When successful products prevent strategic innovation

Design Management Journal, Spring 2002 by Jones, Peter

Design managers often experience disputes over appropriate processes, ownership, and roles in product design, from product interface definition to customer testing. They must satisfy an internal customer, a product manager, but may run into conflicts emerging over appropriate process. Design managers must often negotiate the value of a desired design activity, such as understanding the user, when the business criteria of the defined process may not allow sufficient scope or schedule for the activity. Innovation opportunities are easily missed when design and development are so tightly constrained.

Project management must then satisfy (in this model) the processes and values of product (or portfolio) management. A portfolio/product management process approves the projects, often based on a Stage-Gate3 or similar framework for product and project oversight. So projects have little leeway for sponsoring innovation; it's beyond their defined (or implicit) scope.

The portfolio management process answers to an executive steering committee or marketbased product board. These in turn answer to the firm's management team. And we wonder why the company is not more innovative!

To summarize, we find product success driving growth, and changing strategy to focus on customer intimacy and away from innovation. Institutionalized processes mirror the values and preferences of the dominant market position and customers, sponsoring less risky (though often resource-intensive) enhancements for existing customers.

New markets and design opportunities, though attractive within an activity, seem risky when viewed by the next higher level of activity. Designers invent and promote new concepts for potential innovation as opportunities. But when obviated by project or organizational processes and the need to incrementally serve an existing customer base, the motivation to innovate withers.

Beyond processes: Learning from innovators

What can the already-successful company learn from start-ups about energizing its culture and organizational innovation? Certainly, market leaders have the resources and capabilities to reengineer their innovation processes, and to some extent their business models. But the bigger question might be, can they innovate their values? Even visionary leaders cannot hope to motivate large-scale change quickly in a large organization-although even management processes resist rapid revision, the values embedded in them outlast CEOs and reorganizations.

Revising the processes may not be enoughat the organizational level, some (such as psychologist Don Norman) have promoted corporate reorganization as a necessary precondition for ensuring user-centered design; they would do this by fostering horizontal teams and new organizational structures to manage innovation projects and processes. Others recommend a values leadership approach, encouraging managers to negotiate decisions from an understanding of strategy, hidden objectives, and all stakeholder values.4

A start-up's innovation advantages draw from values and more. Sheer devotion, single-minded focus, and unstoppable leadership characterize the start-up with a product and the will to move it. However, large firms found during the