Relating to Ideation—Part One

As an industrial designer and innovation management consultant, ideation is a familiar topic, the principles of which can be applied across many industries.  At Trig Innovation, we have built deep industry experience in consumer products, but we have also found that most of our talents translate easily into medical devices and most recently, even to service companies.  As Trig has expanded its talent base, we have actively sought to build service areas like ideation that can transcend our traditional industry niches of tools, hardware, furniture, and other products for home improvement.

One of the benefits of being a multi-industry innovation consultancy is that we bring fresh thinking to every engagement.  Many clients and prospects think of ideation on a pretty esoteric level—it’s often hard to get your arms around it, unless you’ve actually participated in an ideation session.  I enjoy relating the results of ideation to different products people see in the marketplace across various industries, as well as communicating the method that drives ideation by behaviors that people find readily accessible in their minds.

In the first installment of this two-part series, we’ll take a look at how ideation yields powerful results that transcend particular industries.  You’ll no doubt find the ideas behind directional oil wells and endoscopic devices, as well as how they are deployed in similar situations—albeit within entirely different landscapes.

Directional Oil Wells versus Endoscopic Devices

A great example of cross-industry results driven by ideation showcases the similarities between techniques developed by the oil industry for Directional Oil Wells and the medical device industry for Endoscopic Devices. 

Exploration companies use directional oil wells to reach oil or gas targets in difficult-to-reach places, such as areas beneath cities and swamps. Directional oil wells are composed of two key elements, the mud motor and electronic measurement devices. The mud motor provides additional power to the bit while drilling and can bend and steer the well in different directions, providing greater scope of reach.

While drilling, coteries of high-tech electronic devices located above the mud motor are used to calculate down-hole measurements and transmit data to the rig floor. These devices tell operators how and where to steer the directional oil well.

Since oil and gas reservoirs tend to accumulate horizontally, allowing more oil extraction per installed oil well.

As with directional oil wells, endoscopic devices are charged with reaching difficult locations, finding hollow places within organs or and other cavities within the body.  A friend of mine has described his frequent trips to his local otolaryngologist, who utilizes an endoscopic device to aid in the treatment of his chronic airway problems

Inserted through the nose, the flexible tube of the device, equipped with an LED light and camera at its tip, can reach nearly to the top of my friend’s lungs. The doctor moves the unit slowly down its course, first through the nose, then down through the airway, as he watches the camera in live action on an HD monitor. He clicks pictures along the way, with the device recording where in the body’s “coordinates” that the doctor sees inflammation in need of treatment.

This multi-element device, designed with some of the same features as the directional oil well, allows for much greater precision in the treatment of my friend’s chronic airway problems. And, much like the directional oil well, the endoscopic device eliminates the guessing game, pinpointing, in this case, the problem to be addressed.



Services Innovation: Visual Tools for Change Management

By Ty Hagler

I was recently invited to participate in a very productive ideation session with a global services company to serve as the visual scribe. The experience was certainly rewarding as it was an opportunity to learn from leaders in a completely new industry immersed in a thick vocabulary of shorthand ideas and acronyms. Given my lack of experience in this industry, it was something of a surprise and relief to still be able to make a contribution to the ideation team using principles from design. 

As designers, we understand that ideas can be fragile things, easily molded and shaped, combined with other ideas or discarded in a flash. Often, companies invest heavily in the front end of innovation to unearth great customer insights, wrestle to solve the most pressing challenges and create fantastic ideas, only to see those ideas fail to be implemented due to a disconnect somewhere along the way.  In truth, large companies have an immune system that is very good at repelling new ideas that could change how the existing business operates. If a great idea is to survive long enough to be adopted, design has several tools to strengthen it to fight the cultural antibodies.

The magic of an ideation session itself rests in the fact that complex problems and ideas are best solved by teams with individuals representing many different areas of the company and its customers. When one person expresses half of an idea to solve a key problem, others filter it, interpret, and then re-express the idea through their unique lens to add richness to the idea. As this ideation process goes forward toward an elegant solution, the team captures complex information in a condensed form – similar in scale to the complexity of information that shapes the company’s stock price.  

