The Theo Spears Blog

Blogging Considered Harmful (Considered Harmful)?

Winning the Innovation Game

First posted 2008-10-10 23:13:00.000004+00:00

On Wednesday I went to a presentation by Arnoud de Meyer at the Judge Business School on Winning the Innovation Game. I'll give a summary of what he said, and some musings on it. Arnoud's background is in telecommunications, so get ready for lots of mobile phone based anecdotes.

Arnoud began by talking about what is meant by innovation. His criteria for something to be an innovation were * It must be commerically successful - if it doesn't make you any money, it's not an innovation. It must involve a new idea or technology in some way, or at the very least use an old idea in a new way It is in some way an improvement over what was previously available.

Arnoud used the example of the iPhone (based on existing technology, lacking many of the features of other modern phones) and Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. These have both been commercially successful, and introduced new ideas, though it is not entirely clear what it means for an advertising campaign to offer an improvement over what was previously available.

In creating innovative products Arnoud advocated finding /lead customers/ - customers who are early adopters in their field. He stressed that in the modern world the lead customer is no longer a single individual, instead the attributes of a lead customer will be spread amongst different groups. This is different to 25 years ago when innovation spread from localized hubs.

For example the 'fractions' of a lead customer for a new mobile phone might be found across the world

This conflicts with some other approaches to innovation. One common angle is that you should chose a particular target segment and tailor your product to this segment (See for example Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore). It is not immediately obvious how to reconcile this with designing your product after looking at a fragmented set of different users, though I am not convinced it is impossible. Another school of thought is that you should 'scratch an itch', find a problem that affects you personally and set about fixing it. Again if the target user is 'fractioned' it seems unlikely on innovator can fit into all the categories.

Arnoud next commented that innovation often involved finding new markets. He singled out the 'lower-middle class' in Asia, defined as those households earning over 5,000 euros a month (approximately the average household income in portugal when compared on purchasing power parity terms). There are 600 million people in this category.

Arnoud concluded with a list of what you needed in order to successfully innovate