Product developmentcases

23fo#03 2009 www.cifs.dk/FO

CasesIn the following seven cases, we look at various overall questions about product development, and illustrate several approaches.

By sara Jönsson and Jacob suhr thomsen, Copenhagen institute for Futures studies

#3

whO IS yOuR taRget gROuP? the netbook effect

#6 what aRe the cOnSe-QuenceS OF yOuR InnOvatIOn? IICradle to cradle

#5

what aRe the cOnSe-QuenceS OF yOuR InnOvatIOn? I dean Kamen – segway’s inventor

#7

hOw dO yOu deveLOP yOuR PROductS? accidental innovation

#4

hOw yOu SeLL yOuR PROductS and SeRvIceS? Charity Button

#1 hOw dO yOu dIScOveR undIScOveRed needS? treatment offer for CoPd patients nominated for design prize

#2 hOw dO yOu cOmmunIcate wIth yOuR uSeRS? leGo ambassadors

24 fo#03 2009 www.cifs.dk/FO


hOw dO yOu dIScOveR undIScOveRed needS? treatment offer for CoPd patients nominated for design prize

What happens when you learn you have a chronic illness? How you get a positive relation to your illness? And what about your surroundings? The design agency 1508, together with Frederiksberg’s health center, has developed a user-driven program for patients.

in a true autumn forest of white, yellow and red post-it notes, ideas and insights come to light and create a pattern that soon makes sense for caregivers and patients in Frederiksberg’s health and treatment program for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (CoPd) patients. at a time when professionalism is considered important, the users who need to understand and relate to a foreign sounding diagnosis are too often overlooked. you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” “Gezundheit, doctor!” the design agency 1508 and odegaard Consult, in collaboration with practitioners, users and experts at Frederiksberg’s health center combined their creative energies to cre-ate a unique course. users – citizens, caregivers and the treatment system – go through a comprehensive qualitative process that has clarified a number of undiscovered and unrec-ognized needs. in other words, users are at the heart of product development. this is where the white, yellow and red post-it notes come into play. if you are seri-ous about involving users in product development, it is not enough to simply ask “What can we do for you?” users must be allowed into the intimate processes usually reserved for management and the development department. you must let users speak alongside consultants, developers, managers and experts. you must realize that the real experts are the users. in other words, user involvement requires you to give up much of the control and secrecy normally associated with product development. users must be allowed to write post-it notes, and you must take their notes seriously. in the case of the treatment offered to CoPd patients, Frederiksberg health center, along with 1508, odgaard Consult and users, has created a groundbreaking product that has been nominated for the indeX 09 award – one of the world’s biggest design awards.

read more about the indeX award and CoPd-treatment at http://www.indexaward.dk


hOw dO yOu cOmmunIcate wIth yOuR cOnSumeRS? leGo ambassadors

how does a global company communicate with all of its millions of users? how you get people to be co-creators in product development? and do you get to know your users? leGo has found the answer to these questions through its ambassador program – at least in part. the program consists of volunteer adults who have a burning interest in leGo and who wish to liaise with users. leGo ambassadors represent leGo’s com-munity and, for a year, share their ideas and leGo constructions with the world. new ambassadors are chosen each year. today, there are 40 ambassadors from 22 countries. their task includes:

- helping develop and improve relations between leGo’s global community and the leGo Group.

- active cooperation with leGo’s staff and their users.

- helping the leGo Group’s activities in the leGo community.

ambassadors becomes the interface between leGo and users. the program is an original and differ-ent way to engage users while learning more about them.


whO IS yOuR taRget gROuP? the netbook effect in the effort to improve computers and make them stronger, no one considered that users might not want more out of their laptop but less. the result – which was intended for an entirely different purpose – is a market favorite today. netbooks, minicomputers with a seven-inch screen and limited performance, have been a sales success for many computer makers. the idea sprang from the one laptop per Child pro-ject, which provides laptops to impoverished children in developing countries. With cheap, but intelligently designed hardware, such as flash memory – the same kind that can be put on the usB stick on your computer – and cheap operating systems such as linux, the computer was designed to give poor children access to the digital world. Who would have imagined it would be a success among general computer users in the western world?


