Steve Hoeffler
Vanderbilt University
Michal Herzenstein
University of Delaware
Tamar Ginzburg
Vanderbilt University
In this chapter, we provide prescriptive advice for new product development professionals who are interested in designing and creating radically new products. Radically new products are defined as products that allow us to do something we could not have done before (Hoeffler, 2003). Examples include 3D printers, TiVo, and more recently, Google Glass. While the topic of design and the domain of radically new products are both relatively new and emerging topics in marketing, crossing the desire to create radically new products with emphasizing the role of design in the success of these novel products requires altering many of the approaches that are currently used.
This chapter contains a series of processes design professionals should use in order to create an independent process that results in novel ideas. We offer six processes for firms that are seeking to improve their ability to come up with breakthrough products:
Table 17.1 gives specific examples of how these processes translate into action and supplies specific examples of companies and products that have employed these processes.
Table 17.1 Implementation of the Six Ideas
Area for Novelty Audit | Implementation Ideas | Examples |
Communicating the Challenge Goal
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On the individual level: People in the NPD team should have X% of their time assigned to develop radical ideas they are personally interested in. | Google allows its employees one day a week to work on whatever they wish to develop. |
On the group level: The organization should create groups that include people with different backgrounds. The group would have high degree of autonomy and would work secretly. | Lockheed Martin Skunk Works allow the freedom to create without restraints; Google X-Lab is a semi-secret facility, tasked with developing technological advancements, like the self-driving car. |
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Shift Time Frame
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Questions to ask the design team:
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President JFK announcing on May 25, 1961, that the United States will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. |
Promote Emerging Technology Focus
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A brain storming activity for a skunkworks group: Each person brings to the meeting one technology they want to discuss, then the group brainstorms: What can this technology combination do? What are the outcomes? Are they relevant in our domain? | Hybrid ways to deliver products to consumers: Fuse together home 3D printers (new tech) with same day delivery (new challenge). Amazon can e-mail a file to be printed at home and thus allow just-in-time delivery. |
Promote the Use of Analogical Thinking
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A brain storming activity for a skunkworks group: Half of the group brings in a problem, and the other half brings some unrelated ideas/things that have superior qualities. Then the group brainstorms how the problems and the “superior things” are similar and how they are different. | Sungard, a cyber-security cloud computing company, developed the idea that moving to the cloud is like surviving a zombie attack. In both cases the attacker wishes to “eat your brain” and the only way to survive the attack is by being prepared. |
Do Not Write Off Simple Problems
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A two-part exercise: (1) Ask the design team to make a grocery list of the nuisances/ challenges they encounter daily. Then, after a month of keeping such records, (2) hold a skunkworks group meeting. |
Coravin allows the pouring of a single wine glass without removing the cork. It was invented because the inventor wished to enjoy wine while his wife was pregnant. |
Leverage more Ideators via Crowdsourcing
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Acquire information about users and engage them in ideation activity. Use current communication technologies and virtual platforms to attract worldwide crowd to share ideas.
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Quirky.com lets everyone submit a product idea (from a little doodle to a chemical formula). Next, people who frequent the website vote whether they like the idea. Finally, the company designs and manufactures the chosen idea of the week. |
When trying to break out of existing new product development (NPD) patterns and create completely novel designs, it is important that upper management explicitly communicates those goals to both internal new product development personnel (when the task is in-house) and to any external ideators. We suggest that periodic attempts to create radical designs are added to the traditional NPD process and highlighted as unique so that they can receive special attention. To facilitate these attempts, the organization's top management should take three general steps.
First, management has to create a culture in which failure is acceptable; otherwise, the development team will be less willing to take big risks. It has been shown that if the manager directly in charge of the new product development teams is supportive and has an open-minded response to questions and challenges, then the NPD team is more likely to feel psychologically safe and take more risks in its work. A culture that allows NPD teams to make mistakes along the way promotes more radical ideas and designs. The measurements of performance of the NPD team can also influence how radical the team's ideas are. To be effective in that way, the performance measurement should not emphasize short-term gains, but rather focus on the long term. Further, it should emphasize the process rather than the outcome. For example, did the team learn from its experience, even if the outcome was ill-fated?
