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Use BPM to Assist in New Product Development
The food and beverage industry is trying to figure out the right formula for developing new products to meet rapidly shifting consumer trends. Business process management (BPM) can help. Read the full article. December 1, 2008
Meeting Facilitation: Important Ingredient for Change
Leaders invest a significant amount of time in meetings. Whether one-on-one or in larger groups, meetings offer a chance to discuss or launch a project, share ideas, consider solutions and reach consensus. Read the full article. November 24, 2008
Retain Customers: Align 'Moments of Truth' with VOC
A company wishing to retain customers should complete a two-phase process: 1) determine what is important to the customers during "moments of truth" and 2) make sure their organization is capable of filling those needs reliably. Read the full article. November 17, 2008
Lateral Thinking Stimulates Creativity and Innovation
Lateral thinking as defined by Edward de Bono involves approaching a problem from new directions instead of in a predictable and direct manner. Lateral thinking helps generate fresh, better ideas and is enjoyable. Read the full article. November 10, 2008
Define and Quantify Customer Value - Reveal the Needs
The role of an innovation champion is to connect various needs and their solutions so that synergy is created faster, cheaper and without failure - understanding and empathizing with its customers before defining value. Read the full article. November 3, 2008
Six Sigma and Business Innovation: Process or Passion?
What is the relationship between Six Sigma and innovation? Are the two complementary or do they work in opposite directions? Actually, they are both complementary and opposite. Read the full article. October 27, 2008
Discover Customer Needs With Ethnography
The provider that best satisfies customers' unmet needs may be deemed the most innovative, and is likely to win the biggest share of the market. Practitioners often use voice-of-the-customer (VOC) techniques to find the specifications clients seek. Read the full article. October 20, 2008
Innovation and Six Sigma Need Not Be Exclusive
Six Sigma’s systematic approach may be seen as a threat to creativity. Is it worth generating innovative ideas, assuming the costs and time of the many attempts required? Read the full article. October 13, 2008
Dispelling Myths About Leadership for Change
Successfully implementing any process, innovation included, requires leading and managing change effectively. Leading change, especially in successful businesses, is about aligning energy through a compelling vision of the future. Read the full article. October 6, 2008
Find the Zones of Conflict - Identify the Problem
TRIZ teaching methods emphasize the importance of solving the "right" problem rather than applying energy into curing only the symptoms of the problem. TRIZ focuses on finding the problem drivers and removing or modify them. Read the full article. September 29, 2008
Using TRIZ to Enhance Quality Functional Deployment
TRIZ can enhance the practice of QFD. Researchers will continue to find ways to integrate these methods to help all product and process developers create innovative solutions that win market leadership by solving customer problems. Read the full article. September 22, 2008
Be Innovative: By Design, Accident Or Both?
An IBM ad suggests that businesses only invest in what customers want – not what they need. This either/or has to stop; both are needed in an effective innovation effort. Read the full article. September 15, 2008
Implement a Holistic Patent Strategy for Maximum Value
At the core of patent strategy is the ability to define and understand the value contained in the intellectual property, in the form of value determinants. Read the full article. September 8, 2008
Follow Brainstorming Basics to Generate New Ideas
Before brainstorming, it is important to understand not only the fundamentals of the method, but also how to prepare for and conduct a session. With the right atmosphere, team members and encouragement, the ideas will flow. Read the full article. September 1, 2008
Four Steps to Grow a Company's Innovation Practice
Innovation (which is of the utmost importance to companies across the globe) is difficult although there are dozens of methodologies and tools to achieve it. A series of four steps should be followed to successfully innovate. Read the full article. August 25, 2008
Who Should Lead a Company's Innovation Process?
