Archives for "Innovation"
Avoiding NPI pitfalls: Plan for the total customer experience
A recent post in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) blogs tells the story of a product launch gone wrong:
“The market failure of the Michelin run-flat PAX tire illustrates the common mistake of failing to realize that even a groundbreaking product has to create a complete consumption chain. Broken links in the chain mean a broken customer experience, which can lead to new-product-launch heartbreak.”
The story is a reminder that solving an unsolved problem isn’t enough. You have to solve the right problem (i.e. one compelling enough to create behavioral change) – AND you have to make sure you don’t create new unsolved problems along the way.
The HBR post is a quick, interesting read. Check it out.
The Victor Bike: The bicycle goes even greener
For his final project in the University of Montréal’s design department, product designer Christophe Robillard asked, “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself communicate the same message?”
The Victor Bike is his answer to his own question.
By re-conceiving the shape of the frame, reducing the amount of metal used and carefully selecting greener materials and manufacturing processes, Robillard has set a new standard for eco-friendly bicycle design. But it’s about so much more than that, according to Robillard, himself:
Reducing the material weight, optimising the manufacturing process, using recyclable and recycled materials, simplifying the disassembling and the separation of materials at the end of life are technical points which have to be respected during the development of a sustainable product. I believe in Mr. Jonathan Chapman’s philosophy — EMOTIONALLY DURABLE DESIGN — where the object presenting the best environmental qualities are the ones that we love, to whom we become attached and the ones we preserve.
Victor is not only the result of a quantifiable analysis work following a protocol of green engineering, but an object that has an irreplaceable role to our everyday life.
I tried to show the elegance and the grace which a bicycle can have through everyday use. A companion to the everyday life that joins us in what I consider to be a respectable and admirable lifestyle. I created an object which harmonizes with the townscape while respecting the charisma and the dignity of the cyclist: such values I hold dearly.
Further reading:
Christophe Robillard’s blog
Flickr images of the Victor Bike
Co.Design coverage of the Victor Bike
Can you teach a robot to flip a pancake?
Even if you put science fiction aside, it’s not hard to imagine a seemingly endless number of real-world applications for robotic technology. But have you ever wondered how a robot learns to perform its duties?
In this video, a robot learns to flip a pancake using “reinforcement learning” after having been guided through the move by a trainer (who used “kinesthetic teaching”). It takes about 50 somewhat hilarious attempts before the Barrett WAM 7 DOF manipulator gets the knack of it.
The work is being done by Dr. Petar Kormushev and Dr. Sylvain Calinon at the Advanced Robotics department of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova, Italy.
Adspecs oil-filled eyeglasses: A vision for the emerging world
Here’s another one in the category of products that *really* make a difference in the lives of users. Atomic physicist Joshua Silver has developed “Adspecs”—fluid-filled adjustable eyeglasses—and with his organization, The Centre for Vision in the Developing World, is distributing them to needy people in developing countries around the world.
The design is simple: Plastic glasses with flexible plastic lenses filled with clear oil. The user can adjust the amount of oil in the lenses using syringes attached to the arms of the glasses. Once the user has dialed in the correct amount of oil, he or she can remove the syringes and set the glasses to a permanent prescription.
Because the user can self-set the eyeglasses, usually in a matter of minutes, the need for a trained professional to fit them is removed.
According to the Centre’s website, the need for eyecare in emerging countries is stark: In the UK, there is 1 optometrist for every 8,000 people. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s 1:1,000,000. So far, more than 30,000 pairs of Adspecs have been deployed worldwide, and Professor Silver has an ambitious vision for the future—one billion people to get the glasses they need but lack access to by 2020.
Another pressing goal for Silver and the Centre is to dramatically lower the cost of producing the eyeglasses. Right now one pair costs around $20 to produce, and the project must rely on donations to offset these costs. Silver wants to get the cost down to $1 a pair.
There’s no clear plan yet for bringing down the cost, but Silver is optimistic: “Work is going on on several new designs, and further work will be required to get the costs down. The truth is that there is, at the moment, no device that can be made for a dollar in volumes of 100 million. But I am entirely confident that we can do that.”
See Adspecs in action on the Colbert Report.
Redesigning the coffee cup
The betacup is a recently completed competition to re-imagine a coffee cup with reduced environmental impact. As many as 58 million coffee cups are discarded every year in the United States alone, and along with most of them, a sleeve that protects the holder’s hands from scalding.
The proposed solutions offer a range of great ideas for how to approach the problem, from the Karma Cup’s social engineering angle to Miller Creative’s Radial Fin Cup with an integrated insulating sleeve design.