Second, management can help the innovation development team by viewing this process as having two stages, the first including open behaviors and the second closed behaviors. Open behaviors include taking risks, drawing on different domains, being radical. Closed behaviors, on the other hand, focus on what is possible—on implementation. The goal should be to start with the radical and audacious ideas, and only much later on in the process to think about implementation. The tension that implementation creates should be avoided in the early stages, but it is helpful in later stages because it can push innovators to come up with creative solutions.
Third, management has to allow the team to avoid routine organizational procedures. It other words, management should allow the development team to be autonomous and free of bureaucracy. This means that the development team should have more access to resources (such as adding other employees to the team, adding materials, purchasing and training with new technologies and equipment, etc.), and more freedom in terms of reporting on their progress. After communicating the challenge goal of developing a radically new product, the following steps should be taken to implement the change:
Moreover, management stays in the loop and learns about issues before they become too complicated to solve.
One method to free up ideators from the bounds of today's traditional designs is to specifically ask for ideas that will not be relevant until some future date (i.e., 5 or 10 years into the future), or as Google X Lab defines it, “science fiction–sounding solutions.” This farther-into-the-future thinking may relax the normal constraints associated with developing a novel design. Moreover, this shift in time focus may eliminate one's common self-imposed restriction on new ideas to merely those where the ideator can envision a path to fulfillment. Innovators' prescribed imagination is the killer of radical ideas. Therefore, top management should find ways to remove mental boundaries by allowing the innovation team to generate ideas that will not be feasible in the near future. The following steps should be taken when implementing this change in time frames:
One way to promote uniqueness is to fuse the process with a particular emerging technology and ask how that emerging technology could be used in the focal domain. Another way is to attempt to hack together two emerging technologies and then place the outcome in a specific domain (related to the company's core industry). In addition, technological road maps can be created for all potential emerging technologies that may impact the industry, consequently promoting combinations of several emerging technologies in a novel design challenge.
The idea to focus on new technologies is similar to the blue ocean concept in which innovators create new industries rather than compete with current players. Nintendo's Wii console is a perfect example. The company did not wish to directly compete with Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox in terms of the resolution and animation of the games. Instead, Nintendo created a new control and thus appealed to segments new to the video game industry (women and older folks). By promoting a focus on emerging technologies, firms can reconstruct market boundaries and introduce novelty. New product developers can use cross-conventional technologies to create new demand in a new, unknown space, rather than compete over existing markets. This emerging technology focus in the design process will lead to innovative developments. The following steps should be taken when implementing the emerging technology focus:
Table 17.2 Steps in the Consumer Consumption Chain
How do people become aware of their need for your product or service? |
How do consumers find your offering? |
How do consumers make their final selection? |
How do consumers order and purchase your product or service? |
How is your product or service delivered? |
What happens when your product or service is delivered? |
How is your product installed? |
How is your product or service paid for? |
How is your product stored? |
How is your product moved around? |
What is the consumer really using your product for? |
What do consumers need help with when they use your product? |
What about returns or exchanges? |
How is your product repaired or serviced? |
What happens when your product is disposed of or no longer used? |
Strategically thinking about the various steps consumers go through when interacting with a product enables the development team to creatively enhance the consumer experience every step of the way with unconventional technological solutions.
The design team should find ideas from analogous domains in extremely different industries that have dealt with some of the same abstract problems (Kalogerakis, Luthje, & Herstatt, 2010). Analogy use is a common and vital technique in creative problem solving and complex innovation tasks. The goal of this exercise is to find both similarities and, more importantly, differences between the problem at hand and the base of the analogy, in order to infuse the solution to the problem with attributes that otherwise would be unthinkable.
The story behind the invention of the Nest Learning Thermostat is a good example for analogical thinking. The team that designed the thermostat aimed to reinvent something that has not changed in the past 20 years. The head of this team was the person who invented the iPod. His thought was, how can we make a thermostat that is more like an iPod? Indeed, if you look inside the Nest, you will basically see a smartphone—a very high-powered processor with memory, flash, wireless radios, and antennas. By using analogical transfer, the team was able to reinvent this “unloved but important home product.”
