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Problems w/ Technology Push

Traditional new product development regularly falls into the bad habit of ‘technology push’, often without intending to or even while trying to avoid this pitfall. Unfortunately, organizations get trapped by the perspective that they sell products and services and forget that they need to focus on creating value for customers. Similarly, research and development, particularly in the university setting, often becomes unduly focused on overcoming technological challenges. Scientists, and the organizations they work in, often forget that technology only has an impact when it proves more capable of accomplishing customers’ jobs than available substitutes and, furthermore, when an appropriate business model is utilized such that barriers to adoption are minimized.

Problems w/ Market Pull

Although it is widely recognized that ‘market pull’ is critical to building successful commercial solutions, customer-centrism is also not a panacea. Modern customer-centric approaches like design thinking can lead to homogeneous solutions and a lack of competitive advantage if they ignore an organization’s differentiated capabilities. This is not innate to these perspectives but has become common as they are misapplied by naive users. For example, the website of IDEO, often considered the original design thinking consulting firm, highlights: “All of IDEO’s work is done in consideration of the capabilities of our clients and the needs of their customers.”

Blended or Iterative Approach

Unlike many traditional approaches, Innovation Cartography is a blended or iterative approach that is technology- or competency-driven, yet customer-centric. It brings together your organization’s technologies and unique capabilities with a deeper understanding of users/customers to create a unique approach to technology commercialization, new product development, and entrepreneurship. Quite simply, Innovation Cartography is a structured approach to exploring adjacencies and White Spaces and is an example of an Epicenter of Innovation as described in the book Business Model Generation. Furthermore, our Innovation Cartography approach is intended as a complement to existing approaches such as StageGate and Lean Startup as it provides a structured approach to identifying and selecting starting points as well as pivots.

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

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Specific Applications of Innovation Cartography

Industrial R&D Companies & Other Organizations

For any organization the Innovation Cartography approach can help identify new sources of revenue based on existing competencies and differentiated technological, production, or other capabilities. For industrial R&D companies the process can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of R&D by identifying irrelevant technologies earlier in the process while increasing the impact of remaining development efforts. Finally, the Innovation Cartography process can help facilitate open innovation by creating a forum and real-world challenge for partners to collaborate on.

Entrepreneurs

The Innovation Cartography approach is designed as a complement to Lean Startup approaches. Our process helps entrepreneurs or innovators evaluate their starting point in comparison to other options they may not have considered. Furthermore, it helps systematically explore available options when they make pivots or restarts. The first part of the Innovation Cartography process in which we explore adjacencies is slightly more relevant if an entrepreneur or inventor has a technology or some other unique and differentiated capability, resource, or partnership to build off of. However, even entrepreneurs that have not yet developed their solutions can sometimes benefit from exploring adjacent problems and opportunities. In addition, the second phase of the process which looks at business models and go-to-market strategy is relevant to any entrepreneur.

University Technology Commercialization

Our Innovation Cartography approach is designed to overcome the ‘valley of death’ challenge by transforming the overall process of university research and commercialization. Traditional models tend to rely on scientists creating new technologies and securing rounds of research funding until they can show technical effectiveness. At this point the technology is passed to the Technology Transfer Office so it can be protected and so commercialization avenues can be explored. Our approach transforms this model by incorporating customer insights earlier in the process, by training scientists in the relevant business perspectives, and by encouraging inventors to consider a broad range of alternatives at the earliest stages of development—including both alternative customer jobs as well as business models by which the technology will be delivered. As a result, scientists spend time working on problems with a greater likelihood of commercial success and irrelevant technologies are identified earlier in the process.

University Engineering Senior Design Projects

A specific university program that can be significantly enhanced with the Innovation Cartography approach is Engineering Senior Design Projects. Senior design offers a tremendous potential for creating technology-based new ventures. However, at many universities senior design teams work on concepts that have little to no chance of commercial success. This can be resolved by having Senior Design Teams work through the Innovation Cartography approach to evaluate the potential of identified technology applications. In addition, this approach can help engineering senior design teams identify new applications that leverage existing technologies either from within the university or from external sources like NASA or NIH.

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Other Relevant/Related Perspectives

White Spaces

The Innovation Cartography approach focuses on exploring adjacencies and ‘white spaces’ in order to identify and prioritize high-potential opportunities. Research has shown that companies with systematic processes for exploring and attacking adjacencies are likely to be more successful than those approach these opportunities arbitrarily or those that ignore adjacencies all together. Furthermore, evidence shows that 70% of university technologies that do make it to market are actually commercialized outside of their field of initial use. Thus, systematically exploring adjacencies is a critical yet underdeveloped dynamic capability for organizations and universities.

Lean Startup

Innovation Cartography is intended as a complement to Lean Startup as well as modern lean, iterative, and customer-centric StageGate approaches. Lean Startup highlights an exceptionally important perspective focused on identifying assumptions, designing lean experiments to test these assumptions, and then pivoting, proceeding, or restarting based on evidence gathered. However, Lean Startup does not provide a structured method to decide if the initial business model concept is worthy of being tested—or rather, if it is the best initial concept to start with—and furthermore does not provide a methodology to identify potential paths to follow in the case of a pivot. Innovation Cartography does specifically this and thus provides a useful front-end to Lean Startup as well as a useful divergent and convergent process when deciding on pivots.
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Epicenters of Innovation

Our Innovation Cartography process offers a systematic approach to one of the ‘Epicenters of Innovation’ that is highlighted in the Book Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder. Specifically, this approach provides structure to the Epicenter of innovation that examines how to leverage key resources, activities, and partners to identify and build new value propositions for new customer segments. A related perspective can be found in the Book Dealing with Darwin, by Geoffrey Moore. The Innovation Cartography approach provides a structured approach to Application Innovation in the Product Leadership Zone. Other Epicenters of Innovation are covered to a great extent by other perspectives (for example The Epicenter that builds off of access to customer segments or recognized needs for specific value propositions—also discussed as the Customer Intimacy Zone—is central to traditional Design Thinking approaches that put customer centrism above all else).