have found it best in engaging “future shapers” to give them thinking time (1 week) to bat around and develop ideas with their friends and they have found it useful to incentivise the idea generation with prizes.

Someone asked an interesting question about how you could reach and engage these “future shapers” if you were in an SME and TNS suggested that these people would be the people who are most likely to be passionately engaged with your product or service category. It was suggested that if you filter the responses and comments on your website with this in mind, you could identify and engage this sort of customer.

I liked the sharper focus this approach gives in terms of clearly targeting the most useful lead user profile. I’ll be getting some more informaton from TNS over the next few weeks and will post and update when I do.

 

I saw an interesting post in the Putting People First blog on user-led innovation. NESTA, the UK’s Science and Innovation body, has published a paper The New Inventors on how users are transforming products and services. According to NESTA:

User-led innovation – where users play an active part in the development of new or improved products and services – is exploding: proliferating digital technologies mean that we’re all potential innovators now. New firms based on user-led innovation are being sold for hundreds of millions of dollars only a few years after being founded.

Policymakers have remained somewhat sceptical about the importance of user-led innovation. But if the UK is to harness this new wave of invention and creativity, it needs to develop world-leading policy in support of user-led innovation. This means being more aware of the impact of new legislation on user-led innovation, and establishing a forum to ensure that policymakers hear directly from these new inventors.

Sounds like the UK Government is waking up to the n=1, r=g model that C K Prahalad outlined in his book The New Age of Innovation and I discussed in a recent post.

Incidentally, I was very impressed by the content and scope of the Putting People First blog. More on this in future posts. It’s going on the Blogroll.

Just got back from an excellent seminar, run by the Food and Drink Innovation Network (FDIN). Lots of interesting stuff to share in future blogs on ways to improve your targeting of Lead Users and ways to engage them more fully in your innovation process, Open Innovation, Consumer Trends and Emerging Packaging formats. Incidentally, the FDIN is a great source of information about developments in the food industry and I make sure I get regular updates.�

Some time ago I did some work to identify common traits that successful innovative companies demonstrate. I identified 5 specific areas where these companies differentiated themselves from less innovative organisations.  I found it useful to use these traits to benchmark organisations wishing to boost their innovation agenda to help identify key gaps. I thought you might like to have a look..

Here is a download presentation of these 5 traits: key-traits-of-leading-innovation-companies

I found this amazing video on the Boston Dynamics website yesterday of a quadruped robot, BigDog which can get over serious obstacles, climb 35 degree slopes, carry 400lbs and even gallop and jump. It is pretty cool even if it is powered by a (rather noisy) gasoline engine driving hydraulics. There are clearly some very sophisticated control algorithms in it’s on-board computer – some of the shots of it trying to stay upright on ice are amazing! I then had a look through the rest of the stuff on the site, how about a tree and wall climber, a sneaky all-terrain ground crawler and a small brother to BigDog imaginatively called LittleDog. I reckon this one seems a bit more house trained and might even make a good pet. Anyway, here’s a shot of BigDog full loaded.

Following on from my post on the latest from Tesla, I’ve just come across details of a new electric supercar, due to be launched at the British International Motor Show. The Electric Lightning GT uses a bank of 30 rechargeable batteries based on a new “Nanosafe” technology providing power to four, wheel mounted, electric motors, generating a claimed 700bhp and propelling the car from 0 to 60 mph in 4.0 seconds. The car is equipped with full traction control and regenerative braking on all four wheels and lightweight carbon fibre/Kevlar composite structure. Of course, a silent electric supercar somehow seems wrong, at least to petrolheads, so this car comes equipped with a engine-sound generator that emulates an engine’s roar. It’s expected to cost £150,000, is exempt from UK car tax and the London congestion charge. This is what it looks like..

Well it certainly looks shiny and the technology seems pretty clever, but something doesn’t quite add up. I remember reading that the main reason people buy the Prius is because it says something about them and the way they’re safeguarding the world, so what does an electric supercar which looks like and sounds like the ultimate eco hate-object, complete with an engine-noise generator, say about it’s owner? Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?

