Welcome to my blog! I’m excited by the opportunity to share my passion for collaborative innovation with you. Experience has taught me that when you bring people together to solve problems, be they internal or external customers, innovation happens and transformation is possible.  Furthermore, involving people in this process from the beginning helps promote advocacy for the solutions developed, ultimately leading to an improved rate of acceptance.

I am Cynthia Gilmer and I have over 20 years experience across software development, product development and management, and business innovation. Having served in executive and senior management positions in technology, marketing, operations, and product management, as well as starting my career as a software engineer, I can offer a broad perspective across the business aspects of innovation. I am a PDMA certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP), which allows me to bring a thought leadership perspective to new product and service development. I have also found that the innovation practices promoted by NPDP are very effective for applying innovation inside of companies too.

In 2001 I founded Opus Plus, Incorporated, a consultancy that specializes in innovation and business transformation. Since that time we have helped numerous companies apply our framework to their innovation efforts such as developing new products and services, entering new markets, or implementing internal innovations to improve business efficiency or effectiveness. Beginning this semester (Spring 2009) I am an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business teaching new product development. My goal for this blog is to periodically share thoughts and experiences based on my past and ongoing activities in practice, consulting, and teaching.  I expect to cover topics such as innovation, process, organization and leadership, culture, etc. designed to help, executives, product managers and product development team members expand their knowledge of this topic.

Enjoy!

During the 2001-2003 economic down-turn I saw companies slash all aspects of their business and replace them with sales resources. These “feet on the street” had two problems. First, people were hunkered down and not buying, much like today. Second, they didn’t have innovative new products to sell that met a relevant need in the market. Furthermore, when things started to turn around companies were not prepared launch new products and were forced to restart innovation activities from scratch.

During down-turns markets and needs change rapidly. It’s actually one of the best times to innovate. Everyone is trying to save money and do things more efficiency. They’re willing to listen to any ideas that might help them weather the storm.

My recommendation is to keep innovating. Keep a core team of effective product professionals (product mangers and developers) in place, but follow a few rules to ensure that you’re not wasting time and money.

• Develop a product strategy at the top that outlines where you want to go and what you want to accomplish in the next two years. Keep in mind that this does not define specific products, but outlines the markets you want to serve and what kind of solutions you want to bring to them.
• Keep your team focused on the strategy. Put processes and tools in place to help ensure that they stay on track.
• Continue to interact with customers and potential customers to stay on top of changing needs.
• Make sure you can demonstrate a clear ROI for each product or service offering. During the next few years customers (particularly business customers) are going to want to clearly see what savings can be realized for any investment they make.

“What are you trying to accomplish?’  A simple but powerful question that can spawn innovative thinking.  In May of 2008 an article appeared in Harvard Business Review called “The Customer Centered Innovation Map” by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick.   I’m often too busy to read my HBRs; I tend to go back through them for references when I’m researching a topic of interest. In this case I saw the title and set it aside because I knew I’d want to read it.  Still it wasn’t until I was planning my NPD course for the Spring Semester at the UMD Smith School that I revisited it.  I was looking for tools that help innovate.  Specifically I was looking for good classroom exercises.

I’m going to discuss this article in two parts.  First, I’m going to talk about the thing that really stood out, and then I’ll talk about the article as a whole. 

The thing that stood out the most wasn’t the main point of the article but rather appeared in an inset about asking the right questions.  It said “As defined, does the step specify what the customer is trying to accomplish, or is it only being done to accomplish a more fundamental goal?”

In thinking about this, I realized that this subtle difference in how you ask a question can be the difference between the status quo and true innovation.  If you ask someone how he or she does something, they will tell you plain and simple terms.  If you ask them what they are trying to accomplish, they will stop and think, and give you an answer that could lead to a truly innovative new way of doing it. 

I’ve begun using this question in many aspects of my work, not just in innovating new product solutions.  I use it to get the true value of an existing product or service.  That is, ask a service provider what they really accomplish for the customer or what does the customer really accomplish by using your service.  You will get a very different answer than if you ask what the service is or does.  I also do a lot of business process consulting to help companies deliver their products and services better.  I’ve found this question to be critical in identifying what’s really important in a process vs. what’s just overhead. 

So remember, when you’re trying to get yourself or someone else to truly innovate, ask the question “What are you really trying to accomplish?”

Next time – my thoughts on the rest of the article…

As promised, here are some additional thoughts on the article from the HBR article from May 2008 called “The Customer Centered Innovation Map” by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick.

One of the key points to the article was that all jobs consist of the same set of eight phases which are as follows:

1. Define goals and plan resources
2. Locate and gather what is needed
3. Prepare the environment
4. Confirm you’re ready to proceed
5. Carry out the job
6. Evaluate the result
7. Modify or repeat, if necessary

The idea is that when talking to a customer, or potential customer, walk through the eight phases discussing what he or she is trying to accomplish in each phase. From these discussions potential innovations will arise. By focusing on what is to be done rather than how it is done you force some level of innovative thinking.

I think this methodology is particularly appropriate for business solutions. Even outside of the product development world, I’ve been using this very effectively in business process improvement situations. It is more of a stretch for consumer products, especially those that are filling a “want” rather than a “need” but I still think it could be used to define features that fit with how the end product will be used.

All-in-all I think it was a great article – one of the more creative and practical approaches to focused ideation that I’ve seen.

One of the things I want to do in this blog is to explore some of the fundamental differences of classic product development and the development of software and IT products.  I think developing software products is very different, but I also think our industry could learn a lot from the lessons of new product development in the classic sense.  That is, by applying some of the lessons learned in developing cars, breakfast cereal, home appliances, laundry soap etc. down through the years we can improve the way we develop software products.  However, to assume that the techniques and methodologies don’t need to be tailored to address some of the fundamental differences would be naïve.

One fundamental difference in software products is that they can and must change often and evolve on a shorter release cycle than traditional products.  One of the things this provides us is the ability to show prototypes or even release less than fully functional products earlier.  This allows us to begin getting customer feedback and even revenue earlier, but ultimately what we learn could change the direction of the product.

I was teaching a class onsite at a client location last week, and during the discussion Product Portfolio Management the VP of Product Development asked me an interesting question that really brought this fundamental difference to light.  He asked whether in evaluating the product’s profit potential during the portfolio process he should consider the initial release or what the product would eventually be.

In developing business models for software products, I always consider an evolution from early features to full functionality, and project sales accordingly.  Revenues begin, but development costs continue as the full product functionality development continues. Traditional product portfolio models tend to look at a more sequential model where development stops and revenue begins.  To this end, when designing the evaluation criteria for product portfolio management of software products, we may need to look at a multi-phased development evolution, and potentially tie a probability of commercial success factor to each phase.  This makes for a more complex scoring model, but addresses one of those fundamental differences that we need to consider when applying proven processes to software product development.