Lightning In A Bottle, by David Minter and Michael Reid, is worth getting just for chapter five, which clearly explains "why 9 out of 10 new products fail." The authors have worked for over 25 years in the innovation arena, particularly with Blockbuster Video, Dole, and Einstein Bagels, and run their own innovation company. Their book is an easy read and explains in detail exactly how companies can innovate new products and services without the trauma of a woolly creative process.
The only slight niggle I discovered as I read the book was they sometimes repeated word for word a sentence written in a prior chapter. Get over that and there are some true gold nuggets in this book.
Lightning In A Bottle demolishes many companies' central plank of belief in any or all of the following ways of finding new ideas:
- Focus groups
- Brainstorming
- Ivory tower R&D or "gee whiz"
- Rip off
- Incoming
Minter and Reid discuss why focus groups return the wrong results or results you want them to return. Their full and logical explanation hits right between the eyes because it's so obvious. Almost instantly, understanding dawns as to why the focus groups system is so flawed as to be useless. So unless you're lucky, putting out a new product based on focus groups, feedback is destined to fail.
Brainstorming is given short shrift too as it is compared to giving a group of scientists in different disciplines random labelled chemicals and instruments and asking them to come up with lots and lots of compounds. Rhetorically they ask, "Does this sound like a way to cure polio or develop the next breakthrough in interstellar space exploration?"
Gee Whiz, Incoming, and Rip Off approaches are similarly examined and found wanting.
Maybe you think quantitative research and market segmentation are important? Minter and Reid suggest that while these are good tools, they're inevitably used wrongly for innovation.
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