Bagonca

Lately, I have been thinking and reading articles about innovation and innovative companies and I finally got the time to jot it all down over the weekend. And here are my thoughts…

Many companies want to be perceived as innovative. But are they really innovative?

Part of any process in a company should be to focus on products, the end goal that forms, guides and informs innovation. Wanton innovation is wasteful. There must be something in the product to pull it all together.

There are many companies that develop new technologies and go in search of problems for those technologies to solve. Take the internet bubble for instance; it was defined by this kind of thinking. It was a carnival of worthless innovation. Half baked business ideas and models pumped into money burning concerns in a misguided attempt to make quick bucks and beat the competition. Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet foods and some built gaint warehouses for delivering groceries by van. It turned out that no one wanted to buy groceries delivered to them by web van’s warehouses. Alas! The internet bubble burst taking with it all these half baked “innovative” ideas and businesses that had developed solutions to problems that never existed.

We need a very product oriented culture in companies. Lots of them have tons of great engineers and talented smart people. But ultimately there needs to be some gravitational force in the product to pull it all together. This gravity is what I feel innovation is all about.

I strongly believe that money is not the key for innovation. The key is the product focus and a product development cycle that has room for innovation. Microsoft for instance, spends billions of dollars in Research. Every year it invites journalists to look at its massive concrete and glass structure full of “innovations”. Yet, they end up copying things that Google or Apple does. Look at hotmail or yahoo mail apps. Its gmail mocked! Or Zune, the Microsoft variant of iPod, an obvious copy. The only product I know, correct me if I am wrong, that came out of these research facilities is the speech recognition component in Vista. Yeah it works well, but it is not a killer like gmail or iPod.

Talking about the key aspects of innovation, I think the company’s focus on the product is a must. If a company wants to be innovative and wants to differentiate itself from the rest, I think that it should question its products and its product development cycle.

As an example, let us look at Kano model of customer satisfaction.
It categorizes the features built into any new product as
• Must have feaures
• Linear features
• Exciter features

Must have features are the ones that must be in the product to be useful. Without the must haves there is no product. However, I feel that the must have features need not be fully implemented when the product is released. A “just about right” or “lagom” amount of completed must haves will do.

Research suggests, that although without the must have features the product will be useless, it is the linears and the exciters that gives more satisfied users.

Let us say, that I wanted to build a hand held music player. What are the must haves required for this tool to be useful?
Let us assume, a good head set, some hard drive to store music files, a play/pause/rewind/fast forward button

One can of course spend a lot of time for instance to make the head set really really good. But a good enough head set would fetch us “just about satisfied” users. There are other important things that can make the player really good. So lets stop there and move on!

The Linears, they are the ones that gives the user more satisfaction. A linear feature is the one for which “the more the merrier” holds true. It is called linear because customer satisfaction grows linearly with the quantity of these kinds of features. The more the linears in the music player the more satisfied the user gets.

Some examples of the linears I would like to add to the music player are
1. Good battery
2. A good display
3. A scroll wheel on the sides to browse music
4. Auto and manual lock/unlock button to lock when the user is on the move
5. Slick design
6. Light weight
7. Games, calendar, clock etc

Exciters are the ones that add great satisfaction to the customer. It often adds a price premium to the product. However, a lack of exciters will not decrease the customer satisfaction below neutral. But I believe that exciters are the ones that will make the product be perceived as innovative and these are the ones that make the product stand out from the rest of the pack.

Some exciters for the music player would be
1. As soon as I plugin the music player, it will bring up the users’ default music player (whatever it might be) and sync songs both ways.
2. Charge free device that uses solar and advanced light sensitive batteries
3. Maximum of 2 clicks to access any song on the hard drive.
4. No buttons in the player. We make the whole music player a touch screen.

In whatever feature in a product we do, we got to have 1 or 2 real exciters. Look at gmail for instance; they have built in at least one exciter in any type of functionality you find there…that is innovation! Google’s key to beat the competitive market where yahoo mail and hotmail once ruled!

For a product to be innovative, companies should integrate both linears and exciters in their feature list and make it transparent in their product development cycle. Categorizing features this way can contribute to an innovative company.

I believe that only innovative companies can stand in this harsh, competitive, volatile market. The more successful a company is in finding and implementing the exciters, the longer and happier the customer stays and hence stronger and faster the company grows. Many companies focus on adding a lot of linears to their application, this is not bad afterall. But they have to realize that time is wasted! Linear features increase the customer satisfaction to only a certain degree. They will not fetch greatly satisfied customers. Feature freaks got to think about it and control their temptation!
“Do you need satisfied or greatly satisfied customers?” One real good exciter is better than 10 different features. To me, it is like comparing a man to monkey!

So, let us all build more exciters…not just features!