Commentary by Jack Hipple

Front End of Innovation Conference Report Day 1

I am attending the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston and would like to share highlights with RealInnovation readers. This conference was started many years ago by Joyce Wycoff, a creativity consultant in California, primarily for her clients. It was originally called the Fuzzy Front End conference and blossomed into a fairly large conference over time, was merged into the IIR conferences, and has morphed into the Front End of Innovation. IIR's business model, as a profit making conference provider, includes many "paid" speaking slots and workshops, so the material being reported on is a little biased, but valuable nonetheless.

Day 1

Workshop: Increasing Value through Continuous Open Innovation Improvement

This theme of open innovation has greatly permeated this conference over time, recognizing the value of incorporating outside perspectives and resources to improve and accelerate the front end of innovation. Participants included Sealed Air, Hallmark Cards, Philips Consumer Lifestyles, and Nine Sigma (sponsor). Key advantages of open innovation cited by this group included more thorough benchmarking, acquiring talent, and the learnig of how to emotionally connect with consumers on products. Hallmark highlighted their positive experiences using the talents of the MIT Media Lab as well as the acquisition of Crayola that allowed them to successfully commercialize sound cards at an appropriate cost and with an emotional connection with the product. There was significant resistance to a traditional "art"design company to the the use of electronic and digital technology. All the participants cited the importance of high level management involvement and support, including regular reviews and support for external technology search. Hallmark discussed going beyond sound to recordability, and how to use the desire of suppliers to help them as opppsed to telling suppliers what they they (thought they) needed. Sealed Air talked about the advantage of putting out more general inquiries that generate more "serendipitous" outside in ideas. They also discussed the challenge of maintaining excitement for this effort and their partial solution of having quarterly meetings with their CTO and regular weekly conference calls. Their use of an organization such as Nine Sigma helped them to identify technologies and capabilities from totally different markets and very different solutions.(TRIZ practitioners take note!). Hallmark discussed how they targeted the music greeting card by clearly defining the goal as 3 pages of paper plus music at low cost, and clearly identifying the cost of the sound module as the cost breaker. Now the innovation challenge is to go "beyond sound" (recordability, dual sounds). Sealed Air discussed unique challenges in licensing technology from small firms outside the US. Small firms don't think like large firms and don't understand their processes. Language barriers need to be dealt with as well as the inability to accept delayed payments from large corporations. The observation was made that open innovation can actually take longer, but in the end usually is justified.The group, when asked about the future of open innovation, answered by saying that better VOC was needed, product linkage with a company's web site, and forcing the organization to be more deliberate as well as more flexible. Blaine Childress from Sealed Air described a coporation as an aircraft carrier trying to deal with attack boats of smaller, more agile competitors. Graham Mott said Philips hade condensed their learnings into a "cookbook" globally available across 40 different sites, put short time limits on CDA's, and the use of third parties for outside assessments.

Presentation: "Bringing Innovation to a Technology-Enabled Service for Seniors" (Bill Prenowitz, Philips Healthcare)

Bill Prenowitz talked about selling the integration of a product and interactive service to seniors. The fundamental difference is the person needing help can describe symptons to a trained professional vs. just calling 911. The service can also provide follow up calls. The system includes monitoring, calling, and response--all of which need to work to provide a great service. They have achieved 50% market share with only 20% total market penetration for such services. They learned early to hide all the complicated electronics and interfaces---this complexity (how it works) is irrelevant to the consumer. In this area it was critical to provide real product prototypes and not just concepts, as well as to triangulate market input. Their market research showed that seniors WANT to receive calls (they're lonely). Device design is critical in this area. Shrinkage of buttons on a phone makes it more difficult to use for seniors, but large buttons hurts their self-esteem. Large buttons with more space between requiring lower pressure is the compromise. They also discovered that slides on the side of the phone to control volume was preferable to dials.Vision and hearing impairments must be taken into account as well as providing response to varying strength and range of voice (TRIZ folks: Dynamism). In designing the software, functional mapping was used with embedded dynamism if a wrong response is detected.

Keynote: "More Meadows" (Robin Chase, Founding CEO, Zipcar)

Robin reviewed breakthrough products and services (in addition to the idea of Ziipcar, a car rental service with no large storage area) on the Web. Chat Roulette is an interactive web chat that started out with an old computer and in 3 days had grown to 30 million users! Web 2.0 where users are providing the content (TRIZ Folks: Do It In Reverse). Bed sharing in private homes vs. hotels now has 70,000 rooms. The analogy to Skype was made. The I-Phone now has 150,000 apps with 3 BILLION downloads.She pointed out that there are a lot more people outside the room of any ideation or innovation session. The wide availability of information and resources on the web is now allowing a person who used to do just one job to do seven and soon seven jobs at the same time. The paradigm is shifting from ownnership to sharing as the path to success.

Keynnote: "Unreasonable Behavior: A Driving Force for Innovation" (Mark Harrison, Innovation Director, Diageo and Eric Wilkinson, Cambridge Consultants)

Diageo is the parent of Bailey's Irish Creme and other premium liquors. Mark reviewed their long term business journey from growth to acquisition to cost reduction and finally to innovation. He reviewed one of their liquor breakthroughs--Bailey's Irish Creme, a blend of creme and liquor that no one thought would be viable. Significant technical challenges had to be resolved to keep the liquids separated until appropriate. He also reviewed a new product concept of frozen mixed drinks on tap whose major cost constraint was the large cost (80%) in the scraping system to clean the dispensing system. Details were not provided but one design parameter, which had originally ruled out the use of plastics because of low thermal conductivity. However, surface chemistry properties had not been considered and more than made up for the conductivty property. Need to be careful to consider all aspects, properties, and resources in the system. Other words of wisdon: Don't wait for a crisis to innovate. Think how your technology can provide the unthinkable.

　

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