Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go

My IDEO colleague Ryan Jacoby and I recently published a piece in the Design Management Review titled Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go.

Please give it a read and let me know what you think, or leave a comment below.

Comments

[Roger von Oech]

Diego,

Thanks for posting this. It is good sound stuff. I especially like your "Ways to Grow" model and its diagram.

Here are several thoughts:

-1- I think "customers" would be a better term than "users." Since this is a business-related model, "customer" seems (to me) capture the relationship a company would want to have with the people who provide revenue for the enterprise.

-2- In the upper right quadrant of your model you have the "Create" zone, and below it "disrupting markets." It wasn't clear to me what you meant by that.

-3- I liked your "Innovation Outcomes" model/graphic — especially the "lava lamp" shape for "evolutionary outcomes."

-4- The tone of parts of the article felt a little like an IDEO marketing piece.

Thanks again for writing this. It's a model I'll be thinking about and sharing.

Best wishes!

[Mark Schraad]

Great article Diego. This framework is simple enough in concept that nearly any exec can use it to evaluate where they are and where to position innovation efforts.

The chart is obviously the most identifiably useful tool - but the surrounding disussion provides plenty of thinking points and will undoubtably create more discourse.

Not sure it really matters in the abstract if you call them customers or users... but if the business is used to calling them either one, then switching to the other will help to reframe the conversation and thus avoid those gloss over assumptions.

I am anxious to match this against some current new product plans to gauge outcomes.

[Diego Rodriguez]

Thanks for your detailed thoughts.

Roger, the "disrupting markets" element can best be tied to Christensen's notion of a new-market disruption.

Mark, the language difference between customers and users is a significant one, I think. The word "customer" feels so transactional, while user can mean anyone who is touched by what you put in the world, whether they pay for it or not. Actually, since writing that article last October, we've started to use the word "people" instead. It's even more human and pushes our thinking harder. You could also put "stakeholder" in there, I suppose.

[Noel]

Diego,
In the biomedical entrepreneurship class I am taking the presenter showed a figure that linked the type of technology to the economics of the technology. I have replicated the figure here: http://titus.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/tech_grow_2.jpg

It seems to me that if you extrapolate between the two you can link innovation to technology and using the two figures together provide an innovation-growth-technology link.