People and Experiences via Ideas, Teams, and Customers
Innovation is a popular buzzword today. There are “innovative” hair salons, “innovative” day care facilities, and “innovative” business processes and products. Unfortunately, many companies lack both a vision of innovation for the firm and an innovation vision for each product or service (1).
In the case of business processes, New Product Development Professionals (NPDP) utilize and encourage a particular set of best practices (2) that tend to deliver higher rates of commercial success. For example, a recent study (3) by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) showed that firms that follow systematic New Product Development (NPD) processes will introduce only four ideas to generate one commercially successful product as compared to other firms who will pursue nine ideas to yield a single product that is demanded by a market segment.
Not only is there a financial cost associated with working on too many, low value projects (4), team members can suffer a lack of appropriate motivation, thus leading to lower quality ideas entering the NPD pipeline. Companies with higher rates of innovation success instead stimulate creativity through the NPD best practices.
Two focus areas for any organization to enhance their success with innovation are people and experiences. Applied to specific thematic arenas, a focus on people and experiences can change the odds of innovation success to your favor. The three ways to apply people and experiences to implement innovation successfully are:
- Ideas,
- Teams, and
- Customers.
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References
1. The Missing Ingredients in Corporate Innovation. Lundquist, Gary. Sept-Oct 2004, Research Technology Management, pp. 11-12.
2. An Examination of New Product Development Best Practices. Kahn, Kenneth B., et al. 2, March 2012, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 29, pp. 180-192.
3. Trends and Drivers of Success in NPD Practices: Results of the 2003 PDMA Best Practices Study. Barczak, Gloria, Griffin, Abbie and Kahn, Kenneth B. 2009, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 26, pp. 3-23.
4. Cooper, Robert G. Winning at New Products. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA : Perseus, 2001.
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