I was speaking to a group recently about capturing customer requirements in an effort to determine what the customers valued, then use that understanding of value to produce products and services. One of the attendees piped up that you would never invent an iPod like that; point taken. What customer would ask for an iPod when they have never seen the concept before? Kane Kramer, that’s who!
Kane Kramer is an inventor. He invented the iPod before anyone knew it would be called that. He also invented iTunes while he was at it. Unfortunately he was about 20 years ahead of his time. His pre-FLASH, pre-internet, pre-MP3 prototype could hold about 3.5 minutes of music and the users had to go into a record store where they could purchase and download the latest hits from a central server.
By the time of the turn of the millennium, digital music was the Wild West. Napster and similar file sharing systems were driving the record companies nuts. MP3 players were coming out from everywhere. For the most part they were clunky and tough for the non-techie to use. Steve Jobs decides he could do with digital music players what he did with the PC: make one that looks and feels good. So he did; nothing revolutionary though. You could certainly recognize that original unit as an iPod, but it was huge, expensive, had a very low resolution monochrome screen, and mechanical scroll wheel.
We look at the iPod now and say, “wow, who could have thought of that?” The reality is that it was nine years of innovating a line of products (19 in all, that’s about 2 per year) in an incremental fashion, each one building a little on the one before or addressing a little different market than the one before. It was not even an original idea! Not only had plenty of MP3 players come before, but Kane Kramer invented it all 20 years earlier.
I have never worked at Apple, but I can guess at a couple of things they did right to get to where they are today with the iPod:
Kane Kramer is an inventor. He invented the iPod before anyone knew it would be called that. He also invented iTunes while he was at it. Unfortunately he was about 20 years ahead of his time. His pre-FLASH, pre-internet, pre-MP3 prototype could hold about 3.5 minutes of music and the users had to go into a record store where they could purchase and download the latest hits from a central server.
By the time of the turn of the millennium, digital music was the Wild West. Napster and similar file sharing systems were driving the record companies nuts. MP3 players were coming out from everywhere. For the most part they were clunky and tough for the non-techie to use. Steve Jobs decides he could do with digital music players what he did with the PC: make one that looks and feels good. So he did; nothing revolutionary though. You could certainly recognize that original unit as an iPod, but it was huge, expensive, had a very low resolution monochrome screen, and mechanical scroll wheel.
We look at the iPod now and say, “wow, who could have thought of that?” The reality is that it was nine years of innovating a line of products (19 in all, that’s about 2 per year) in an incremental fashion, each one building a little on the one before or addressing a little different market than the one before. It was not even an original idea! Not only had plenty of MP3 players come before, but Kane Kramer invented it all 20 years earlier.
I have never worked at Apple, but I can guess at a couple of things they did right to get to where they are today with the iPod:
- I bet they have a formal product innovation process that has a big funnel to allow lots of little ideas to germinate.
- Steve has a vision and he keeps the product moving along that vision. How many successful products before the iPod did not let you change the battery? Look at the current battle with Adobe and Macromedia’s FLASH technology. Steve does not need it for his vision, so it does not let it compromise his product.
In order to work, an innovation engine must produce; frequently. We (SAP) are after all building software. As a software engineer I have no delays while my dies are getting formed at the tool makers so I can shoot my plastic parts as I would if I was making something hard. I do not have to wait to cut multiple iterations of circuit boards. I do not have to work with the packaging companies, physical distribution channels, etc. Anyway, you get the point. Nothing restrains software products from being created quickly except us.
If you want to get more out of the formal product funnel, you have got to put more in. In sales you do not get one lead and hope to get one sale from it. You need to get ten leads and try and push them through different stages of the funnel to get one sale. Same goes for innovation; let’s throw more pucks at the net (sorry, Stanley Cup playoff time). I do not know the conversation ratio, but it should not be too hard to figure out. We want X new product innovations a year, we need at least Y (Y > X) ideas in the front of the funnel.
Finally, do not be scared to innovate. We have lots of products in the market, so we know all the problems that new products are likely to cause. As a result we are very, very careful about how we get them to the market. I remember when I was on my own building software. I could get new stuff to my customers in no time. I was young and fearless (I hate to look back at how ugly that code was, but somehow it worked). Later, when I had some experience I knew what pain I would have when I made a mistake, so I avoided mistakes. This meant adding fewer features to my software less frequently. I crippled my ability to innovate. I let my company become structured in a way that had no tolerance for risk of any kind.
Mine was not the only company in this position. Before the mid 80’s, creating a new car at Porsche was a bet-the-business proposition. No company structured in such a way will ever have a process of innovation. It is too scary. Let’s institutionalize a process of innovation that balances risk and reward, allows the funnel to become full of ideas, and delivers the best ideas to market frequently.
