One of the things that I am becoming increasingly aware of in my research project is the importance of prototyping, as prototypes serve as excellent boundary spanners, in settings characterized by diversity. Prototypes can activate different forms of knowledge, especially in cross-disciplinary groups, where it can be difficult to combine and exchange knowledge pertaining to different knowledge domains.

It was therefore with great enthusiasm that I read through this Japanese book from 1995 picturing an incredibly funny selection of totally unuseless Japanese inventions. The author has named this phenomenon CHINDOGU, which in Japanese means “unuseless tool” invented to solve everyday problems and needs. The author has turned chindogu into an art form, celebrating the art of the unuseless idea. Or as the book describes: “bizarre and logic-defying gadgets and gizmos, which must work (to be classified as chindogu), but are actually entirely impractical”.

Flipping through the book is amazingly funny, its like watching the Invention Channel on a really good day - but to an innovation affacinado like myself, the book also serves as an important reminder of the need for prototyping, as described above, and especially in documenting the importance of quick and dirty prototyping. Course the interesting thing about these chindogus is, that they seem to be EXCELLENT ideas, when you think about them, and talk about them - each and everyone actually. And it is only when they are prototyped, turned into action, that the inventor (and the rest of us), realize to TOTAL unuselessness of the idea.

So beware, is the idea you are working on right now truly an innovation or is it a CHINDOGU? The only way to find out is to either look in by prototyping.....

The book mentioned here Kenji Kawakami: “The Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions” (1995). There are a few websites on Chindogu, unfortunately they do not seem to have been updated for a long time.

I am going through quite a lot of articles at the moment, and the difference between how I read articles now compared to how I did it in the beginning of my phd-project is significant. Because now I know what I am looking for, my data presents me with interesting patterns, and I look into theory for theory to aid my understanding and interpretation of those very patterns.

One of the articles I read today was different though, even if it was not exactly was I was looking for, the article had me reading it from beginning to finish, and their research will definitely be referenced in my dissertation, somehow. It was an article from Academy of Management Review by Hogg & Terry (2000) entitled: “Social Identity and Self-Categorization Processes in Organizational Contexts”. There were several interesting points to pull from that article, but one paragraph was particularly interesting, and this is what I thought that I would share with you: Their discussion of the social construction of leadership in groups:

From a social identity perspective, leadership is, according to Hogg & Terry from University of Queensland, a “structural feature of ingroups (i.e. leaders and followers), which is produced by the processes of self-categorization and prototype-based depersonalization. Therefore (...) being a prototypical group member may be at least as important for leadership as having characteristics that are widely believed to be associated with a particular type of leader” (Hogg & Terry, 2000:128).

What this means is, that leaders often become leaders exactly because they embody “the aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors of the group”(Hogg & Terry, 2000:128), and not necessarily because they possess leadership qualities and competences. This is as such not interesting per se, we see that everywhere, the socalled Peters Principle or Law, where people are promoted until they no longer excel in what they do. The interesting thing in this article is their description of how groups tend to form such leaders themselves, through dynamic processes of social identity construction in groups with a high degree of group cohesiveness.

The danger to innovation then is that cohesive organizations (which we see everywhere in or branded and teambuilded organisations) then, according to Hogg & Terry (2000:129) often end op producing leaders who are selected as leaders exactly because they reproduce the present and therefore are less likely to produce the future (and even less likely to produce innovation). Such organizations:

1. Produce leaders who are prototypical but do not possess task-appropriate leadership skills (and end up producing groupthink instead of good management)
2. Consolidate organizational prototypes that reflect dominant rather than minority cultural attributes, and thus, exclude non-prototypical others from gaining influence, and obtaining managerial roles, and therefore
3. Produce an environment that is conducive to the exercise, and perhaps abuse, of power by leaders.

However, as Hogg & Terry explain (2000:130): “This rigidly hierarchical leadership scenario is most likely to emerge when conditions encourage groups (and organisations) to be cohesive and homogeneous, with extremitixed and clearly delimited prototypes that are tightly consensual”.....

Hmmmmm, something to think about......

I just spent most of my weekend reading Anthony Ulwick’s latest book What Customers Want (2005) in which he elaborates on his approach to user-driven, or as he calls it, outcome-driven innovation (which he claims is all about moving beyond customer-driven innovation. The book is a quick read and offers some easy-read tools and methodologies for working strategically with customer input in the innovation process.

I first learned of Ulwick and his approach to innovation in 2002, in the Harvard Business Review article: “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”, where he criticized the ways in which many companies failed in their attempts to capture valuable customer input, and how they made use of that input to direct innovation efforts... According to Ulwick, too many companies simply collect the wrong input from their customers, as he explains:

“Customers should not be trusted to come up with solutions; they aren't expert or informed enough for that part of the innovation process. That's what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes - that is, what they want a new product or service to do for them. Maybe they want to feel a closer bond to people when talking on the phone or to spend less time traveling to and from the grocery store. What form the solutions take should be up to you, and you alone (Ulwick, 2002:92)”

But this does not mean that one should not be listening to customers, it only means that the way in which customer input is collected, used and applied should be carefully structured, not around solutions, needs and benefits, but rather focus on the outcome customers want a given product or service to have, and none the least, to focus on the ‘jobs’ and ‘tasks’ that customers are actually seeking to achieve.

The book which came out last year is an elaboration of the 2002-article, which has been developed a bit further to also include the innovation process, which he describes in these steps:

1. Plan outcome--based customer interviews (requires field observation to understand product use)
2. Capture desired outcomes (Ulwick states that most products have between 50-150 outcome metrics)
3. Organize the outcomes
4. Rate outcomes for importance and satisfaction (using the opportunity algorithm described below)
5. Use the outcomes to jump-start innovation (this is where his message becomes a little toooooo simple...)

The opportunity algorithm basically captures the relationship between the importance customers attach to each of the identified outcomes, or as described by Ulwick:

“The formula [Importance - {Importance-Satisfaction) = Opportunity] yields highly accurate results. Companies ask their customers to quantify on a scale of one to ten the importance of each desired outcome and the degree to which it is currently satisfied. Those rankings are inserted into the formula, resulting in an overall opportunity score” (Ulwick, 2002: 96)

What then emerges is an overall score, identifying where the opportunities for innovation seem to be most interesting, namely the outcomes with the highest scores on importance and lowest scores of satisfaction. Other innovation opportunities exist in terms of cost-cutting, which becomes an evident path to pursue when certain outcomes score high on satisfaction and low on importance.

The way in which this is all presented by Ulwick is rather simplistic, which can be quite annoying at times during the reading, but none the less, he really offers some interesting insights regarding user-driven innovation, and in his book he describes the need for us to move beyond the customer-driven paradigm, which he describes in this way:

“Using the customer-driven approach, companies began to conduct customer interviews and act on the feedback they received. They performed ethnographic and anthropological research. They began to test product concepts with users. Indeed, over the past two decades qualitative and quantitative research methods have become corporate staples. (...) Customer-driven thinking is well entrenched and has become the mantra of the corporate world. But after twenty years of customer-driven thinking, U.S. companies still find that 50 to 90 percent of their product and service initiatives are failures, collectively costing them more than $100 billion each year” (Ulwick, 2005:xiv).