In this post I’d like to highlight our experiences with the SAP Collaboration Workspace as their process is a terrific example of just how straightforward innovation ideation should be. Use this simple picture as your guide.

Step 1: Identify Unsolved Problems

All Innovation stems from understanding a problem well enough to solve it in a new and novel way. The best way to gain this understanding is to get out and collaborate with people outside your company. Cast a big net. Include customers, non-customers, channel partners, former customers, people in adjacent markets, and so forth. Challenge your assumptions about who is, who isn’t, who should, who shouldn’t, and who might be your customer. Don’t just ask them about their problems. Direct questioning is not the way to identify unsolved problems. Collaborate with them to understand their world, on their terms, from their perspectives. This is human-centric, qualitative market research. Use Innovation Games® to help you.

SAP does this masterfully using a variety of techniques. They use Innovation Games® such as Spider Web and Prune the Product Tree in their eSOA initiative to better understand customer needs regarding their eSOA platform. Their DLI (Design-Led Innovation) process, which includes Innovation Games® as a tool for SAP employees, is highly regarding for its focus on understanding customers. The result of Step 1 is a set of understandings that SAP employees use as fuel to generate a portfolio of problems and proposed solutions.

Step 2: Evaluate Your Problem-Solution Portfolio

The next step in this process is to critically evaluate your problem-solution portfolio. Evaluating the problem includes determining if the target market is sufficiently large to justify pursuing the solution. Evaluating the solution involves a critical assessment of your organizations ability to profitability implement the proposed solution. This is typically an internal process, in which you should leverage quantitative methods to help make appropriate business choices based on a sober analysis of the best facts that you can assemble. For example, at this point you might be able to reasonably estimate costs and market size, but not so reasonably estimate price points, yields, or other critical data. That’s OK. I’ve been amazed at just how far a team can get on a small investment on evaluation. SAP’s approach to this step is to leverage internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to evaluate the problem-solution pairs on such dimensions as feasibility, cost, and market applicability. The goal is to remove those problem-solution pairs that cannot be profitability serviced. The resultant list of potential projects is then ready for the next, and possibly most rare, step.

Step 3: Collaboratively Prioritize Your Problem-Solution Portfolio

The final step in this process is to once again go outside your organization to gain their insights in the collaborative prioritization of your problem-solution portfolio. In this case you want to leverage business-centric, Web 2.0 tools.

SAP uses their Collaboration Workspace as a primary vehicle for collaborating with customers to prioritize their problem-solution portfolio. This platform, built on top of the Jive Clearspace offering, provides such commonly available tools as wikis, document sharing, commenting, and groups that enable SAP and SAP’s market to elaborate, clarify, and otherwise gain deeper insight into the problems and solutions proposed by SAP. In addition to these commonly available tools, SAP has integrated Enthiosys’ Buy a Feature online game to enable large numbers of customers to collaboratively prioritize their problem-solution portfolio. By using Buy a Feature online, SAP understands both the priorities of their customers and the reasons these priorities matter. The data obtained by Buy a Feature online can be further analyzed to gain insights into market segment preferences and feasibility. Of course, the customer-prioritized list is just one input that SAP uses to make their final choices on which projects to pursue in their project portfolio. However, customers can rest assured that when SAP makes choices that may be different than these customer-generated priorities, they’re made for very good reasons that are themselves explained and elaborated with customers.

Taking Action

While generating the ideas for Innovative products and services is a fun job, we find the greatest enjoyment in actually creating and delivering these services to the market. SAP’s track record in delivering innovations to the market is unsurpassed, and it is among the many reasons they’re the worlds largest enterprise software company.

There you have it. Innovation in three easy steps. What’s holding you back?

To learn more about the Collaboration Workspace I invite you to read:

Richard Hirsch’s blog: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/10448

Dennis Howlett’s blog: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10117

“Technology companies are moving toward Agile development. This is driven by the need to improve productivity, boost product quality, and make delivery against business goals more predictable. Product management is a crucial part of the move to Agile, calling for new skills and new kinds of deliverables. Many product management organizations, however, do not have experience with Agile deliverables, processes or communications styles.

This white paper briefly reviews Agile development, then identifies six levels of product management and how Agile changes those levels. Roles, processes and deliverables are increasingly divergent from waterfall models as we move from long-term strategy toward sprint-level and daily activities. We will use an outside-to-inside approach to examine Agile Product Management responsibilities for:
1. Portfolio Management
2. Roadmaps and Release Plans
3. Requirements Management and Communication
4. Customer Input and Collaboration
5. Agile Product Teams
6. Communicating Information Up, Across and Out….

Please download it from here.

Which is really cool. Except when they “persona-fy” me in front of me. Then it is a bit funky. Like some kind of outer body experience. But still cool.

Where: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA

When: Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

The Berkeley Center for Executive Development draws on the rich resources, talent and perspectives of top-level business educators and researchers from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and elsewhere to provide top-level executive education courses and custom programs to executives and companies around the world. This includes specific programs in Leadership, Finance, Marketing, and General Management – including Product Management. The 2008 Product Management program draws on The Haas School’s own professors as well as expert practitioners in the field. Rich Mironov is honored to be part of this distinguished group.

What: APLN Seattle Leadership Summit, “Agile Leadership: Exploring and Extending Agile Leadership”
Where/When: Seattle, July 17-18, 2008
Event info and registration here

The event will be structured as a semi-open-space variant of an Unconference, with two keynote speakers each morning and a CIO panel for the closing session on the 17th. Final sessions, topics and tracks will be determined at the event, so please drop Luke an email if you have suggestions for his track.

What: “Gathering Market Inputs Within Different Product Planning Horizons”
When: Weds, July 23, 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT
Where: register here

These days, product managers have an increasing array of market and customer data input gathering tools and methods available to them. Before selecting the tools and methods to be used it’s important to clearly define the questions and issues for which we seek information and to understand what planning horizon we are focusing on. This discussion will touch on the various goals, questions and techniques used for.

• Finding entirely new product categories (The search for one great new idea)
• Managing existing product portfolios (Market/product landscape and profitability)
• Determining what goes into the product roadmap and next release ( Which top priority things come first?)

Finally we’ll review some emerging trends and tools within the online customer collaboration space that are helping product managers with many of the above issues.

Where: Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, 123 Queen Street West, Toronto
When: August 4 to 8, 2008
Register here

Please let us know if you will be in Toronto for Agile ‘08, and come see our presentations/exhibits. As a member of the Agile Alliance board, Luke Hohmann will also be part of the official welcome events.

Where: San Francisco Marriott
When: October 30th/31st
Register here

Software Business 2008 will focus on current strategic business, financial and technology issues and growth opportunities facing executives and managers of software companies. This two-day conference, October 30-31 in San Francisco, serves owners, chief executives, presidents, vice presidents and division directors or department managers of leading and fast-growing software companies, located throughout North America, who are conducting business domestically and worldwide. ISV executives and managers are coming to Software Business 2008 to learn from the best of breed companies, network with partners and develop their strategy and processes to grow in today’s software market.

What: a presentation on “The Importance of Strategic Plans In an Agile World”
Where: Dr. Dobb’s Software Development Best Practices Conference & Expo ‘08, Hynes Convention Center, Boston
When: October 30th, 1:30PM – 3:00PM

This is Dr. Dobb’s premier east coast event, with world-class training for teams and managers who strive for efficiency, productivity and quality in their software development projects. As thought leaders in Agile product management, we’re pleased to have Pete selected to help this audience use roadmaps and strategy to keep their development organizations focused.