hOw dO yOu SeLL yOuR PROductS and SeRvIceS? Charity Button

since 2007, shoppers at Kvickly, a danish supermarket chain, have been able to “press the Charity Button” when depositing returnable bottles. By doing so, the money they would have got-ten for their empties goes to charity. Jens Juul nielsen, information director of Coop danmark, Kvickly’s parent company, talks about the concept. “We got the idea for the Charity Button when we looked for areas with high traffic and where “many small streams come together to make a big river.” We investigated the possibilities to introduce the technology through various channels, but it quickly became clear that it was tomra, our bottle return system, that could do the task. after testing, it was rolled out to all stores last year,” says nielsen the concept now appears in other danish markets. according to nielsen, more than €600,000 are collected for char-ity through the Charity Button. “our Partner agreement with danChurchaid and uniCeF denmark aims to profile Coop as a socially-responsible company and collect money for the two organizations through Coop stores. to create visibility for the two organizations and raise money, we conduct various activities. typically, we develop some products, the profits of which accrue to the two organizations,” said nielsen. Charitable organizations are often innovative in their sales channels. other successful ideas include selling fabric bags, pins and bracelets, the profits of which go to charity. in sweden, it is possible to “round up” in many clothing stores. For example, if your bill comes to €28, you can “round up” to €30, with the €2 going to charity.


what aRe the cOnSeQuenceS OF yOuR InnOvatIOn? Idean Kamen – segway’s inventor

“i take a lot out of the world, i mean a lot. i fly my planes, i have my heli-copters ... having said that, my whole life, i have always assumed that when you look back you want to make sure you put back more than you took out.” the quote is dean Kamen’s, entrepreneur and inventor whose most famous invention is the segway, a self-balancing transport device con-trolled by body weight. Kamen has also worked to develop water purifica-tion systems for the urban poor, intelligent wheelchairs for the disabled and user-friendly insulin pumps for people with diabetes. he has stood behind more than 400 different inventions, many of which are designed to make life simpler for socially vulnerable people. “life is so short, why waste a single day of it doing something that does not matter, that does not try to do something big?” he asks. dean Kamen believes that there are ready solutions to many of the world’s problems, and that the world, in other words, is not awaiting new

innovations. if it were up to him, the entire world population could get clean drinking water and thus escape having to far for water and so gain a better life. But it is not the poor who decide, and neither do people buy inventions or technology. they buy solutions to meet needs or to remedy a problem. this means that it does not matter if you have the best solution if people do not perceive it as the answer to their problem. about the future: “With 10 billion people on this planet, all trying to have food and water and power, and a standard of living, the only way we’re going to do that is if most of those people are contributors and not recipients. these people need to become an educated group that can add to the real value of this world. “ dean Kamen radiates some of the same glow and inspiration as Barack obama and has almost the same motto as obama: We can do it. some believe it is a ploy to earn more money, and perhaps the solution is not as straightforward as dean Karmen makes it sound. But the questions he is asking about belief in the future, new needs and the role of innova-tors in society are still interesting – even philosophical. When are we are ready, and who decides?


the point of Considered is to recycle eco-friendly materials, reduce waste, create sus-tainable manufacturing processes and work innovatively to protect the environment as much as possible. the goal is that all nike shoes will be Considered by 2011, with all that entails. nike has created specific guidelines to ensure established environmental requirements are met before a product may be called Considered. By 2020, all products – including sporting goods, clothes and accessories – will be made accord-ing to the Considered criteria. nike helps even collect and recycle shoes. since 1990, it claims to have reused more than 23 million pairs using the slogan “Turn your old shoes into places to play.” # 3 sunChiPs What about a 100% biodegradable potato chip bag? since april 2009, sunChips have had outer packaging made from Pla, a plant-based, compostable substance. From next year, the entire package can be composted in just 14 weeks if it is placed in warm compost. since several billion sunChips bags are produced each year, this represents a huge savings of waste and toxic materials in nature. sunChips are made by Frito-lay, part of the PepsiCo group that also includes Pepsi, tropicana and Quaker Foods. PepsiCo has more than 185,000 employees worldwide and profits of more than $39 billion. “Frito-Lay’s SunChips Brand Changing the Future of Snack Food Packaging” can be read on PepsiCo’s website. and they are probably right, since they are put-ting even greater pressure on the packaging industry, so they can find more eco-friendly solu-tions to reduce the trillions of tons of garbage generated in the united states alone each year.

three Cradle-to-Cradle ProduCts

# 1 thinK Chair think is the name of the chair that is the first product to receive product certification accord-ing to cradle-to-cradle principles. the chair is made by steel Case, which makes office fur-niture and has 13,000 employees around the world. the company has described the chair life cycle and shows in precise figures every-thing from how much the chair production and transport affects global warming to how it can be reused.

