NC State College of Management Features Trig Innovation Story

We’re honored that Sam Harris and the communications team at North Carolina State’s Poole College of Management recognized Trig Innovation and its founder, Ty Hagler (Jenkins MBA class of 2011), with a recent feature story on the college website.

In the story, Harris tells the evolving story of Trig Innovation, and how Hagler is using the training he received in the Jenkins program, along with the network of fellow students and faculty members, to drive the success of our company. 

Trig Innovation is a real intersection of entrepreneurship and innovation, both hallmarks of NC State’s MBA program for professionals.  Thanks again for the recognition.  Go Pack!

Trig Innovation Sponsors PDMA’s Innovate Carolina 2013

Trig Innovation, a Durham, North Carolina-based innovation management firm, is pleased to announce its sponsorship of the 2013 Innovate Carolina conference.

Innovate Carolina, held annually at rotating sites in North Carolina and South Carolina, is in its fourth year as the signature event of the Carolinas chapter of the Product Development and Management Association.  Hosting this year’s event on April 12 is North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro.

Keynote speakers for the event, which meets continuing education requirements for product development certified professionals, include Chris Trimble of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Eric Tomlinson, Chief Innovation Officer at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and Scott Edgett, co-founder of the Product Development Institute.

The event will feature multiple breakout sessions on various innovation topics.  Ty Hagler, founder and Principal at Trig Innovation, will lead one of the sessions, speaking on the topic of building a speed-to-market product development process.

For the fourth year running, Trig Innovation will support the Innovate Carolina event, this year as a platinum sponsor.  As part of the company’s commitment to the Carolinas PDMA, Trig will assist organizers with video production before and during the event.

“The Carolinas PDMA and the annual Innovate Carolina event hold special places in the hearts of everyone at Trig Innovation,” stated Hagler.  “This event has grown so much during the last four years, reaching new heights of participation by the Carolinas product development community.  We give to this event because it gives so much back to us—everyone that attends leaves with greater enthusiasm and passion for innovation, and a wealth of knowledge shared by both speakers and attendees at the sessions.”

The event will run from a networking breakfast to the conclusion of the event’s final keynote session on the afternoon of Friday, April 12.  North Carolina A&T will host the event in the Merrick/Craig Buildings, home of the School of Business and Economics and Department of Management.

For more information, including registration procedures, speakers, agenda, and more, please visit www.innovatecarolina.wordpress.com.

The Medical Device Tax: Explore the Alternatives

We recently published some thoughts on the coming medical device excise tax housed in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The excise tax in question, a 2.3 percent levy on medical devices geared at hospitals, rehab clinics, and other medical practices, would generate $20 billion in revenue in the coming 10 years in support of a variety of efforts to deliver basic, affordable care to almost all Americans.

A pair of Senators representing the states slated to be most affected by the ill effects of the tax, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, have asked for an outright delay in the implementation of the tax, as part of Congress’s year-end fiscal cliff deliberations with the Obama administration.  While this would provide a temporary reprieve, what are the alternatives?

We found a great piece by Robert Koshinskie, a medical device professional, where he outlines several alternatives:  outright repeal of the tax, reduction by one percent, reduction by one percent and extending the tax to retail devices, and capping the tax to certain revenue levels.  While outright repeal or singular reduction would leave a large funding gap in the PPACA (and, by Koshinskie’s own keen analysis, require some sort of rare compromise and/or political face-saving by PPACA supporters), the latter options, extending a lowered tax to retail and perhaps including a cap in revenues applied for taxation purposes, could bring in the necessary revenue for the PPACA implementation AND serve as less of a barrier to innovation.

Bringing retail into the mix of taxable devices would allow the industry to amortize the extra tax-associated costs among not only institutional players, but millions of consumers as well.  Rather than crushing companies and forcing huge drops in R+D expenditures and layoffs in our slowly-recovering economy, this would serve as another way for individuals to have skin in the game.  These factors would help to preserve a marketplace that’s more about designing and building the best products for use by healthcare professionals and the patients they serve, rather than products tailored for the tax code.

Healthcare in the United States has been a public-private partnership for many decades—let’s make sure that we keep the proper balance in this relationship, with regard to innovation.  More affordable basic healthcare, combined with a marketplace geared to continuous innovation in medical devices, will benefit individual patients and public health outcomes for years to come.

Back to School—Playing Out Effective Ideation at NC State

By Ty Hagler

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to go back to school—no, not like Rodney Dangerfield in the 80s, but back at the invitation of one of my favorite professors, N.C. State’s Dr. Jon Bohlmann, as he brings a fresh perspective to the Creativity in Management course by anchoring it in the principles of Design Thinking.

Dr. Bohlmann, whom I consider one of the most engaging and influential teachers I’ve had, invited me to guide his masters-level students through real ideation sessions centered on both products and services.  Rather than simply talk about ideation, I wanted the class to practice it.  But first we needed to cover some core concepts.

Thus, for the first portion of the class, we covered insights from giants like Sir Isaac Newton, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tom Kelley.  In particular, we spent time to understand how Gladwell’s research into successful improvisation and the “Rule of Agreement” applies to the central tenets of design thinking as articulated by IDEO’s Kelley in The Ten Faces of Innovation.  It’s striking to me how the same principles that make for great improv actors, also make teams more creative.

We set up the context of ideation within innovation, to promote greater understanding and results from the coming ideation sessions. We used the Innovation Network’s definition of innovation—“teams of people, creating value through the implementation of new ideas”—as our launching point from that front.  And then we took our company’s definition of ideation—“the creative synthesis of a team’s collective insight into new ideas”—to leap headlong into ideation sessions around products and services.

For our ideation sessions, we built upon this foundation of positive, creative, collaborative thinking and discussed the difference between divergent and convergent thinking.  Divergent thought seeks ever more expansive opportunities, deferring judgment on each idea.  Convergent thought seeks to synthesize and analyze each idea to bring it to reality.  The trick is to delay convergent thinking until you are satisfied with the full exploration of divergent thinking.  We usually provide Nerf guns for defense against those who critique too early in the process!

We are constantly experimenting with new ideation techniques, and this class was a great opportunity to build on the good improvisation analogy with an exercise called Act-It-Out.  The activity was originally one of our Ideation Divergence Cards that had been rolled out earlier this year.  Act-It-Out was so effective at drawing out observational insights from our client ideation session as a mini-activity, that it made sense to create a full ideation exercise. 

The students were given a service challenge to act out in groups of four – with each student acting out a role from the service experience.  After identifying problems and prototyping a solution, the class came back together with an impressive, detailed understanding of the customer’s service experience and an equally impressive range of ideas for improvement.  In wrapping up the class, I wanted to know if the exercise had limitations, posing a theory that it would only work if the team members had direct experience with the problem area.  To the contrary, I was surprised when one of the students remarked that the Act-it-Out exercise was even better when some team members are experts in the problem areas and other team members have no experience at all.  That exchange of expressing expert assumptions and being challenged by novices perfectly captures the value of an ideation session to pull brilliant new ideas from teams of people to drive market success. 

Defining Innovation

By Ty Hagler

What is innovation? Perhaps just as importantly, what isn’t innovation?  As an innovation consultant, I’ve heard several limiting definitions, particularly in the product development space.  But for me, it’s a pretty expansive term.

First, we need to understand that innovation isn’t merely some starting point or some particular new thing—be it a product, service, or business model. I like to think that, since the innovation space is an ecosystem that involves lots of people and companies with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, the concept takes in all three of these areas—products, services, and business models—in its expression within the commercial universe.

Since none of us pursues innovation for its own sake, we must contextualize discussion of this concept within the confines of the marketplace. That’s a long way of saying that the ultimate benchmark of innovation is commercial success.  This criterion is what separates invention from innovation.  Yes, innovation has to be new, whether it’s something completely new or a revision of a former product, service, or business model.  But nobody cares about the “failed new,” rather, we celebrate those new things that bring success.

Some like to think of innovation as a specific event that occurs at the stage of identifying opportunities through talking with customers.  Within this narrow definition (and narrow is often good), the thinking is that innovation can only occur when a product or service concept emerges in response to the identification of problems faced by the end-user.  While this is certainly a valuable activity that enhances the process of innovation, it leaves me unsatisfied with what I see downstream from this stage of development.

In a previous Tangents post, we cited an academic research study, “Does Customer Interaction Enhance New Product Success,” that provides a statistical correlation between robust customer research and the market success of an innovation effort.  Customer research is important at multiple stages of developing a product, in addition to the opportunity identification stage.  While highly important to the innovation team’s success, it would be a mistake to think that customer research is the total scope of innovation.

Many people must perform great work to achieve commercial success for new products and services. These people include sales, marketing, engineering, design, executive leadership, manufacturing, and external vendors and partnerships.  When these teams convene for ideation sessions focused around discovery, refinement, and implementation stages, they accelerate the  process of innovation. Each team member brings his or her respective expertise to bear on the problems being faced and effective solutions can be proposed.  If innovation were easy, everyone would do it . . . effectively.    

You can see this in how companies need to restructure their sales and customer service teams to meet demands created by new products and services.  And you can also see that when companies get a taste for innovation that’s successful, it changes the entire culture of the organization.  While many organizations have only change as a constant, companies that embrace innovation and see success from it will see positive change as a constant, as opposed to change for reactionary reasons. There’s a big difference between defining the market and being behind the curve.