Innovation is more than just a creative idea.  Innovation is the process of introducing new ideas and solutions.  According to Webster’s, to innovate means “to introduce new methods, devices, etc.”  The PDMA defines innovation as follows:

Innovation: A new Idea, method, or device; the act of creating a new product or process.  The act includes invention as well as the work required to bring an idea or concept into final form. 

In other words, you have to put your ideas to use before you’re actually innovating. 

I have the utmost respect for truly creative people – those people who have 100 great ideas a day.  In all honesty, I’m jealous of them.  However, unless you can harness that creativity and turn those ideas into reality you are not truly innovating. 

One of the challenges of un-tethered creativity in a corporate environment is maintaining enough focus on a single idea to bring it to reality.  There are a couple of ways to deal with this.  First, decide where you want to accomplish for your business at the highest level.  Then vet the ideas to see if they can be instrumental in meeting the ultimate goal.  That is, will this idea serve a market that we want to reach, and will it ultimately help us meet our financial goals.  Choose to develop only ideas that are a good strategic fit with where you want to go.

The second thing to do is to control creative scope creep.  This also requires focus.  More important it requires asking your prospective customers what they really want.  Creative people have great ideas, but unless those ideas actually appeal to a larger group of people, they do not result in a good business.  Once you have the initial idea and decide that it’s a good strategic fit, ask others what they think, and listen carefully to what they do and don’t say.  It’s critical to innovation – turning your ideas into reality.

Sorry for the long break.  I’ve been very busy teaching New Product Development to University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business MBA students. I thought teaching would give me great ideas for my blog, and it did.  It’s also a lot of work, especially if you’re also working full time for clients, so I haven’t had time to post.  Promise I’ll catch up.

During one of my last classes of the term a student opined that things aren’t always ideal and felt that most of what I taught assumed that organizations were set up and operating effectively.  I disagree!  I believe that taught them how to respond with potential solutions when things are not going well.

In this example, the student went on to say he worked at a company that would randomly kill products based on a single briefing by a product leader.  Sometimes product leaders were ineffective communicators, resulting in good products being tabled.

I asked the student if this company had a formal Product Portfolio Management process and the answer was “no”.  I asked if he thought it would have been better off if they did have a formal process that judged products based on an established set of criteria rather than random product status presentations and he agreed that they would have.  I hope if this student is ever in such a situation again he will have the confidence to step up and lead the development of a solid Product Portfolio Management process for his company.

What I hope my students took away with them, and what we can all achieve by studying the best practices employed by successful companies, is the knowledge and tools needed to fix problems when things aren’t going well.

(If you’re interested in learning more about best practices in New Product Development, consider participating in one of my upcoming workshops.  Click here to learn more.)

Last month I was delivering an on-site workshop for a client.  The company President had joined us for a particular topic and from the back of the room he just started laughing out loud.  I sprinkle my favorite quotes about innovation throughout the content and he had come across this one:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was a brilliant and successful innovator, and his quotes are usually insightful and true.

Any creative idea is a potential opportunity, but an idea happens in an instant.  Then the real work begins.  First you have to validate that the idea is really an opportunity. Then you’ve got to make it reality.

Innovation involves applying a new idea to create a new product or process.  It includes the work necessary to bring the idea to its final form.  Along the way, we often find that it is “dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

I was talking with a colleague the other day who is an accomplished product manager and is currently in search of a new opportunity.  We were discussing a job description that I had recently shared with her from a list I follow.

She noted that the description started out well, stressing strategic vision, problem solving, and working closely with customers, among other things, as responsibilities.  Then under education and experience they asked for a bachelor’s degree with an MBA preferred, experience with software products, and experience in the specific industry they were targeting.  This was all pretty standard.  What stood out to us was the very last bullet item under education and experience which read “PMP Certification is a plus”.

While Product Managers are often called upon to also be great project managers, PMP Certification alone is not the optimal choice for Product Managers.  The Product Development and Management Association (http://www.pdma.org/) offers the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification that focuses on those skills necessary to be good at bringing new products to market, including:

1.  Strategy

2.  Product Portfolio Management

3.  New Products Process

4.  Tools & Metrics

5.  Market Research

6.  Teams, People & Organizational Issues

Project management turns out to be scattered throughout, but the focus is on those project management challenges that are specific to new product development and launch.

Getting a NPDP certification follows a similar process to that of other certifications such as PMP.  You must demonstrate a number of years experience in the product development field as well as pass a professionally proctored exam (offered by Thompson Prometric).  Once you have your certification you must maintain it by actively pursuing additional knowledge in the field, just as one must do with a PMP certification.

PDMA has not always publicized this certification well, but they are getting better and it is gaining some recognition and traction.  Because I continue to see people asking for the wrong certification when searching for Product Managers, I decided to take the opportunity to help them out by publicizing the NPDP in my blog.

Next time you’re searching for a great Product Manager you can ask for a PMP if you want to, but make sure you add “NPDP certification is a plus”.  Also consider training your product managers, executives and other team leaders in NPDP processes and techniques.  A common understanding of the best practices in New Product Development can vastly improve team efficiency and overall product success!

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.