Unlike the stock price, however, a great idea at this stage has little ability to shape behavior in the company. If it isn’t accurately recorded and incubated, the idea dissolves as easily as the team dispersing to go home for the day. It was at this point where I found my skills as a designer making an impact. As a ‘visual scribe,’ I sought to capture the gestalt of the idea through rough sketches of the core elements of an idea. For some of the more elaborate ideas, it took 2-3 sketches before the team was satisfied that, yes, they fully captured the idea. Later when each team was presenting their work to the room, I was thrilled to see some of them repeatedly reference the sketches as a tool to succinctly express the idea. In some cases, we used creative metaphors to quickly express abstract concepts and their benefits to the user – perhaps sowing the seeds for future advertising campaigns.    

As the internal innovation team strategizes how to shape and implement the fruits of this ideation session, a long-observed principle from design will apply. Given the nature of the ideation session, the ideas were presented in a rough format – which invited lively discussion from the room. Similarly, rough concept sketches invite more feedback and engagement from others, creating a broader sense of ownership and buy-in to the idea. By contrast, a tightly detailed photo-realistic rendering of the same concept, while it may be beautiful in execution, appears much more static in nature – something that can only be accepted or rejected. 

In the context of change management and the socialization of ideas, design teaches us that the stylistic presentation of an idea can impact the psychology of those cultural antibodies that are predisposed to reject change. First, it is through accurate use of visual tools that the gestalt of the idea can be more quickly communicated, avoiding rejection from an ancillary feature that proves to be a red herring.  Second, stylistic choices can have a powerful signaling effect on whether the recipient of the idea is invited to help shape its success or to make a Go/No-Go decision. Implementing innovation within large corporations is certainly a challenging task that involves a high degree of emotional intelligence, to which design tools can improve the chances for success.

Brand Identity Case Study: Parklife Communications

Client Company—Parklife Communications, Hillsborough, NC

Vital Signs:  The company is two years old, led by a husband-and-wife team of veteran corporate marketers.  Parklife provides marketing consultation and content for both digital and collateral materials.  Clients include companies in business-to-business consulting and services, legal, green building, entertainment, and fine arts.  Parklife has a heavy emphasis on the cutting-edge tactics and tools in blogs and social media.

Needs—In a classic “cobbler’s children with no shoes” scenario, Parklife has built its business over the last two years without taking time to brand itself. The company needed a representative logo and brand mark, along with color and font schemes suitable for everything from business cards to social media avatars.

Trig’s Branding Approach—First step, 3C analysis, taking a holistic look at the company, its representative clients, and its competitors.  After capturing the essence of Parklife and its people, seeing the types of clients it targets, and positioning the company within its competitive landscape, Trig facilitated several ideation sessions with the principals, leading to multiple concept iterations.

During the first ideation session, Trig assembled a list of adjectives to describe the Parklife brand: progressive, kinetic, modern, playful, fun, shrewd, business-savvy, anti-corporate, innovative, and collaborative.  Our consulting team then matched up these adjectives with fonts that reflected the attributes described, giving the Parklife team multiple options.

During the second ideation session, the Trig team probed Parklife’s penchant for color. We received some great guidance here, as the Parklife team had some well-defined opinions. We were told to avoid anything too primary and corporate, but to avoid being too trendy. The color scheme needed to be modern, but with a classic feel.

After refining Parklife’s color preferences, our design team set to work on a brand mark that would serve as an iconic representation of the company in both digital and collateral-based marketing.  An early idea that clearly resonated with the Trig team and the Parklife team was the idea of turning certain letters in the name of the company into punctuation mark-like images. After multiple iterations, we settled on the truly iconic rendering of Parklife with the A and E reflective of quotation marks.  We selected the A mark for the stand alone brand mark for use in applications such as social media avatars.

Results—The results of this exercise were inspiring for the Trig team, since we enjoyed a rare opportunity to do brand work for a service company outside of our normal industry space in hardware, tools, and medical devices.  You can see the multiple renderings and iterations that got us to the final products on our case study page.



