The starting point for successful innovation

When Noah started building the Ark it wasn’t actually raining.  This seemingly trivial biblical detail was offered by Dan Williams at the start of a presentation on the role of innovation in driving sustainable growth.  Williams, a former senior design executive at Reebok and Motorola and now creative director at Product Development Technologies, was making a simple point – that vision is fundamental to innovation.

In Noah’s case, of course, the vision of the Great Flood came from that most reliable of long-range weather forecasters, God.  Plenty of innovators would be happy to get their ideas from the Almighty – and perhaps they do. However, Williams was not advocating prayer (though he didn’t appear to rule it out) so much as attention to more earthly forces – consumers.

Vision, he pointed out, required keen senses, notably observation and an understanding of user needs.  And that, more often than not, was simply a matter of “getting up out of your chair and talking to people”.  Indeed, he added, the best companies these days “literally tell their people to get out of the office” in the cause of innovation.

Initially at least, innovation owed more to people than processes. So relationships had to be built and maintained.

Alongside this external focus, Williams cited four internal factors for successful innovation in a company – a supportive corporate culture, personal commitment, attention to consumer insight, and design and technology.  He described the use of ethnographic research methods to identify product usage patterns within target audiences and spoke of the “iterative design process” needed to test and refine an idea.

Good innovators, he said, “see the product through the gate – they stick at it all the way”.  Successful innovations were by no means restricted to big companies.  “Dollar for dollar, small companies can do innovation just as well as the big companies,” he insisted.

But they needed to follow the process through – starting with a sound understanding of core needs based on research, attention to the design process, and a commitment to see the project to fruition.

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