Concept Screening

Concept screening is one of the most critical steps in the consumer centric innovation process. At this stage, the innovation team is responsible to make decisions on which concepts are taken forward, or parked.

As a first step, the project team collects input from different sources and builds scenarios that match the project brief in the best possible way.

There are multiple factors in judging a concept such as technical and financial feasibility, deployment timeframe, and consumer value as determined from consumer testing. Please see the previous installment in this series of articles.
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Today, we upgraded to WordPress 3.0. Thanks to the WordPress team for great software.

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There is a need for consumer centric innovation in every product (and service) category. Ron Barth, President of Resource Furniture shows us an incredible array of space saving furniture designs in this core77 video.

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There is hardly any intellectual property protection in the form of copyrights or patents in the fashion industry. And yet, the industry seems to be doing rather well compared to the heavily copyright protected industries such as the music industry. Johanna Blakely explains to us that lack of protection is actually the reason why the fashion industry is so highly innovative. A very well stated case. You can find more information at ReadyToShare.org.

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Common Traps; Trailing Measures

Companies tend to use metrics that are inappropriate for measuring their innovation pipeline. The appeal of measuring something tangible, convenient, and safe (yet inappropriate) usually overrides (for performance review reasons) the need to implement the right measures. In many other cases, being unaware of existing proper measures can drive decision making.
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Today, we have cleaned up the html code, and brought the site to xhtml compliance. We have also made the site more compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and 7. If you are on one of these older browsers, you may want to consider upgrading to Firefox, Explorer 8, Safari, Opera, or any of the more modern browsers.

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Lemmings

On April 15th, we published an article on the comeback of vertical integration and its impact on innovation. That reminded us about other silly stuff that corporations end up being duped into doing, because everyone else is doing it in true lemmings fashion.

We mentioned in that article Apple’s venture into outsourcing tech support lines to India, only to bring them back a few months later. Why do companies do that, and what’s the affect of that on innovation?
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Who Said Vertical Integration is Bad Anyway?

In the 80′s and 90′s, large companies, following the lead of the automotive giants rapidly shed non-core assets and focused on core assets to compete better. It was widely believed and became quasi a dogma on Wall Street that getting rid of non-core assets would result in higher efficiency and productivity.
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Concepts and Prototypes

Conceptualization happens right after the ideation phase. Innovation professionals, typically consisting of designers (industrial and/or graphic), and model makers, usually go into bootcamp in a dedicated project room. The task on hand is to transform ideas into concepts.
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The Annual Front End of Innovation Conference is coming up in May. This is THE event where participants from a variety of industries and walks of life talk about innovation. If you have not signed up for the event, now is a great time.

We have participated in this event on and off both in Boston, and in Europe. There is always a broad range of topics that in many cases are eye-openers.

Don’t miss it!

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