In automotive, many possible paths have been explored already, and the associated technologies are mostly mature, so it's possible to write a complete specification for a vehicle up front. The challenges come with prognosticating whether it will find a market at what cost, and with designing it to that cost and volume. I don't intend to minimize the difficulty.
We were in medical electronics, which is much less mature, and the back room gang was kicking around ideas about stuff that we didn't know how to do at any price, and nobody else did either, because no one else had done it, anywhere, ever.
The market works a little differently from automotive, too.
Maybe an example would help. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is used as a whole-body imaging tool. Suppose you could do NMR on individual cells, one at a time, while they were flowing through a (small) pipe?
Could it be done? I don't know.
Could it be automated? I don't know.
What could it measure? I don't know.
What disease states could it detect? I don't know.
Could it detect a disease earlier than other technology? I don't know.
Not my idea. A software engineer asked the first question, possibly just because it sounded like fun to do. I thought the questions deserved answers.
In the days before NPI, we'd have just formed an ad-hoc team and stolen whatever resources we needed from the regular Product Development bureaucracy, kluged up a prototype, and showed it to the Chairman, even if it didn't work. If he thought it was worth a crap, he'd put us in touch with other people from around the globe who could help solve our problems, stealing resources from their own bureucracies to do so. We'd make a few, less crude, prototypes, and put them in the hands of medical researchers, who would figure out if what the machine did could be of any use. If it turned out to be useful, we'd turn over our findings to the actual bureaucracy, which would be charged with turning the crank to make the prototypes into actual products.
At any given time, there were probably a hundred such pre- projects in gestation and detected by the bureaucracy, and probably several hundred more that were not detected. The bureaucracy, of course, kept trying the usual accounting measures, and could never figure out where its resources went, or why it was so inefficient.
Since participation in a pre- project was entirely voluntary, the loser ideas got weeded out automatically, because nobody would help if they thought the core idea couldn't work.
I'm not sure if he crafted the process by intent or by accident, but it worked, and it made the Chairman a billionaire.
Then he got sick and lost control and the bureaucracy took over. The bureaucracy that was intended to be inefficient and porous in order to provide resources for the real PD process to steal, tightened up and got efficient ... and basically killed the company.
NPI assumes that you know up front:
- that you can do what you propose.
- how to do it.
- what it does.
- to whom you will sell it.
But for a truly new product, you don't know any of those things, so NPI's gatekeeping murders innovation.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
