Creating Breakthrough Innovations

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Creating Breakthrough Innovations
A video series by Marv Patterson

This series of seven videos provides a clear and comprehensive answer to this very important question:

These videos were created in response to an assignment that John Young gave me in 1992. As the Director of Corporate Engineering, I was in front of HP’s Executive Committee delivering a review of my department’s performance. I reported on the improvements we had made in R&D effectiveness at various HP divisions, but I also described a troubling discovery. The results of our work did not correlate at all with division financial performance. This seemed to depend far more strongly on the level of interest and involvement that division’s executive leaders had in their new product programs. In the more successful divisions, these folks seemed to have an inherent interest in new product efforts, and and an intuitive understanding of how to provide effective guidance. In those division with mediocre or less financial performance, the executive team paid little attention to their R&D programs. Further research revealed that HP’s executive training program did not include any content at all related to the management of new product innovation programs.

My recommendation to the Executive Committee was that someone be assigned to define and implement the needed curriculum. John Young’s response was, “Hell, Marv. No one else is working on this. Why don’t you take it on?”

In response, we immediately launched a project in Corporate Engineering to do this. I left HP in 1993, though, to start up Innovation Resultants International (IRI), a consulting company focused on improving new product innovation efforts in client companies. Later I learned that, after my departure, HP’s curriculum project was cancelled well short of completion.

IRI’s success depended on having a workable answer to the question above, so my colleagues and I documented our collective wisdom as best we could, and then continued to add useful insights gained from our own research, and from our experience with client companies. We got by in this way for 13 years but, even at the end, there were important gaps in our knowledge.

On my own in 2007, I continued to seek a comprehensive answer to the question above. First of all, it would need to be one that allowed innovation performance problems to be understood and effectively resolved. Furthermore, it should provide an understanding of how to modify innovation activity in ways that could dramatically improve performance over time.

I had much experience in addressing these issues in hardware systems. I would first need to know the desired function of the instrument, and the system architecture it employed to achieve that purpose. The system elements would have to be identified and understood. Interrelationships and interdependencies between these system elements would then need to be determined. Finally the physics or operating principles that enabled each element to do its job would need to be understood. With this knowledge in place, repair or improvement would be straightforward.

My work since 2007 has adapted this thought process to the generic new product innovation system that is somehow embodied in every business enterprise that depends upon the periodic introduction of new products and services for its revenue growth and profitability. The video series begins by describing this generic system, its architecture and its operational elements. Next, the operating principles that connect investments in innovation to growth in revenue and profit are derived. Innovation system critical success factors are outlined, and methods for dramatically improving innovation performance are illustrated. Finally, two real-life case studies are presented; HP and Apple. Each one illustrates the power and validity of the innovation system principles highlighted earlier.

The video lectures: