Turning ideas into gold

Coming up with ideas for new products is all about getting the maximum number of people involved in the process. “The more minds on the job, the more ideas,” declared Professor John Bessant, addressing a seminar at the Cambridge University Institute for Manufacturing’s Annual Technology Symposium. He made his point by asking participants to come up with ideas for making use of a glass. Apart from drinking from it, those present suggested other uses: a paperweight; a holder for pens and pencils, or flowers; and as a device to eavesdrop on conversations on the other side of a wall. Nobody had the same ideas on their lists. It is not enough, he said, just to have ideas – it is about finding the right ones, and exploiting them. He said there were a number of gauntlets to run. One is to be able to combine the idea with its exploitation. He cited, as an example, the invention of the vacuum cleaner by J Murray Spengler, which was only commercialised because Susan Hoover tried it out and was impressed by it. Similarly, the sewing machine was patented by Elias Howe – but Isaac Singer added the up and down motion which enabled him to make a fortune from it. “Invention on its own is not enough,” Bessant declared, citing ideas that never made it – such as the gas-filled umbrella, or the cheese-flavoured cigarette. Successful innovation, he argued, is a complex process, involving lots of people, which he described as “spaghetti” from the complexity of all the mapped-out interactions. Thomas Edison did not make brilliant inventions on his own, but in his ‘Invention Factory’ in New Jersey, which typically employed 26 engineers. One way companies can obtain new ideas is to get their customers involved in the process. Prof Bessant cited the examples of the BBC Backstage (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk) and Threadless (www.threadless.com). The latter, which made $18m in sales in 2006, with a 35% profit margin and fewer than 20 employees, gets customers to send in ideas for T-shirts, which it then gets other website users to score – paying for the ideas which the site users think are best and which are clearly going to sell. Lego also works closely with users. In 1987, an MIT student created the Autonomous Robot Design Competition class, which started with students writing “virtual robots” that competed with each other within a simulated world in computer memory. It soon morphed into a class in which actual autonomous robots competed against each other. Lego, Microsoft, Motorola and other companies eventually became sponsors of the course and Lego turned the platform into the ‘Mindstorm’. However, the big breakthrough occurred when the adult engineering and hacker community embraced the product, creating numerous Internet web sites, full of innovatory ideas, boosting sales by 300% in 1999. CAD companies have, of course, latched onto these kinds of ideas big time, encouraging user groups that come up with new bits of code and ideas that can be incorporated into the products. Prof Bessant referred to this as “encouraging active users and the democratisation of innovation”. Companies often test their products with mainstream users, but “extreme users”, who really push envelopes, may open up entirely new markets – and sensible companies encourage this. Pointers * Successful innovation usually involves more than one person * The more people involved in idea generation, the more ideas they come up with * Involving customers in the product improvement and innovation strategy can lead to major steps forward and greatly increased profits