Sunday, April 19, 2009

Outcome Driven Innovation

My company, Club Car, and its parent Ingersoll Rand have adopted a new innovation process that seeks to improve the success rate of innovations by considering the problem differently. Many of principles of Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) reflect or were modeled after value focused thinking.

Both practices develop a fundamental objective hierarchy to define “what the problem is”, then a means objective network to understand “how to alter the objective”.

Why value focused thinking improves innovation? Taking a value focused approach forces engineers to think about the how to best resolve a problem and break a common thought trap: to continue iterate the current solution.

I witnessed a good example of ODI from a competitor. They were challenged to create a heating system for a neighborhood electric vehicle (a grown up golf car that is equipped with safety features to make it street legal on residential streets). They designed a seat heater in place of the more obvious solutions. If it could be shoehorned into the small space available, the typical air vent heating system wouldn’t be adequate in the semi-enclosed car. Plus the typical source for heat, engine coolant, isn’t available on electric vehicles.

Link to BUS650: Value focused thinking has been applied to engineering to increase the effectiveness of innovation

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