This question generated a lot of retweets and interests…but a surprising limited amount of six sigma and process management defenders!

The Fortune Magazine article that started the discussion: How 3M got creative again. New management and slavish devotion to six sigma process management nearly killed the innovation tradition – but it is back! 3M back

A former blog posting of mine that discussed possible danger even for a process management system designed for new product development: Process management & innovation – danger! Process MGMT is the problem

A book review that also mentioned six sigma as innovation’s enemy: Making Ideas Happen Making Ideas Happen RT @ctmarcom

Innovation articles or postings of interest this week:

Innovation and constraints: The Genius of the Tinkerer Tinkerers #WSJ.com  

Wanted: Big Ideas from Small Fry Small Fry

Top 5 Countries for Open Innovation – Open5 by @StefanLindegaard via @innovate

Sustainability is about innovations sustain RT @ecotwist

Service Innovation

Four steps to begin service innovation… 4steps to service innovation

Innovation in Education

SM in schools – I am a skeptic but… Case For SM: SMinSchools (via @Tina_Barr @mashable) RT @ashleydburleson

B-Schools discover Africa BizSchoolsAfrica

Social Media Marketing

Facebook sells your friends (and blurs line between conversation and ads) thesocialnetwork #BusinessWeek

Social Media Metrics: SMmetrics (@chrisbrogan) via @Nichole_Kelly

Weak ties — “Why the revolution will not be tweeted” tweeting the revolution RT @GeorgeDearing from Malcolm Gladwell

Don’t worry about Google, fear FB! R.I.P. 3 Ways Facebook is Killing Your Website watch out for the social network via @nowsourcing

Students of new product development are aware of the term the “Fuzzy Front-End of NPD”, which describes the less understood process of idea generation (versus the allegedly more rational development process at the end that is better studied and understood).

Professor Susan Hart, Head of the Marketing Department at Strathclyde Business School and a well-known researcher and author, coined an insightful phrase, the “Fuzzy Rear-End of New Service Development” and discussed at it at the PDMA annual research conference.

As I have noted in past posts, new service development is not characterized by familiar processes like Stage-Gate(R) or other linear or semi-linear processes. The development process is nearly as mysterious at the front-end, hence Dr. Hart’s apt phrase: The “Fuzzy Rear-End.”

I just returned from the annual research conference of the Product Development & Management Association in DisneyWorld. This year there was a full session on service innovation! As was noted in the May JPIM article by Al Page and me the focus of NPD has generally been on goods-companies, so I was encouraged that there was a full session only on service this year. (Dr. Hart was one of the presenters, as was I. Al Page chaired the session.)

Three straight presenters talked about the dearth of research on service innovation, the risk of viewing service innovation through the framework developed from observing goods manufacturers, and the chaotic nature of the NSD process.

The PDMA is a wonderful get together: a two day academic conference followed by a industry focused conference. There is some crossover — I attended the industry conference two years ago, several brave industry people sat through the entire academic research conference this year. I would strongly endorse the PDMA and the two conferences for anyone involved in new product or service development or in broader issues in innovation.

PDMA website: http://www.pdma.org/

I will report observations from the conference in my next few postings. My Wednesday post will give an overview of insights from the service discussion.

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I apologize for the sparse posting recently. In the past 52 days I have defended my dissertation, received my Ph.D., prepared for the PDMA Research conference and delivered a paper and started a new academic year. (Excuses, excuses!) However I will return to posting at least twice a week — on Monday and Wednesday.

Don’t fence me in…

In this month’s issue of Visions magazine the owners of the stage-gate(R) trademark take a look at ideation. They conducted a survey to find the most used and most effective customer research methods.

Few details are provided about the survey, but as noted in a previous post, one would assume that there would be a natural bias: an NPD manager might feel stupid admitting that his most used tools really aren’t all that effective. Tom Wolfe recently said that it is fun to read autobiographies because they are personal and ”like Wikipedia–some of the statements might even be true.” A pet theory of mine is that survey respondents have main three goals, in order of importance they want to: (1) look smart, (2) tell you what you want to hear, and (3) tell some truth.