Who should be the innovation champion in a company? How can senior managers use their roles to facilitate innovation in their businesses? Read the full article. August 18, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: The Seven Cs Together
Innovation is a key corporate initiative in most firms, yet is often unsuccessful. While it is relatively easy to generate ideas, most companies lack processes to evaluate ideas and move them on to new product or service development. Read the full article. August 11, 2008
Ten Tips for the Innovative Leader
Leaders have successfully developed a culture and processes for efficiency, execution, quality, direction and achieving quarterly goals. They can then add the unorthodox thinking and experimentation that will lead to high value innovation. Read the full article. August 4, 2008
Breakthrough Management Group International Hosts 2-Day Innovation Workshop for Executives – Seminar Targets Senior Leaders Looking to Enhance Organizational Innovation Efforts
Breakthrough Management Group International Hosts 2-Day Innovation Workshop for Executives – Seminar Targets Senior Leaders Looking to Enhance Organizational Innovation Efforts Read the full article. July 29, 2008
Axiomatic Design: Achieve the Right Design
The axiomatic design process provides a functionally-driven, solution-neutral way to develop design alternatives and and clear objective methods for choosing between those alternatives. Read the full article. July 28, 2008
Assess Design Alternatives With Axiomatic Design
Axiomatic design provides a rational and scientific way to develop and assess design alternatives, and preemptively addresses and resolves design issues that traditionally are discovered so late that only suboptimal compromises are possible. Read the full article. July 21, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Consumer's Cost
Many firms do evaluate the cost of the innovation – the internal cost to develop and distribute – but not the true cost to the customer to acquire and use. Read the full article. July 14, 2008
Perturbation Theory and Working Backward From Ideality
Take a solution to a more readily solvable problem and adding several smaller terms to it that approximate the unknown, more difficult parts of the current problem. The solution looks like a series of mathematical functions, all added together. Read the full article. July 7, 2008
Improve Product Design: Watch What End Users Do
The beginning of any design and development project should include activities aimed at a deep understanding of user behavior. Planning a design that facilitates likely user tasks will succeed in minimizing frustration and reducing user abandonment. Read the full article. June 30, 2008
Create a High Performance Culture with Hoshin Kanri
Often organizations plan effectively and fail to act on their plan to achieve their goals, leading to poor performance. Hoshin Kanri is a method that addresses the need to act on and achieve planned goals. Read the full article. June 23, 2008
The Importance of Innovation Timing: The Fickle Consumer
Knowing when to launch a new product or service is difficult. The challenge is particularly great when the innovations directly interact with consumers. Critical information can be obtained by studying the voice of the consumer and market demand. Read the full article. June 16, 2008
Evaluation Innovation Framework: Use Coolness
Usually the intent of an innovator is to create something that is valuable, but not necessarily hip or cool. The reaction of the target market, however, can drive up a cool quotient on a new product or service. Read the full article. June 9, 2008
Make Better Design Decisions With VOC
Companies that have advanced their voice of the customer (VOC) methods to the next level have a lot of cycles with customers throughout design phases, incorporating detailed customer preference information in analysis of trade-off decisions. Read the full article. June 2, 2008
Begin a Systematic Innovation Practice - Step Five
Any company should begin its innovation journey with the end in mind; in this case, an effort to sustain innovation must be carefully planned and practiced to perpetuate the culture of accelerated introduction of new products or solutions. Read the full article. May 26, 2008
Analogies Are the Way of Breakthrough Innovation
Innovation experts as a whole seem to be missing the power of TRIZ or have overlooked it, perhaps because it remains a method primarily used by the technical community. Yet the alignment is clear: a system of analogies rules the efficacy of innovation. Read the full article. May 19, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Compatability
Compatibility provides a choice – align to existing standards and improve other factors of the product or service, or disrupt and improve or eliminate the existing standards to provide a completely new product or service. Read the full article. May 12, 2008
Hybridization - Innovation Should Be Integrated
Innovation competencies should not be practiced as stand-alone methodologies. Just as incremental learning needs to be integrated with a prior knowledge base, innovation competencies need to be integrated with other competencies in an organization. Read the full article. May 5, 2008
