Leading New Product Development and Innovation

Question 1: How do I, an individual, help create a culture of product innovation?  

• Be open and foster collaboration by sharing information, making connections, and building trust. A culture of openness and transparency helps facilitate discovery.  
• Learn from others in the industry and benchmark where you are. 
• Schedule a “FEDEX” time to focus on an idea that seems worthwhile and needs developing. 
• Make the innovation process fun. Not everything has to be a big project. Do it for small things. Do it over lunch.  
• Coach your team members to make connection with the overarching business goals for their work, engage with stakeholders, and empower them to ask “why are we doing this?” 

• Be patient and keep speaking up. A culture of innovation requires an environment where everyone is encouraged to have ideas, voice them, and be open minded about their potential impact.  

Question 2: Why should I evaluate my organization’s tolerance for risk before I try to get buy-in? 

• To manage expectations about success and failure. Are you pushing on a brick wall? Buy-in is only bought if management/org culture can accept the risks.  
• The worst thing for morale in a digital group is the inability to enhance or build new products. Never start work without understanding if you’ll have the ability to finish.  
• Having frank conversations about risk diffuses anxiety and makes it less likely that stakeholders will undermine the project when things get difficult. Try scenario planning to increase comfort with risk and reveal areas of stress or concern. 

Question 3: How do I validate my product idea? (or, Is anyone going to buy this?!?) 

• Build continuous feedback loops, establish a consistent pattern of asking for feedback over and over, never ending until release (and then start again).  
• Do a mix of quantitative, qualitative surveys and interview members/customers at trade shows, at work, on campus — meet them wherever they are. Consider using customer journey maps, empathy maps, use cases, data from similar programs and their successes, and personas to making their needs more concrete.  
• Use your SWOT analysis to differentiate your product from competing products and ask customers about the value and priority of specific attributes that your product has and that your competitors’ products have, in order to gain a better sense of their willingness to pay and overall competitive advantage.  
• Ask these three questions of every product/project/process (and be honest): 
  • Will it make money?  
  • Will it increase or retain membership?  
  • Will it extend the organization’s brand? 

Question 4: How do I leverage all these processes and learnings to nurture existing products and keep the innovation going?  

• Regularly examine existing projects and processes for continued relevance. Audience needs change, and your ability to create new products depends to a great extent on how much effort your team is expending on existing ones. Keep them clear of bugs and enhanced based on feedback.  
• Innovation and product development are iterative, and both require ongoing levels of commitment and consistency. Stopping and starting development, shifting development teams, etc., all have the potential to introduce inefficiency and dampen innovation.  

• If you have a successful process, workflow, or customer benefit, consider how it might apply to other products or across a product portfolio, and think creatively about scale.  
• Carve out and reward dedicated time on an individual or departmental level for innovation.  
• Keep trying. We all have an experience of going through this process and having it fail; perhaps there was no buy-in or it took too much time. Instead of never doing it again, adjust and try something new, or smaller, or take a piece of what did work and expand on that. 

If you registered for the SSP Annual Meeting, you can still access the recording of this presentation via the conference platform. My thanks to Michele Dominiak, AIAA; Jess Ludwig, Gale; Paul Gee, JAMA; and Alexis Colella, University of Illinois Press.