“No one gets ahead by copying the status quo,” advises Tom Kelly of design firm IDEO.
What are the five basic steps to develop an innovative product or service? Has the new ‘status quo’ become extolling the undoubted virtues of artificial intelligence [AI] tools like ChatGPT without realising their use can make one slower, and less creative? What does a new MIT study suggest about the risks of large language models?
Innovation is the systematic practice of developing and marketing breakthrough products and services for adoption by customers.
“In a business context, innovation is the ability to conceive, develop, deliver, and scale new products, services, processes, and business models for customers. Successful innovation delivers net new growth that is substantial,” says Laura Furstenthal of McKinsey.
Innovation can seem tough – overwhelming. Why not just keep doing, what we have always been doing, and just hope for the best ? One could even be a touch subversive and call the same old, same old ‘innovative’ and expect to get away with it.
Innovation begins with curiosity. Thinking different. Start the thinking from a unique place. Or better yet, learn to stop thinking, if even for a few seconds. Learn to stop the endless chatter in your business mind, targeted at survival and being right, if only for a moment.
Push the pause button. Stop telling the same tired worn-out story. Change the story, shift the mindset, feel differently. Turn off the soap opera drama in your head, see what your customers really want, the actual problems, not what you think they require.
Smaller business and start-ups have a distinct advantage over larger corporates in innovation. In their desire for profitability and market share growth, the big players will miss out on the hard to spot inventive products and services that have a tiny market and are struggling with profitability. Yet it is at edge of the Kenyan marketplace where innovation happens – following clear map.
Five steps to creative profitable originality
IDEO’s Tom Kelly advises on the five basic steps on the path to innovation:
1. Understand the market, the client, the technology, and the perceived constraints on the problem. Later in a project, one can often challenge those constraints, but it’s important to understand current perceptions.
2. Observe real people in real-life situations to find out what makes them tick: what confuses them, what they like, what they hate, where they have latent needs, not addressed by current products and services.
3. Visualise new-to-the-world concepts and the customers who will use them. Some people think of this step as predicting the future, and it is probably the most brainstorming-intensive phase of the process. Quite often, the visualisation takes the form of a computer-based rendering or simulation, through IDEO also builds thousands of physical models and prototypes every year.
4. Evaluate and refine the prototypes in a series of quick iterations. Try not to get too attached to the first few prototypes, because they’ll change. No idea is so good that it can’t be improved upon, plan on a series of improvements.
5. Implement the new concept for commercialisation. And, constantly evolve, and adapt.
AI is a double-edged sword – possibly harming critical thinking
Status quo is now to jump on the AI band wagon. Undoubtedly, use of AI opens up access to world of neatly packaged ‘prompt engineering’ knowledge.
But simply doing a ‘cut and paste’, regurgitating machine learning, in the absence of critical thinking, risks leading one down the garden path to mediocrity.
Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.
“The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels. Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.”
“The MIT paper suggests that the usage of large language models [LLM] could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLM for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process,” writes Andrew Chow in Time magazine.
Efficiency, sustaining and disruptive
Innovation guru Clayton Christensen described three different types of innovation: efficiency, sustaining and disruptive. Efficiency innovation has to do with reducing costs while maintaining the same, or improving on the level of quality.
Sustaining innovations are all those little things a company does just to be able to stay current to compete. Prime example, would be banks who copy each other introducing apps targeted at younger customers, where roughly half of Kenya’s population is 25 years and younger.
Disruptive innovations are the game changers, smartphones, platform business models like M-Pesa and social media and now AI, and whatever is coming next that makes AI -- what Noah Yuval Harari calls ‘alien intelligence’ -- look like fax machine.
First step, outside of the status quo – imagine unusual.