Resolving Contradictions with 40 Inventive Principles
Innovation practitioners can all benefit from one of the basic concepts of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) - at the heart of many problems is a contradiction, and much of innovation involves solving the contradiction. Read the full article. April 28, 2008
Three Phases of a Comprehensive Innovation Strategy
A verbal commitment to creating innovative products is often senior leadership’s response to a company’s poor financial performance. A commitment to the intentional creation of new products needs to be comprehensive by a company and its management. Read the full article. April 21, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Completeness
Many innovations are technical capabilities looking for a problem to solve, rather than a complete solution. This problem is true whether the innovations are products, services or business models. Read the full article. April 14, 2008
Local Problems Lead to Ideal System Solutions
Problem solving at the sub-system, local level can be inefficient. By defining a problem and attempting to solve it without regard for the entire system, there exists the risk of local optimization, with global non-optimization. Read the full article. April 7, 2008
What Not To Do: Six Ways to Ruin a Brainstorming Session
The brainstorm is the most popular group creativity exercise in business. A well-run brainstorm is fun and energetic; it will generate plenty of good ideas. A poor brainstorm can be frustrating and de-motivational. Read the full article. March 31, 2008
Begin a Systematic Innovation Practice - Step Four
Successful businesses grow through in-house innovations; the challenge is deciding what to innovate. Companies must learn to identify opportunities for dramatic growth through disruptive innovations. Read the full article. March 24, 2008
Developing Forced Analogies Creates New Solutions
People solve problems using analogies based on associations formed over time. This set of association standards is the source of an individual’s psychological bias. The focal analogy method drives ideation by creating a non-standard association set. Read the full article. March 17, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Community
Evaluating an innovation by community can reduce switching barriers for consumers in at least two regards: 1) a community demonstrates that other people have made the change successfully and 2) a community becomes an advocate for the innovation. Read the full article. March 10, 2008
Using Ideality to Improve Solar Panel Release in Space
A problem solver’s objective is to increase the useful functions (numerator) at a rate greater than any consequential increase in the harmful functions (denominator) – this forces a system’s evolution that also increases a system’s ideality. Read the full article. March 3, 2008
Ideality Drives Innovation for Kraft's Lunchables
Ideality is a means of identifying the path to perfection. As compromises in a system are resolved, the implemented solutions should eliminate the contradictions that have been targeted. Also, the solutions should evolve the system toward idealness. Read the full article. February 25, 2008
Dow: Designing the Next-generation Railcar With TRIZ
The interaction of process improvement and innovation tools can be seen in one of Dow’s projects – to design the next generation of rail tank cars for transporting the most hazardous chemicals. Read the full article. February 18, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Convenience
For an innovation to succeed, it must offer more convenience than the existing solution. Whether the target consumer or customer is a homemaker or an executive, innovations that improve convenience over existing solutions will attract attention. Read the full article. February 11, 2008
Bad Attitudes Can Lead to Good Innovation - Hire Rebels
How can you build a team that is innovative, dynamic and capable of finding breakthroughs for tough problems? One way is to make sure that among your solid citizens you have a good sprinkling of rebels. Read the full article. February 4, 2008
Begin a Systematic Innovation Practice: Step Three
With an understanding of the types of, and strategic planning aspects of, innovation, the next step for a company’s leadership is committing to innovation for its value proposition. Read the full article. January 28, 2008
Systematic Innovation's Successes in Healthcare
Systematic innovation is being applied to many industries with great results. Two healthcare case studies address the wide fields of applicability for strategic and systematic innovation Read the full article. January 21, 2008
Innovation Evaluation Framework: Use Choice and Control
Innovations that offer more choice and control create an atmosphere of trust and lead to the adoption of new solutions. Increased choice and control offer immediate, tangible benefits to a consumer. Read the full article. January 14, 2008
Dow Pairs Six Sigma With Innovation
When innovation is the lifeblood of a company, it cannot solely on the fickleness of inspiration. This basic premise underlies research and development at The Dow Chemical Co. Read the full article. January 7, 2008