In addition to analogical thinking, scenario thinking can be helpful in mentally simulating future consumption and experiential usage scenarios. One aspect that may help ideators think through the potential usage scenarios is to think through the specific types of consumer uncertainties that are thought to impact the usefulness of the new product or service. Hoeffler (2003) demonstrated that consumers have greater uncertainty when estimating the perceived usefulness of RNPs, and proceeded to partition the sources of uncertainty into:
Thinking through these uncertainties may help identify particular areas where completely novel opportunities exist. Specific tasks to elicit novel design ideas may include sketching, prototyping, and storytelling. In addition, visual examples may be shown to ideators to promote novelty, as long as the timing of the exposure to examples is strategically designed to avoid design fixation. The following steps should be taken when implementing this emerging technology focus:
Table 17.3 Types of Uncertainty
Prediction | Uncertainty | Examples |
Predicting benefits | Consumption/usage uncertainty |
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Performance uncertainty |
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Network externalities uncertainty |
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Predicting drawbacks | Switching costs uncertainty |
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Learning curve uncertainty |
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Price change uncertainty |
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Predicting social implications | Symbolic uncertainty |
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Affective reaction uncertainty |
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Often, companies focus on solving “big” problems in an effort to create extremely novel designs. We suggest that firms can alternatively focus on breakthrough ideas for solving common everyday nuisances. The goal here would be to start with the focus on common “small” problems, and then to think about designing extremely novel approaches to these simple problems.
For identifying day-to-day problems that need to be solved, a company might choose to expand its ideators group and invite input from a variety of factions. Involving customers and potential customers in the brainstorming stage can broaden the pool of ideas and thus promote novelty (and we provide suggestions for “crowdsourcing” to get novel ideas in the next section). By carefully defining the various problems brought up and identifying their core, the design thinking process can result in creative and previously unidentified solutions.
As an example, Leonard Bosack and Richard Troiano managed the computers at two different departments at Stanford, and wished to have their computers communicate with each other. They ended up developing the first router that allowed computers in different networks to be connected, and named their company Cisco. A simple problem triggered a solution that created one of the largest computing companies in the world.
Toward a goal of coming up with a continual stream of new products, firms have traditionally relied on an internal staff of professional innovators to generate ideas and to evaluate those ideas. Recently, there has been a push to seek out novel ideas from any avenue available. One method that firms are employing is to outsource their ideation efforts in an attempt to get fresh ideas into their innovation process. The idea behind crowdsourcing is that firms can tap a dispersed “crowd” of nonexperts (e.g., consumers, employees). The steps to leverage more ideators include:
A summary of the aforementioned six ideas to improve product development is presented in Figure 17.1.
In order to achieve greater innovativeness, product development professionals interested in enhancing the novelty of their new product designs should first understand the unique differences between designing for improvements in existing products and designing for creating radically new products. As Figure 17.1 shows, a combination of effective communication of the challenge to create novelty, together with shift in temporal focus, inclusion of emerging technologies, analogical thinking exercises, focus on day-to-day issues, and crowdsourcing can effectively enhance novelty in design. With the aid of our six processes we hope that new product design teams will be more likely to find that breakthrough product to help redefine their industries going forward.
Steve Hoeffler is a professor at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University; previously Steve was an assistant professor of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Steve's research on such topics as positioning multiple category products, marketing radically new products, and the advantages of strong brands have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Journal of Marketing Research. He has worked in marketing for NCR/AT&T and consulted for Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Fujitsu.
Michal Herzenstein is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Delaware's Lerner College of Business and Economics. She has been a member of the Lerner College since 2006, upon completion of her doctoral studies at the University of Rochester. Michal's research focuses on consumer decision making and specifically on financial decision making, crowdfunding, and prosocial behaviors. Her papers were published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, among other outlets. Prior to her doctoral studies, Michal worked as a marketing consultant at a prominent consulting firm in Israel, and was a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces. She holds a BS in economics, statistics, and operations research, and an MBA in marketing, both from Tel Aviv University.
Tamar Ginzburg holds an MBA in marketing and strategy from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, and a BA in economics and Arabic language and literature from Tel Aviv University. Currently, she is an at-large member of the Nashville Opera Executive Committee and serves on the Opera board. She is a board member at Akiva School in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as the PTFA co-chair of the school and a member of the school's recruitment committee. She has worked as a consultant and a marketing analytics manager at an advertising company, as a marketing analytics intern at Xerox, and prior to that in investment banking.