I was impressed that, although little used, ethnography was found to be the most effective tool, although as noted in the earlier post there are some methodological issues with this also.

I believe that there are problems with all of the other results. The authors find “Voice of the Customer” tools to be very effective. However they include tools such as focus groups, which Griffin and Hauser  (as well as 40 years of other research) showed to be ineffective and did not include 1:1 interviews which was the primary tool suggested in the VOC article.

I would recommend skipping the Visions article and instead finding a copy of the original Griffin and Hauser VOC paper (1993 Marketing Science). Or in its longer, working paper version it is available online:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/2425/1/SWP-3449-27000178.pdf

I will devote a future post to an overview of the VOC article.

For a short discussion of how P&G freed itself from using Focus Groups and moved to true VOC methods:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_15/b4079073614638.htm

Also see my two previous posts.

For over a decade there has been research indicating that a Stage-Gate® process hampers more innovative new product development projects. For me a high point of these analyses was a 2005 presentation at the PDMA conference by Elko Kleinschmidt, Dr. Cooper’s primary academic co-author, and Ulrick de Brentani and Soren Salomo testing a model of innovation in Global NPD. The model showed a strong and significant negative direct effect between the structure in the NPD process and the innovativeness of the outcome.

A theoretical study by Benner and Tushman in the 2003 provided a nice framework for these results. The authors argued that process management techniques in general — not just S-G, but TQM, six-sigma, etc. — “are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change.”

This result seems intuitively attractive: process management is largely focused on reducing variation in processes, significant innovation would seem to imply some variation to what a firm is doing.

Their solution was for firms to be ambidextrous and allow less structured review of more innovative process.

So maybe you should use your stages and gates, TQM, and/or six-sigma when you are developing diet cherry-vanila coke, but keep the process management techniques at arms length when you are trying for real innovativeness…

The May issue of JPIM has an article by Dr. Robert Cooper defending the Stage-Gate®   (“S-G”) model of new product development from many criticisms in recent research and writing on product development. The S-G process is ubiquitous in new product research and training – it is sometimes used as the definition of whether an NPD process has a formal structure. Dr. Cooper is the professor who put registered the name S-G; his article is a JPIM “perspectives” piece which means it was written from the vantage point of a consultant-practitioner. The article raises important issues, so I will devote multiple postings to it over the next few weeks: first reviewing the criticisms and then Cooper’s defense of the model.

Stage-Gate® is usually depicted as a linear progression of alternative parallelograms and circles. The boxes are the stages that are undertaken by the development team and the circles are the gates where disinterested third-parties make go/no-go decisions based on the analysis which is part of the preceding stage.

The idea will come from strategy or some ideation process and then proceed through a go/no-go inital idea check; then may come a business analysis and another go/no-go; then a technological or operations analysis and a go/no-go; and continuing with customer concept testing, market analyis, development, pre-launch, etc. Generally there are eight to twelve stages and gates to screen the new product or service.

Although a straight line progression was Dr. Cooper’s original depiction of the process, he now stresses that it is misleading to think of S-G as a linear process since it has evolved: the different stages can be done in parallel and projects can be customized by picking and choosing stages and gates appropriate for that effort. (More later..)

Before beginning my academic adventure I had been involve in NSD: I served on the new product/service committees or teams in two exchanges, a bank, and a couple startup software firms; I also ran the new product effort at a software application firm.

The first time I ever saw or heard of  Stage-Gate®  was in the pre-reading for Professor Page’s doctoral seminar on new product development. My initial reaction, colored by my experience in the Internet startups, was amusement at what appeared to me to be Taylorism totally run amok – the S-G process looked to me like an attempt to make innovation into an assembly line production.

This week’s question: What was your reaction as a service innovator when you saw the  Stage-Gate® model for the 1st time?