Beware of the ‘lightweight front end’ when creating breakthrough innovation

We often hear companies say there is no need to get the R&D team involved in the front end innovation process until the customer insights and initial concepts are better defined, because they “don’t want to be too limited in the solutions considered at this stage”.

Our view is that innovation leaders often fail to acknowledge how difficult and challenging the innovation process actually is going to be, and therefore happily go forward insufficiently ‘tooled up’, skills wise. We guess this is because breakthrough innovation is not as simple as the theorists and journalists would like us to think, while basic concepts are certainly applicable to a broad range of projects they actually require a high degree of adaptation, experience and skill to deliver successfully in a given situation. This gets conveniently overlooked by those unwilling to commit significant resources early on in the innovation process, sometimes because experience has shown it can deliver an inconsistent return on investment compared with other more short term uses for corporate funds. A bit of a chicken and egg argument it seems.

But the necessity to have a portfolio of innovation projects remains clear in an ever changing and competitive world. If your company expects to be making the same products in 10 years time then it’s an unnecessary overhead, but for everyone else a good way to understand the value of innovation is to think of it as buying your company the right to trade in the future, when the competitive landscape will have changed significantly. One example cited recently in the press is a once market leading company in the entertainment industry now struggling to find direction in today’s new media dominated marketplace. Innovations they considered but passed over 15 years ago would probably not seem quite so expensive for the business today.

So returning to the original point, we have seen the outputs from many front end innovation processes where the concepts are really no more than ‘what if’ statements, aspirations rather than discovered possibilities. In trying to avoid ‘constraints’ on their new idea generation process our unsuspecting innovators have in fact implemented a serious limitation in the process without realising it. The ‘how to’ question may be more difficult to answer but it cannot be ignored, a ’what if’ idea without a ‘how to’ solution is not innovation, it’s science fiction. The problem with answering the ‘how to’ is also a fundamental one. It’s a simple but profound insight that ‘how to’ knowledge comes only from practical experience. The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as ‘a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field’! Unfortunately this means that ‘how to’ knowledge is always going to be relatively expensive because it takes many man hours to create.

But you could argue common sense usually provides the ‘how to’ because if the ‘what if’ is similar to something we’ve seen before in the market then an existing product demonstrates the ‘how to’ feasibility. This seems reasonable but has two fatal flaws. Firstly, this strategy most likely precludes breakthroughs because it’s rare for a breakthrough to be simply a new use for an existing technical system because the wisdom of the crowd will have probably worked out the new use before you did! Secondly, the laws of physics are not always intuitive and require in depth understanding to interpret to a given ‘what if’ scenario.

So, a lightweight front end process that only generates ‘what if’ style ideas is a really bad place to start innovating. In contrast a multidisciplinary team that can create more holistic concepts in the common ground between what we think customers want and what we think we can deliver at the right cost actually has the capacity to deliver breakthrough innovation. Getting the team to deliver is another challenge, but no one said innovation was easy!