- up to 98% of the chair can be reused. - dismantling for recycling takes five minutes

and requires only basic tools such as a screwdriver.

- the chair contains up to 37% recycled mate-rial.

# 2 niKe trash talK under the label Nike Considered, which includes environmental and climate-friendly products, the clothing giant nike has made a shoe from recycled materials. they call it the Nike Trash Talk after what is made of: trash

- the uppers are sewn-together leather resi-dues and leather picked up from the factory floor.

- the inner soles are made of excess foam from factory production.

- the outer soles made of eco-friendly rub-ber which reduces toxic waste and contains residues from the production of other nike shoes.

- the shoe box is recycled cardboard.

what aRe the cOnSeQuenceS OF yOuR InnOvatIOn? IICradle to cradle

“Why not challenge the belief that human indus-try must damage the natural world? in fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things?“ these questions are posed by William Mcdonough and Michael Braungart, authors of the book Cradle to Cradle. the idea behind the concept is to produce products that are recycled or degraded naturally, and which thus go from cradle to cradle rather than from cradle to grave. “a tree produces thousands of blossoms to create another tree, yet we consider its abun-dance not wasteful, but safe, beautiful and high-ly effective,” write the authors. they believe it is not about individual innovations, but on a whole new way of thinking. at a time when industrial waste has become an environmental problem, a solution is offered in the motto “Waste equals food – food for growth.” Mcdonough and Braungart have worked with companies such as nike, Philips, and Ford, and they have been inspired to create such things as dishes and containers that can be eaten, as well as biodegradable ice cream wrap-pers containing seeds. But the concept is not just about individual products: whole towns can get a new view of sustainability. Cradle to Cradle has been mentioned as the production principle of the future in which the consumer does not work against nature but supports it. if it was reality, we could consume in good conscience – far more than we already do.


hOw dO yOu deveLOP yOuR PROductS? accidental innovation

the microwave oven, cornflakes, nylon, penicillin, post-it stickers, ice cream cones and champagne are all very different things, but with one common trait: they are all accidental inventions. in english, you use the word serendipity to describe the effect when someone inadvertently invents something useful, and so it is with some of our most used products. robert austin, associate professor at harvard Business school and visiting professor at Copenhagen Business school (CBs), researches the innovations that occur by chance, and the work that lies behind. he became interested in the topic when he interviewed some artists about their creative processes and discovered that many of them used co-incidences when they produced interesting and creative results. “Working without a clear definition of your objective is considered wasteful, inefficient. But if you are trying to get outside what you can anticipate and see in advance, if you are going after the truly new and valuable, this way of thinking can be a problem. this is one truth about innovation that artists seem to understand a lot better than managers,” says austin. at the same time, he is careful with the word “accidental.” “actually, though, i would not really label this “accidental innovation.” the innovation itself cannot really be said to be accidental, even though it involves accident. it takes a considerable capability to see the value in an accident, and to build upon it to create even more value,” says austin.

niels Krøjgaard, creativity expert, who holds the course Become the creative employee of the future at CiFs believe it is important to allow a “mistake-culture” when you create something. “Many so-called random inventions build on physical or chemical reactions. in other words, when an unexpected result appears when you accidentally mix two drugs incorrectly. this kind of innovation is based on a “mistake culture,” and this mindset can be used in many more areas than just random development of natural products,” says Krøjgaard. “Many people fear making mistakes. We want to be perfect, and we want to first present the finished product to our surroundings only when it is absolutely perfect. it would be a great idea for the creative process to ask ‘What if?’ and consciously did things that are not logical. your logic is based on your knowledge and is backward-looking. use your imagination, which is forward-looking. Break habits. visit subcultures of persons who live in a completely different way. read books and watch movies whose contents are far from your field of study. there is where you can find truly useful inspiration. But remember – it doesn’t pay back right away. often it can take a long time before inspiration unfolds into a creative process,” says Krøjgaard.

read the full article on robert austin: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5441.html

Product developmentcases

Documents

Transcript of Product developmentcases