Of course you know that good, well managed innovation in business is crucial to our survival and success in the coming years.
Obviously the product design process is the definition of innovation in producing new products. But ‘innovation’ covers a lot more than new product development, it’s the way you creatively improve your whole business…
- How do you come up with and capture ideas? And how do you choose the best ones to use?
- How do you put ideas into practice and measure the results?
- How do you re-engineer your business processes to achieve more efficiency or customer service?
- How best to benchmark yourself against your competitors or other industries to get the most useful information?
- How to manage all this new and existing knowledge that is so valuable to your business?
Because the product design process is a creative innovation process there are many parallels between what we do in NPD and the wider business innovation. I firmly believe smart businesses need design thinking at the top of the organisation, as it is a holistic goal driven improvement programme by definition, it is the creative progress system to balance and harmonise with the measuring systems so embedded through accountancy thinking. In the coming months I intend to write more on this subject as I’d to try and clarify this for non-designers. One of my hero’s, the late Russell Ackoff has some very clear things to say on the subject of education and creative business thinking - we’ll leave that for another post…
For now then, if you are interested in learning more about new product development then give us a call. There is also an interesting post about the knowledge economy by Maxine Horn of the British Design Innovation (BDI). And finally if you want to find out how innovative we are in the UK, our partner company Codexx is running an innovation study with the University of Exeter, which if you take part in will get you an invitation to the London event and a free copy of the results.
