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January 25, 2006
Part 1: Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 1 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
Many issues are still debated when it comes to new product innovation, but fortunately marketers and product developers seem to have stopped debating the issue of whether or not it’s important to keep the product and service development pipelines full. This is critically important. Study after study has demonstrated that new product and service success is relatively rare, such as the London Dun and Bradstreet study in which the accompanying chart was found. As the chart indicates, for every profitable new product, there are approximately sixty ideas or concepts that do not make it to market successfully.
Much has been said regarding the importance of having a structured, repeatable process for new product and service development. Experts such as Dr. Robert Cooper and his colleagues have spent countless hours laboring on defining exactly what such a development process should look like, resulting in charts now familiar to many new product developers.
Yet even Dr. Cooper has stated,
“Don’t expect a well-oiled new product process to make up for a shortage of quality ideas: if the idea was mundane to start with, don’t count on your process turning it into a star!” Optimizing the Stage-Gate Process. What Best Practice Companies are Doing – Part 1, Cooper, R., Edgett, S., Kleinschmidt, E., 2002
So while there’s not much debate that success in the Idea Stage, or the Fuzzy Front End as it’s often called, is critical to the success of a new product development and innovation program, there’s still a great deal of discussion about why the Fuzzy Front End is such a challenging part of the product or service development process. Perhaps this is because, unlike other portions of the development process, more time has been spent in this sort of discussion compared to the relatively small amount of time that has been spent defining how to make the Fuzzy Front End more efficient and productive. Or perhaps it’s because of the still-pervasive notion that ideas are just supposed to “appear” from customers, or employees, or from some corporate initiative encouraging people to be creative and innovative.
It’s our experience that it is possible to structure the Fuzzy Front End in such a way that it not only produces innovative results, but that those results can positively affect the entire development process.
NEXT: Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
Comments (7)
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Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
1. Will Gaus on January 25, 2006 2:18 PM writes...
Great read. Very interesting approach to innovation. I agree in that 'thinking outside the box' is not only a deterrent to usable ideas but a cliche to some and intimidating to others. We operate best with some rules. You captured that essence in a very conclusive manner. I look forward to reading the rest.
Permalink to Comment2. Renee on January 25, 2006 5:35 PM writes...
Thanks Will! If you want to read the whole thing without waiting for the other posts, you can see a .PDF at this link: http://www.decisionanalyst.com/Downloads/Looking4IdeasInWrongPlaces.pdf
:) renee
Permalink to Comment3. Keith on January 26, 2006 8:10 PM writes...
Feels like everyone's crawling back in the box these days. Trendspotter Douglas Rushkoff writes in his cool new book "Get Back in the Box" that the key here might be through introducing play into the workplace. He suggests (and I agree) that the process and efficiency-oriented approach to innovation has alienated organizations from what they really do best. Personally, I vote to avoid a painful dissection of "the fuzzy front-end" and instead revisit the fun of discovery that probably led us all to our domains in the first place.
Permalink to Comment4. Tim Nicol on January 27, 2006 3:17 AM writes...
Great topic for discussion-thanks for provoking some thoughts; Innovation of core propositions should, in my view, be a higher priority than extending and stretching already overcooked brands in FMCG. From that viewpoint, creativity at the front end certainly benefits from the "freedom of a tight brief". The trick is to manage the creative, lateral thought process but ensure the outcomes remain focussed. Our suggestion is to be very broad in scope at the generation phase, then rapidly screen and eliminate out all those ideas that won't work for the company/brand/consumer. "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideasâ€-so says
Permalink to CommentLinus Pauling, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize. Who are we to disagree?
5. Hans Henrik on January 28, 2006 5:49 AM writes...
Hi Renee
Great post - back in August I had a similar post about expanding the box.
http://www.cph127.com/cph127/2005/08/is_outsidethebo.html#comments
Every time you go outside the box you tend to loose focus on mission, vision and strategy. So, as I see it it's not about moving outside the box, it's more about expanding the box - "Big Box Thinking"... :-)
All the best
Permalink to CommentHans Henrik
6. Brian Phipps on January 28, 2006 10:11 AM writes...
Very useful post, and the pdf is a real plus. I would join Keith in recommending Douglas Rushkoff's "Get Back in the Box", but I would disagree with his description of Rushkoff as a "trendspotter." Rushkoff is an incisive social thinker and theorist. Portions of the book are found in the December archive on Rushkoff's blog: http://www.rushkoff.com/2005_12_01_archive.php
Permalink to Comment7. Renee on February 9, 2006 7:36 AM writes...
Thanks for all the kind comments, everyone! We've been using the "in the box" metaphor for about two years now, and actually were about to retire it because so many others are using it now as well. But it does say something very important about the nature of btoh innovation and creativity, I think. I have not read the Rushkoff book -- my copy arrived from Amazon just yesterday and I'm looking forward to it. I'll be posting on that in the near future. :)
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