The many crucibles of innovation

I was asked recently what prompts product innovation – is it that innovation begets innovation? Or is it a result of inspiration?

Both play their part, but true product innovation is prompted most of all by the customer, more-specifically by understanding what it is that will solve a customer pain point, and then researching, discovering and bringing to market new ways to deliver on that.

Do this commercially, and you have a business.

Note that I said what “will solve a customer pain point,” which I think transcends what the customer wants and what the customer needs, which can be different. Sometimes, customers can describe the pain point and have a view of what they need; But that is not what is needed to solve the pain point.

Regardless of either case, people want solutions that make their lives easier, and oftentimes, they don't quite know what that is until the moment they see it.

Listening carefully to customers is a difficult thing to do well, and it's certainly where inspiration is tested in the product development process, because without a customer need or desire being met, the product won’t hold any value, rendering it worthless.

I've talked before about the tendency engineers can sometimes have to allow the excitement of a new product to run away from them, so that they end up missing the objective. Any of us who has been in product development for more than a few years will have at least one of these "successful failures" in our portfolio.

Where does inspiration come from?

The answer is, from anywhere and everywhere. The demands of a large enterprise, or an in-home speaker that sparks an idea for a speech recognition system. It could even come from data extracted from a racing motorcycle hurtling around a racetrack .

Inspiration and innovation can also come from repurposing something that was originally designed for another purpose. I mentioned the in-house speaker above, but embed a microphone, clever voice recognition software and AI into that speaker and give it access to vast amounts of data in the cloud, and you have a smart home system that can turn on your smart lights and play music while taking you through a recipe for your favorite meal. All functions designed to make a person’s life easier.

What's fascinating about innovation is that while the original impetus is usually inspirational, once a new product category exists, it prompts new innovation that is often equally game-changing.

Some years ago, I was asked by a customer what I thought about whether early tablets would be useful in large companies. My view - then - was that they wouldn't, for a very specific reason: they would be slow, because at the time, none of the applications that large companies used and needed worked on tablets. The workflows we used worked better with keyboards and mice

The introduction of tablets has now changed how we work. Today, the workspace, workflows and applications are in many cases optimized for tablets and screens rather than keyboards, largely because they make certain functions easier and offer flexibility, and because of this, more tablets are now appearing in ever more applications and products.

Owls' wings to laptops

Inspiration, though, comes before innovation. My favorite example from inside Lenovo is still the owl-wing cooling fan . For those of you not familiar with the story, it originated with a colleague's experience during a fishing outing. While he was focusing on catching fish, an owl landed on his boat behind his back and stole the fish he had already caught from his bucket.

What alerted him was the uproar from the fish in the bucket - at which point he realized he had not heard the owl at all.

The owl's wings were silent, and it was in that moment he realized that if he could design a cooling fan blade that mimicked the wing of an owl, we could have quieter laptops.

What's so impressive about this story is that a quieter fan unlocks new possibilities for users. Now, they can work remotely at home or in cafés without disturbing others. They can collaborate more effectively in offices, and because our laptops can remain cooler, they can have processors of greater power inside them.

The line from a fishing trip to an effective cooling fan is a long one, but it still addresses the needs of the user.

As another example, in the arena of battery technology, there's a new innovator coming in our direction: the auto industry.

Weight and battery life are close to the top of every user’s wish list – lighter computers with longer battery life. The Li-ion technology we use today is well-understood and well-proven. Demand for car batteries is growing, and Bloomberg NEF predicts that the electric vehicle market will be worth US$53 trillion by 2050, with peak demand for road transport oil expected in 2027.

So, while the development of batteries for mobile devices has seen a drop in the cost of Li-ion cells by 97% over the past 30 years, lithium prices have risen seven times in 18 months. As a result, I believe the automotive sector will start to research new potential materials and chemical processes for its batteries. That in turn can be leveraged by the IT sector, in the same way that the automotive sector leveraged 50 years of semiconductor technology in the development of smart technology in cars.

Each industry derives benefits from the innovations of another.

Concerns for the environment will accelerate this transition. Innovation in manufacturing processes and materials will allow us to meet user expectations around the environment and sustainability to make a tangible impact.

Another way of saying that innovation comes from many directions is to quote the discussion I often have with my teams in Lenovo: we can build, buy or leverage. Whatever we do though, wherever we go for our inspiration, and however we innovate, we do so based on what the customer wants, with the objective of making their life easier in some way, shape, or form. ?