The Karma Cup uses social engineering to increase the use of reusable cups and therefore reduce waste:
Miller Creative’s entry reduces waste by integrating the protective sleeve, using biodegradable and renewable resources for the rest of the cup and employing a manufacturing process that does not require glue:
The betacup contest was sponsored by jovoto, an organization that describes itself as “a marketplace for creative concepts [that connects] those who have ideas with those who need them, providing the necessary tools to make the process fun and fair.”
The betacup entry ranked #1 by the jovoto community is a 100% biodegradable cup made from rice husks and available in a disposable or reusable version. (The reusable one even comes with an RFID sleeve that would replace the prepaid payment card.)
See all betacup entries on the jovoto website.
Ideas wanted: New X Prize offers $10 million for innovative oil spill cleanup solutions
Have an idea for how to clean up the massive amounts of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico? The X Prize Foundation (known for spurring technological advances through the offering of large sums of prize money) has announced a new challenge. The goal: innovative solutions for cleaning up the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf. The prize: $10 million.
Francis Béland, vice president of prize development at the X Prize Foundation, announced the newest X Prize yesterday at the TEDxOilSpill conference in Washington, DC. Like other TED conferences, this one gathered some of “the world’s leading thinkers and doers for a series of talks, presentations and performances.” Topics at the conference included “mitigation of the spill and the impending cleanup efforts; energy alternatives; policy and economics; as well as new technology that can help us build a self-reliant culture.”
No word yet on whether BP will let the X Prize winner try to clean up the mess in the Gulf, but after reading Fast Company’s post about the 908 InnoCentive ideas the company refused to consider, it’s hard not to be skeptical.
Submit your ideas to francis@xprize.org. (And watch for more details in the coming weeks.)
Further reading:
Fast Company on the latest X Prize
AMR Research spotlights supply chain standouts in 2010 Supply Chain Top 25 report
AMR Research has just released its 2010 Supply Chain Top 25 list, and for the third year in a row, Apple is in the #1 spot. The annual report’s goal is “to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts business” by recognizing companies that deliver both operational excellence and innovation excellence. In fact, this year’s report mentions a recent study by researchers from University of Alabama and Texas A&M, led by Dr. Alex Ellinger, that used the Altman Z-score to show that companies in the Supply Chain Top 25 do enjoy greater financial success than their competitors.
To be considered for the Supply Chain Top 25, companies must be large, public companies in the manufacturing or retail sector; most are among the Fortune Global 500. Working from a master list of companies, researchers rank companies with a formula that gives equal weight to financial measures (inventory turns, return on assets (ROA) and revenue growth) and opinion (votes from a peer panel and an AMR/Gartner panel). According to the report’s authors, Kevin O’Marah and Debra Hofman, these rankings help show “which companies are furthest along toward the demand-driven ideal of supply chain excellence.”
After Apple, the next companies on the list are Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart Stores and Dell. The figures to the right list the complete 2010 AMR Supply Chain Top 25, along with scores and rankings, while the full report offers a snapshot of each company’s supply chain successes. The diversity of the Top 25’s collective accomplishments is notable and makes the report an interesting read. About Apple, for instance, the study authors say:
“Apple has broken new ground in the area of transforming its supply chain into a value chain, starting with the consumer experience and designing its network to serve that master first and foremost. This means demonstrating some of the behaviors we look for in Top 25 companies, including embedded innovation, networked supply and demand shaping. It’s also instructive that Apple, which most observers think of primarily as a design and software company, in reality has a vertically integrated value chain that reaches from logo-bearing, pure-play retail all the way back to superfast chipmaker Intrinsity, which was recently acquired by Apple to ‘steal a march’ on competitors looking to enhance the performance of mobile devices. Not shying away from any operational challenge, Apple’s value chain controls its most strategic nodes all the way from silicon to synapse.”
PepsiCo (#6) is cited, among other reasons, for the “increasingly high-profile role being played by CEO Indra Nooyi on matters of social justice and consumer health. These initiatives appear to be more deeply embedded in daily operations than what’s typical and may offer benefits in the future as emerging markets increasingly drive profit growth.”
The report lauds Intel (#18) for a new supply chain strategy focused on “cut[ting] cycle times by as much as half and accelerat[ing] planning in order to simultaneously double the rate at which customer requests can be met, while still dramatically reducing unit costs.” In the authors’ opinion, this “is a testament to the potential of applying supply chain principles across the entire business rather than in functional silos.”
