Adaptive Path Blog

Today I’m at the IIT conference which is all about how businesses can marry design and business concepts to create value and gain competitive advantage. The stories people are telling about how they’ve driven innovation through their organizations are fascinating. A notable theme emerging is about how making something new requires a unique business process each time.

A few presentations focused explicitly on processes invented to drive innovation through what otherwise might be a company adverse to change. These simple yet flexible processes allowed teams to focus on what they were doing rather than how they were doing it. Each time the story starts with a well defined business problem and ends with highly collaborative teams from different disciplines working together. The components of these processes aren’t unique but the way that they’re brought together addresses the problem at hand. In the end, the differences end up being similar in that they put the focus on the people rather than the process.

Design managements stories from Strategy ‘06:

Jim Wicks, Design Director at Motorola talked about the new model of product development used for the RAZR and the PEBL.

• Nail the basics, by addressing business fundamentals including a solid design principles and branding strategy.
• Develop rhythm by synchronize the business strategies, software releases, consumer research and strategic component roadmaps.
• Partner and collaborate intensively both internally and externally. Don’t be afraid to tap into inventive talent outside your team.

Todd Tillemans from Unilever and Chris Conley from Gravity Tank talked about how they solved a business problem using a straight forward set of design and management principles.

• Address a business problem. The Unilever team articulated a very clear problem representing a potential $19m in lost sales: a specific retail sector was consistently under stocked.
• Broaden your perspective. A cross-functional team was created and given permission to challenge everything, including problems other people were responsible for solving.
• See things with fresh eyes. The team looked at entire supply chain from end to end and saw first hand how why the problem was occurring in the stores.
• Work on it together. Gravity Tank facilitated a 2 day working session with Unilever and the store managers responsible for restocking their products.
• Prototype and pilot. Based on all the data collected the team developed prototypes, piloted them in the field, and iterated until they found a successful solution.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Conference Commentary, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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