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Following on nicely from last week’s post on platforms for co-creation, Apple have just taken another step towards C K Prahalad’s vision of tomorrow’s innovation model. Alongside the launch of the new 3G iPhone, Apple have just snuck out a new business platform which could, in time be as big as iTunes is today. The Apple App store is a new online Apple store that will post and sell third party software applications. The plan is to split revenues between Apple and the 3rd party software developers in the ratio of 30/70. So far, hundreds of thousands of developers have downloaded iPhone’s software developer’s kit, and with predictions of hundreds of millions of iPhone users five years from now, the App store could be a very busy place indeed.

Third party software could enable the market itself to keep the innovation pipeline going. Steve Jobs says that the new iPhone is about the things consumers have been asking for, and about delivering a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t even know they wanted.

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I came across Realsight in an online forum and thought they had a very interesting and potentially powerful new way to identify innovation ideas in the Front End of Innovation.

 

Realsight uses a patent-pending technology system and a process they call quantitative anthropology to generate new ways to grow brands from everyday consumer behavior. They provide consumers cameras to film their own behavior while talking to them through online “blog” diaries about product decisions they have made over 3-4 weeks of “behavioral monitoring.” Then Realsight uses analytical tools to discover common product experiences from the thousands of observations of product usage events they capture. So, not only do they have a more complete consumer view than interview-based approaches (which, while useful in themselves, can miss 90%+ of behavior), they quantify opportunities during the Front End of Innovation. Many of the product experiences they uncover are hidden deep within the everyday routines we all have to manage our lives, ones we can’t recall since we’re usually on “auto-pilot” trying to get through each day. These are the experiences that are difficult to uncover with existing Front End approaches, but valuable for companies as they happen almost every day!

 

Looks to be a good way to help take the “fuzzy” out of the Front End of Innovation.

I’ve just watched C.K. Prahalad being interviewed on Business Week, talking about his new book “The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks” Prahalad talks about the new needs of innovation being driven by four big changes in the competitive landscape:

1. Global connectivity, where up to 4 billion people will be on-line

2. Digital technologies becoming more available through increased convenience and lower cost

3. Convergence of industry boundaries and technologies, e.g. a cell phone is also a computer a watch and a camera

4. Evolution of social networks

In Prahalad’s view this is driving big shifts in innovation away from industrial revolution thinking, where the key considerations of innovation were the form and product as the source of value, to a situation where one consumer has a very personalised experience provided from a concentration of a very broad range of resources. An example of this is the iPod, where a user builds his or her own very personalised experience while Apple (who don’t manufacture the device or prepare the content) facilitates this by bringing together a wide range of resources from aroung the world. This Prahalad, rather snappily, describes as “N=1, R=G”. He goes on to contrast this new model with the previous view of the world, highlighting three key differences:

1. While the product may be a small part of the experience, the key thing for the consumer is the experience.

2. This experience is co-created by the consumer. For example, Apple can’t tell you which content to play on your iPod. All they can do is provide a platform for you to chose the content. You become an integral part of the value creation.

3. The experience cannot be created without the collaboration of a wide range of different institutions, creating a whole eco-system of contributors to your personalised experience.

These three points contribute to the shift away from the old innovation approach of form being the unit of analysis and product being the source of value, the old innovation approach being epitomised by the Model T Ford. Prahalad argues that this new model doesn’t just apply to systems like iPod and iTunes but will also apply to other, less glamorous products such as tyres or shoes.

Prahalad sees two fundamental challenges for management:

1. To change the way we look at the world, to see our consumers as an active parts of the experience creation process. In this new world, there are two joint problem solvers the company and the consumer. What impact might this have on future business strategy?

2. how to change information management systems to match these shifts. He see this area as a major source of competitive value.

So, to summarise, if you’ve gone with this argument so far, our job as innovators becomes one of building new platforms on which our consumers can create their own experiences. This all seems to align well with the TRIZ evolution of the technological customisation system. The next step after this from a TRIZ viewpoint is that the system itself customises the consumer’s experience with no intervention required from the consumer. �