While the report focuses on the accomplishments of large companies, it offers a number of recommendations that small and mid-size manufacturers may wish to consider too:
* Apply demand-driven principles to coordinate and integrate the functional areas of supply, demand and product management in order to better sense, shape and respond to changes in market demand.
* Take a cue from the leaders when designing your own supply chain strategy. Think outside in, starting with your customers and working back through your trading-partner network to design a profitable response. Remember that one size does not fit all. Define how many supply chain types you have and design a customized response for each.
* Balance operational excellence with innovation excellence for superior overall performance.
* Focus on acquiring, mentoring, growing and retaining supply chain talent.
* Measure your supply chain as your customer experiences it. Use the right supply chain and product metrics to consciously manage performance, and foster a culture that embraces measurement for continuous improvement.
[source: AMR Supply Chain Top 25 for 2010 report]
To learn more about the study methodology and read about the supply chain accomplishments of the companies on the list, read the full AMR Supply Chain Top 25 for 2010 report on the Gartner website.
The SawStop: Product design with a purpose
If you’ve never seen the SawStop table saw in action, it’s worth watching this video for the sheer engineering vision it took to pull this off…. This is magical product design that changes lives.
P.S. The story of SawStop is another one for the build-it-yourself annals — the inventor of the technology originally planned to license the SawStop feature to other table saw manufacturers, but when he was unable to reach agreements with any of them, he decided to take matters into his own (five-fingered!) hands and design, develop and manufacture a cabinet saw that had all the features and precision he’d ever wanted.
How to ensure clean water in Ghana: Build filters locally
According to UNICEF, in Ghana 25% of deaths in children under 5 are caused by diarrhea. In Northern Ghana, where more than half the population gets its water from wells, ponds and streams, this percentage is even higher. These water sources often contain disease-causing microorganisms because they’re too remote for centralized filtration and sanitation systems to reach.
Susan Murcott and Pure Home Water, the non-profit that she co-founded, are working on creating and distributing affordable ceramic filters in this region. The product has been well-received, but the organization is planning to go one step further: PHW is planning to build a factory to make the filters locally. Currently the organization buys filters from a factory 12 hours away. With its own local factory PHW will be able to drop the filters’ cost from $16 to $10. Since the filter will still cost more than most Northern Ghanaians can afford, PHW intends to use the factory to also make profitable ceramic products, like bricks, that can subsidize the water filters.
In addition to cost reductions, PHW will gain tighter control over the design and quality of the filters and the manufacturing process. The PHW team has some MIT engineering and Sloan School of Management interns working with them to conduct product research, run consumer studies and test the unusual manufacturing process, which uses combustible materials like rice husks to create small voids that allow water to pass but trap bacteria and parasites. Murcott learned the technique for making the ceramic from the non-profit organization Potters for Peace in Nicaragua.
You can learn more about PHW’s ceramic manufacturing process, product research and business plan in an article on the MIT News website.
Follow up: The Adidas perfectly round soccer ball—do sports and business mix?
Earlier this year, I posted a video of the production process for the revolutionary Adidas Jabulani soccer ball to be introduced at the upcoming FIFA World Cup.
Now, on the eve of the tournament, several players have begun voicing strong concerns about how difficult the ball is to control and how unpredictable it is in flight.
Most of the criticism has come from goalkeepers who claim something to the effect that “they don’t know where the ball will be.” But especially interesting are the comments from US starting goalie, Tim Howard, about 45 seconds in to the video linked above, where he acknowledges the reality of “soccer economics”: That shutouts don’t sell tickets. If you’ve ever wondered how product design, culture and economics overlap, the unfolding tale of this soccer ball is the story of their collision.
Business being business, Adidas was quick to respond: The issues the players are seeing are all due to altitude, not the ball itself. And lined up behind the company are a few players who have defended the ball: Kaka, Frank Lampard and Michael Ballack most notably. But—they are all sponsored by Adidas or play for an Adidas-sponsored club. Coincidence? Probably not. (Adidas is thinking about soccer ball sales, after all.)
Ultimately, the only one to settle this may be the designer of the ball himself, an Englishman named Dr. Andy Harland. And for what it’s worth, not only does he acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of the ball, he has offered to provide tips to his national side in advance of their opener against the US for how to best take advantage of the ball’s unique properties.
Whatever the effect of the ball, it was already shaping up to be a very exciting World Cup: It’s the first time the tournament will be hosted in Africa (South Africa) and several African teams (Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Nigeria) are fully capable of a deep run. Hopefully the games will be decided on merit and not on the erratic foibles of altitude and a perfectly round soccer ball.
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