Think Big
Forget about a better mousetrap: Find a whole new way to catch the mouse.
While conducting research on General Motors, Daeyong Lee saw
automotive engineers using plastic rulers to measure stretching in
metal fenders and asked how well the primitive-looking technique
worked. "They said the accuracy was poor but that there was no
alternative," Lee recalls. "I said there must be a better
way to do it."
Lee began to search for a completely new tool to perform the
measurements and eventually devised a way to use a video camera to
automatically gauge the stretch in the fenders. That innovation
formed the basis for the Troy, New York, company called CamSys that
Lee founded in 1989. He now employs 10 people who sell the
measuring system to car makers and steel companies around the
world.
The practice of pursuing such radical innovations has fallen out
of favor in recent years as more incremental approaches have come
to the fore. But a new study by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
(RPI) suggests it may be time to try for bigger gains.
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Radical innovation is losing out to the incremental approach
because it's much more difficult and the risks are huge, says
Gina O'Connor, assistant professor of marketing at RPI in Troy.
"But the payoff is greater as well," she adds.
Companies that create radically new innovations can gain long
lead times over their competitors, which leads to higher profit
margins and a competitive advantage, the RPI researchers say.
And, they found, while many radical new ideas appear
to be the result of chance combinations, there are systematic
techniques you can apply to increase the chance your organization
will generate the next big idea.
In reality, of course, few firms come up with more than one
truly significant new idea--if that many. Radical innovation
researchers don't think it has to be that way, however.
"If we can understand these processes," reasons
O'Connor, "then it can become a repeatable
phenomenon."
Mark Henricks is an Austin, Texas, writer specializing in
business topics.
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