One Day Innovation – stress today; speed in the future
The current business climate stresses our innovation leaders. They are still told to make innovation happen, but please – make sure we get results today rather than tomorrow. It is a tough job and people need to get creative.
Linak, a Danish medium-sized company Linak working with linear actuator technology recently presented a new initiative in which they get close with their customers in just one day. They call it One Day Innovation.
Claus F. Rode, the business development manager who initiated the idea at Linak describes it as a new type of sales meeting. They bring in selected customers and perhaps also a few suppliers in order to co-create, ripen and select ideas for products which require linear actuators. Linak prepares, facilitates (including fast prototyping) and documents the day.
It is not a new thing to listen to customers and there are many cases and concepts on customer interaction. What I like about Linak’s approach is that it is quick and dirty. In one day they get new ideas and the feedback from customers making it possible to make things happen fast.
Concepts such as Linak’s One Day Innovation – and I believe there are many variations in many other companies – are born out of requirement by executives who demand more or less the same output for a lot less input.
I hope innovation leaders see this not just as a challenge to get things done right now, but also as an opportunity to improve their general innovation processes. It should raise questions such as:
- How can we improve our rapid/instant/one-day/quick-and-dirty innovation initiatives?
- What can we do to speed up our overall innovation process?
- How can we work closer with our eco-system of customers, partners and suppliers to crank up more innovation with less effort?
I assume such questions prompted Claus to create a LinkedIn group called Rapid Innovation. Check this link: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1936351
It is often said that we should not waste a good crisis. Hopefully, innovation leaders still have the power – and time – to continue making innovation even more important and relevant within their companies. This current crisis does provide some pretty good situations to make this happen.
By the way, since I mentioned time in the last sentence I can tell you that my next post will be about why creating personal thinking time is important for innovation.
Before founding the Food & Drink Innovation Network here in the UK, Jeffrey Hyman was product development director at Sharwoods, which is now part of Premier Foods. His holy grail was what he called “Same Day NPD” (this was back in the day when innovation managers in FMCG companies were called New Product Development Managers). The closest he came to finding the grail was an innovation process he and I ran for a well known potato products manufacturer. 25 people from different parts of the spud company met at 1700 on Day 1. By 2100 on Day 2 they were in possession of a small number of concepts that were consumer inspired, consumer evaluated and consumer enhanced. You can download a slideshow outlining the process (opens in a new window, or right click and save as): Fast
Innovation with Open Space.