Innovation in Medical Devices versus Consumer Products—A Contrast in Priorities

When building practice specialty areas in product design and development, one must take into consideration that different industries require appropriate tailoring of innovation management skill sets.  A case in point is the difference in innovation management approaches when considering the medical device market in relation to consumer products.

Throughout product design and development in both sectors, Voice of the Customer market research is of paramount importance as a driver of future market success.  The landscape of failed consumer products is filled with companies that skipped this step entirely, bringing products to market in a VOC vacuum.  In some cases, consumer products in established categories that have already completed extensive customer activity research can make low-innovation product line extensions that respond to trend insights observed from changes in cultural behaviors. The stakes are significantly higher with medical devices, whereas each product requires extensive input from the myriad of customers and stakeholders - patients, practitioners, third-party payers, and internal constituents. 

In their July 2000 Journal of Business Research piece, “Does Customer Interaction Enhance New Product Success,” Kjell Grunera and Christian Homburg offer the following guidance to companies trying to bring voice of customer research into the development process in the right way, and, more importantly, perhaps, at the right time:  "Most important, we could support our fundamental hypothesis that customer interaction in new product development has a positive impact on new product success. Additionally, our study provides specific insights in which stages customers should be involved and we provide guidance on which customers to select for cooperation. The results encourage firms to interact with customers specifically in early and in late stages of the new product development process. A deficit in current business practice is particularly evident in the early stages (idea generation, product concept development). The study found no benefits in interacting in the two medium stages (project definition, engineering)."

A point of contrast between the consumer product sector and the medical device field is the application of ideation, which involves preparing a strategic understanding of the key opportunities, bringing the stakeholders together, and facilitating a brainstorming session focused on generating solutions to address the key opportunities. The main driver of difference between medical devices and consumer products is the required competencies for delivering innovation and mitigating risk. 

Typically, companies in the medical device industry have stronger competencies for mitigating the higher risks involved at a financial, product performance, and regulatory level.  Therefore, the medical device industry gives far greater attention to thorough, focused ideation sessions that hold the search for innovation in balance with addressing challenges early in the process.  In contrast, ideation for most consumer products is utilized to a much smaller scale, in part, because the product’s life-span is usually shorter, necessitating faster development cycles and incremental innovation with reduced risk profiles.

With regard to industrial design, innovation managers should pay attention to several different types of attributes when developing products across these respective industries.  Consumer products, in contrast to medical devices, hew much closer to fashion influences, as seasonal changes in color, pattern, and textures can drive sales by tracking changes in societal behaviors.  Medical devices, rarely considered fashionable, are more heavily influenced by the features and benefits being delivered.  Industrial design in medical devices makes significant contributions to ergonomics and the user interface.  The FDA has stressed the importance of human factors in managing risk of medical error through poorly designed user interface. 

In some cases, the sheer engineering prowess required to achieve the functional needs of the medical device overshadows the original aesthetic goals of the product.  Good design holds both engineering and aesthetics in proper balance, adding sophisticated details that better appropriate the technical wizardry accomplished by the device’s function. Sophisticated designers therefore seek that balance in a device that not only achieves the desired functionality, but also brings to bear non-product intangible benefits of appealing to practitioner's sense of pride in their work and competitive differentiation among hospitals and clinicians that employ the device.  In consumer products, design and engineering objectives are addressed almost in parallel to increase the speed to market, reduce costs, and make sure the right product is hitting shelves at the right time.

 In summary, the product development arenas for medical devices and consumer products do share some similarities with regard to key innovation management skill sets, especially with regard to market research, and specifically with regard to voice of customer research. In the areas of ideation and industrial design, however, developers see a real shift in tool kit priorities, as the lower margin, higher volume sales world of consumer products tends to diminish the investment in deep-dive ideation sessions. This more cost-intensive area tends to dictate significantly higher levels of compromise in the area of industrial design as well, sacrificing the customer experience to achieve a lower price point.