Should you hire an anthropologist?

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Gary R Schirr

Ethnography stands out in a survey

The principals of the Product Development Group, owners of the Stage-Gate registration, published the lead article in Visions (a PDMA publication) this month. It was a survey of firms about their most used and most effective “ideation methods”. [I will probably return to this article in more detail in a later posting.]

Overall there seems to be serious problems with the survey including an odd definition of VOC techniques and susceptibility to bias. The authors highlighted the quadrant where methods were both most used and most effective. If you believe, as I do, that survey participants desire to:

  1. Make themselves look intelligent
  2. Tell the researcher what he/she wishes to hear, and
  3. Tell some truth,

in roughly that order, then the most used – most effective quadrant may not be that interesting. Who wants to tell a questioner that “I spend all my time and money on focus groups but they aren’t worth a d—.” It quite likely is true but it doesn’t make the subject look particularly smart.

I would find the little used, but effective quadrant to be the most interesting. The authors did not make that available, but the less-common used extensively, highly-effective quadrant MAY point us in that direction.

Ethnography was the clear outlier: less than 15% of respondents used it extensively but it was rated as the single most effective technique. (And it was labeled correctly as a VOC technique.)

Of course there is a bias risk here too: ethnography may be a fad; it may have a cult of followers who have to believe because they are spending their time and money in an unusual way…

But maybe anthropology deserves a look!

Posted in Co-creation or User collaboration, Customer Research Methods, Ideation | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Rushing the Gates – I

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Gary R Schirr

Don’t let process management kill innovation

For over a decade there has been research indicating that a Stage-Gate® process hampers more innovative new product development projects. For me a high point of these analyses was a 2005 presentation at the PDMA conference by Elko Kleinschmidt, Dr. Cooper’s primary academic co-author, and Ulrick de Brentani and Soren Salomo testing a model of innovation in Global NPD. The model showed a strong and significant negative direct effect between the structure in the NPD process and the innovativeness of the outcome.

A theoretical study by Benner and Tushman in the 2003 provided a nice framework for these results. The authors argued that process management techniques in general — not just S-G, but TQM, six-sigma, etc. — “are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change.”

This result seems intuitively attractive: process management is largely focused on reducing variation in processes, significant innovation would seem to imply some variation to what a firm is doing.

Their solution was for firms to be ambidextrous and allow less structured review of more innovative process.

So maybe you should use your stages and gates, TQM, and/or six-sigma when you are developing diet cherry-vanila coke, but keep the process management techniques at arms length when you are trying for real innovativeness…

Posted in NSD Process, Stage-Gate® | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Try and Fail (and try again)

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Gary R Schirr

 The Cost of Trying is lower than the Cost of Analyzing!

In a classic CMR article, Lynn and Morone urged high tech firms to “Probe and Learn”: get a workable product or service out there into the market and see what works.

I just listened to a podcast on the BW Innovation site of Clay Shirky promoting his new book. He cites how the Internet changes everything for NSD or web-based services (echoing a finding from my own research with web-based B2B financial services):

     “The cost of trying is lower than the cost of analyzing…[whether a new product or service will succeed]”

The podcast is on the BW Innovation site:

http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/innovation/innovation_03_19_08.htm?popupWidth=770&popupHeight=660

 

Posted in Customer Research Methods, experiential innovation, Experiment, NSD Process | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

All the World – Stages?

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Gary R Schirr

Your first time 

The May issue of JPIM has an article by Dr. Robert Cooper defending the Stage-Gate®   (“S-G”) model of new product development from many criticisms in recent research and writing on product development. The S-G process is ubiquitous in new product research and training — it is sometimes used as the definition of whether an NPD process has a formal structure. Dr. Cooper is the professor who put registered the name S-G; his article is a JPIM “perspectives” piece which means it was written from the vantage point of a consultant-practitioner. The article raises important issues, so I will devote multiple postings to it over the next few weeks: first reviewing the criticisms and then Cooper’s defense of the model.

Stage-Gate® is usually depicted as a linear progression of alternative parallelograms and circles. The boxes are the stages that are undertaken by the development team and the circles are the gates where disinterested third-parties make go/no-go decisions based on the analysis which is part of the preceding stage.

The idea will come from strategy or some ideation process and then proceed through a go/no-go inital idea check; then may come a business analysis and another go/no-go; then a technological or operations analysis and a go/no-go; and continuing with customer concept testing, market analyis, development, pre-launch, etc. Generally there are eight to twelve stages and gates to screen the new product or service.

Although a straight line progression was Dr. Cooper’s original depiction of the process, he now stresses that it is misleading to think of S-G as a linear process since it has evolved: the different stages can be done in parallel and projects can be customized by picking and choosing stages and gates appropriate for that effort. (More later..)

Before beginning my academic adventure I had been involve in NSD: I served on the new product/service committees or teams in two exchanges, a bank, and a couple startup software firms; I also ran the new product effort at a software application firm.

The first time I ever saw or heard of  Stage-Gate®  was in the pre-reading for Professor Page’s doctoral seminar on new product development. My initial reaction, colored by my experience in the Internet startups, was amusement at what appeared to me to be Taylorism totally run amok — the S-G process looked to me like an attempt to make innovation into an assembly line production.

This week’s question: What was your reaction as a service innovator when you saw the  Stage-Gate® model for the 1st time?

Posted in NSD Process, Stage-Gate® | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

My First Webinar

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Gary R Schirr
 Thanks ABA!
I did a web-based seminar for the first time yesterday.
  
187 bankers from the American Bankers Association participated in a discussion of the 2007 Bank New Service Development Survey, which was done with the cooperation of the ABA. Webex without open communication was a very strange way to communicate with the bankers. I have given many talks at industry or academic conferences — Euromoney, Product Development & Management Association, etc., and I lecture undergraduates three times a week. Lack of eye contact makes webex so much different.

 It was strange to sit in my home office — and see deer and turkeys out the window – and know that I was talking to almost 200 bankers. I worried about not being able to communicate 1 to 1, but there were 29 email questions — better than participation in most of my classes at the university!

 I think innovation is an important topic to bankers…

 WELCOME ABA MEMBERS!!!!

Posted in communication | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments