Innovation at the Top

Alright, let me step into the shoes of a CEO of a toothbrush company. I am Mr. GoodDay. I own and run GoodDay Toothbrush Corporation. My last quarterly results showed a 33% increase in net-profit. I am happy and I make everyone concerned happy. Still, I am told I need to innovate. Hell, why do I need to innovate a toothbrush? Innovation is costly and tough and irrelevant.

Probably, this is how Tom Kelley would respond: Innovation is a mind-set. You need to innovate because creativity sells. Innovate or perish. It cannot be costly; it can only prove to be costly by not adopting it. If you look around, you can see that there is always an invisible (or visible?) score for innovation. How do you know that your customer is really happy?

Enter Me, the customer, and the daily tooth-brusher. I am such a bad toothbrusher that I need to change my toothbrush every two weeks. I still brush like a child, and I still crush it, because I am half-asleep even when I am brushing... it’s as if I am resisting getting up. Why hasn't Mr. GoodDay been able to deliver a good tooth-brush to me? I think I would buy a BestDay Toothbrush today.
The point is: there is always a scope for innovation. By simple observations like "smaller hands need fatter toothbrushes", IDEO was able to help Oral-B innovate a toothbrush for children. Tom calls this their "being left-handed" principle, which is to develop empathy for consumers' who might be radically different than you are. Build this empathy into your strategy, and sales improve, and so do all other S's. If you want to survive the future, there is only word: Creativity.

Creativity can be fast and easy too. Tom illustrates this through the example of IDEO's innovation on a shopping-cart. They entirely redesigned and created a new shopping cart in a rapid-fire 5 days time. They used ideas from roller coasters and baby seats to create the child's seat, incorporated a scanner to pay for items directly, and several other common-sense features.
Agreed, not every business has the capacity or need to do 'fast' innovation like IDEO. But, every business has got to find its own ways to build creativity into its system, to explore, enjoy and survive.

Tom Kelley suggests a methodology that works at IDEO and believes would work for any product-development. He tries to engineer a 5-step model to manufacture creativity, using verbs: Understand, Observe, Visualize, Evaluate and Refine, Implement. These verbs seem to address most of the problems that I had with traditional software-development methodologies like waterfall-cycle model, which were noun-based. But, I believe, each of these verbs applies well in any company that sells a product or service. These verbs need to be built into the organizational environment through various "free-spirit" systems.

Anyways, I may be talking crap. But, I am still reading the initial pages of the book. :)