TEI 113: Innovation tools – with Evan Shellshear




The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers show

Summary: Listen to the Interview<br> A frequent question lately has been what tools are used by product managers and innovators. In this episode, we are addressing some tools for innovation. I’ll cover product management tools in a future episode. To discuss innovation tools, I talked to the one person who has literally written the book on innovation tools, which appropriately is also titled, Innovation Tools.<br> My guest and bestselling author is Even Shellshear. Evan’s focus is on industry transforming technologies and methodologies, from software to consulting. His background is in economics and game theory. He is also the founder of Simultek, a company that leverages game theory to elicit people’s true preferences.<br> In our discussion, product managers and innovators will learn:<br> <br> * using crowdsourcing as a catalyst for innovation and avoiding crowd slap,<br> * tools for early prototyping,<br> * using and avoiding problems with behavioral innovation, and<br> * business model innovation.<br> <br>  <br> Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators<br> Summary of some questions discussed:<br> <br> * Why did you write Innovation Tools? When people think of innovation, Lean Startup often comes to mind. There is a gap between the theory of Lean Startup and other such methodologies and actual execution. When people express the gap, they understand the methodology but are missing a concrete set of low-risk tools to make innovation a reality. The Lean Startup is really about managing risk. It’s a risk management methodology and framework to help people launch new ideas and companies in a low-risk fashion. What was missing was not just a set of tools to implement that but a set of tools that were centered around low-risk activities and risk-minimizing execution strategies. I set out to fill that gap and help people find risk-minimizing tools out there to help you implement something like Lean Startup. The impetus for the book was many conversations with people saying, “Yeah, look, I get it but I need to do something, to get my hands dirty. What’s out there?” That was the reason why I wrote that book, to help people with this important piece.<br> <br>  <br> <br> * Let’s talk through some of the tools. Tell us about Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is important because it’s been a massive catalyst for driving innovation. We know that the crowd has a huge number of perspectives and great expertise. What you’re doing with crowdsourcing is you’re tapping into that expertise, that desire for people who know something special, to give you that something special. That’s really the challenge and the benefit of crowdsourcing. The other part of crowdsourcing is where you flip it. Instead of reaching out to the crowd and asking for solutions or ideas, you reach out to the crowd and ask for funding to launch a solution to a problem.<br> <br>  <br> <br> * What are the pros and cons of Crowdsourcing? There’s a thing called the crowd slap, which is where some companies like Chevrolet have tried to source the crowd for ad campaigns or other ideas and because of the company’s image in society, instead of people taking it seriously, they ridiculed the company. However, the biggest challenge around crowdsourcing is managing the crowd and having the right expectations from the beginning. As an example, in 2006, IBM ran their Innovation Jam. They received 46,000 contributions, which they then reduced down to 31 ideas for further refinement. That’s less than 0.1 % of all ideas contributed. If we say that it took someone five minutes to consider every idea, 160 24-hour days would be required to go through all those ideas, or about 480 work days, or roughly two years of one person’s time. This is the challenge with crowdsourcing. It’s understanding what you’re going to get out of it, what the work requirement is, and what the other options could be for less effort....