Future, inc.: What goes into building an innovation practice?
What exactly is innovation, and how do we produce it?
Recently, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about how design, innovation and product delivery intersect. It’s a big, messy conversation with no clear answers, and it cuts across all the core competencies of a business — from business development to marketing, design, strategy and technical implementation (to name a few).
It’s rarely clear what manner of alchemy results in success. We stick to what works, and iterate to improve our process over time.
This article tries to unpack that discussion and do three things:
- Place some clearer language around what we mean when we say ‘innovation’
- Briefly outline current methodology for producing innovation
- Talk about what types of people are needed to innovate effectively
Innovation has been a buzzword for a long time. In a business context, it often seems to mean: “The new or novel thing that will push us past the next product milestone, revenue target or leadership goal.”
So what are people really talking about when they talk about innovation? Wikipedia offers up this chestnut:
Wikipedia definition of innovation
Innovation is: production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome.
That’s more specific, but perhaps even more confusing than before. There are quite a few semicolons in the sentence above.
Radical innovation as technological convergence
Innovation is also pitched as a sea change that brings about a renaissance in a given industry and propels the lucky company involved to the top of the stock exchange.
Almost always, this happens when someone implements new technology. This is often coupled with new means of producing the technology and impeccable timing. The market has to be ready for innovation to happen.
The addition of multi-touch screens to phones is a widely shared example –a technical leap forward that people didn’t know they needed but now cannot live without. Apple didn’t invent the technology, but they were the first to fully realize and capitalize on the implications. Radical innovation isn’t necessarily invention, but the tipping point when newly possible technology meets vision, design and implementation.
Radical innovation as a shift in meaning
Radical innovation also comes along when companies and technology are able to shift the meaning (and social/cultural relationships) that people have with existing products and services. You can call it disruption, but it’s always been around, and is a natural part of the economic cycle. Uber has completely changed the meaning of the hired car, and AirBnB is in the process of doing the same for hotels and rentals.
Radical innovation is the holy grail, but it’s not necessarily predictable or controllable. It can come down to luck. Not many people know for a fact that their new product will forever change the way people use computers, or that their small startup’s service will be the one to change the meaning of an entire industry.
Incremental & contextual innovation
However, less radical forms of innovation are constantly taking place. While not as earth-shaking, it’s a mistake to discount or de-emphasize the importance of this kind of work. It makes up the bulk of all innovation effort. If you’re an in-house designer or an innovation consultant, odds are you’re working on gradually evolving your product to be the best it can be or gradually expanding available products and services around your core offering.
These kinds of smaller-scale innovation are the way companies venture into adjacent spaces, quickly catch up to their competition, fight back against disruption and cross the chasm from early adoption into product maturity. They are also the way that end-users get products that are truly great. Radical innovation gets it out there—but a process of consistent, gradual innovation makes a product truly great.
For a more thorough discussion of these ideas, see Norman & Verganti’s paper: Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus Technology and Meaning Change. These ideas originated there, and they dive much more deeply into the details.
Just to recap
Hopefully we now have a baseline for talking about innovation, at least in this context. So if we say we want to build an innovation practice, we now have a pretty good framework for what that practice will be geared towards doing.
But that’s only part of the equation. We know it’s important to strive for breakthrough innovation, but not discount the day-to-day struggle to simply evolve and build better products.
Luckily, there are some well-established methodologies out there to make that struggle just a bit easier.
Process & methodology to produce innovation
I’ll save the long journey into design thinking / HCD process for another article, but it’s worth mentioning as the glue that binds everything together.
When we talk about doing innovation in an intentional way, we’re often talking about using design thinking and human-centered design to do it. It’s a way to tie together diverse disciplines, and a guiding light when things get messy or seem impossible.
These processes are a proven value-add for business, and the theory and practice has expanded beyond just the traditional product design arena. There’s even a Stanford course about how to apply it to every aspect of your life. Familiarity and mastery of these concepts are crucial to developing products that aren’t just good but innovative.
Building teams that innovate
Beyond process knowledge, there are core domains that every innovation project needs to address. Having a team that can weave these skills together is important:
Strategy
This isn’t about throwing buzzwords at slides. This is about understanding how business is done, and being able act as an interpreter. Identifying and clarifying business requirements, doing deep research into markets, understanding competitors and unpacking business models are all part of this. Without a strategic imperative, product design and development is pretty pointless. You need to know where to steer the ship.
Technical expertise
Design research and exploration without technical validation can provide a strong vision and illustrate the ideal end-state of a product experience. However, meaningful innovation only happens when those ideas and experiences are possible to build. Having technical expertise from the beginning exponentially enhances the value of the work. You know which ideas to focus on and which to ignore. Your vision suddenly has much more clarity in terms of prioritization.
Design research & synthesis
We’ve talked about understanding the business and having a deep understanding of the technical landscape. The missing ingredient is getting to know the people involved. Innovation has to be grounded in how actual humans will use a product or service. As projects progress, it’s crucial to test, learn and expand on that knowledge base. In addition, the data can’t just be collected. It takes skilled interpretation and dedicated work to turn the learning into a vision that aligns with the technology and business goals.
Visual design
There will never be a time when visual communication isn’t important to doing good innovation work. Interpreting and packaging ideas in a way that is legible, memorable and appealing is a decisive advantage. Creating moments of delight, excitement and wonder does even more. This is key throughout the process, from testing to presentation to shipping a final product.
UX and information architecture
The final piece of the puzzle is the sort-of nebulous practice of UX and information architecture. At a high level, the practice is defined by the definition and organization of content. Does the product meet the needs of its users? Is the system well-organized and understandable? Are the workflows simple and sustainable? Are the the standard software patterns applied in an appropriate manner? These are some of the questions that UX answers.
Bringing it all together
We need multiple disciplines to pull these challenging projects off. So when we hire, what should we look for?
The obvious answer is to look for a lot of depth in one of these core disciplines. That’s the pillar that anchors team members and allows them to contribute in a meaningful way. It’s absolutely needed, but I don’t believe we should stop there.
Tim Brown of IDEO talks about his ideal candidates as T-shaped people, and I think this idea holds true in the digital product realm as well.
The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.
The ‘T’ metaphor is handy shorthand for depth and breadth, but the nuance is the important stuff.
To do innovation right, you need all those things mentioned above: deep domain skill, empathy, curiosity and a strong drive to both teach and learn with your team.
