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Product Design and Innovation Consulting

 

 

Intended Outcome

Product Design and Innovation

C3 guides you to “Think Different”, sell your ideas, produce excellence and delight your customers!

Our Product Design and Innovation consulting is based on Customer-centered Excellence principles.  The C3 methodology combines both rigor and simplicity for a repeatable method accessible to all practitioners, no matter what their role in the enterprise.

Perhaps one of the biggest myths about continuous improvement is our belief in this adage: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. The truth is that 100 years of better mousetraps (the most frequent patent submission in the last century) caused absolutely no change in market leadership. And did customers say they wanted trapped mice? NO, they wanted zero mice.

If excellence depends on satisfying customers, it is helpful to have consensus on who “the customer” is in every situation. Also needed are the questions to ask that reveal what customers want that they otherwise won’t tell you. You will learn the methods for doing that and find it wonderfully simple to apply everywhere.

One stated purpose of methods such as Six Sigma, Kano Model, ISO and surveys is to understand and satisfy the voice of the customer. But the guidance provided is perhaps their weakest element by either (a) providing a highly complex approach based on QFD, (b) omitting key questions or information assumed to be known, (c) failing to eliminate linguistic ambiguity and/or (d) adopting a manufacturing application bias that may have little relevance for those performing service, knowledge and non-manufacturing work.

When we are unclear about who customers are and what they really want, intentional innovation is illusive. We superbly address those weaknesses turning lemons into lemonade.

It is very important to recognize that innovation leading to commercial success has often started because a single person has become frustrated one too many times, as a user, with a previously experienced undesired outcome.  One supportive ingredient needed by that person encountering stuff that sucks is the means and high motivation to develop an alternative. A second supportive ingredient is “no prior experience needed”.  This means the innovator often does not have a wealth of experience as a producer of the offending product. The innovators of  iPod, Google, PayPal, Uber, and AirBNB are notable examples.  Serial innovators, on the other hand, may very well have prior producer experience which can be a giant assist in getting funding for a rapid introduction of their latest innovation.

Deliverables Can Include

Product Design and Innovation

Using our Product Design and Innovation program you will be equipped to go beyond traditional approaches.

Using our Product Design and Innovation consulting program you will be equipped to go beyond traditional approaches that rely on surveys, reactive problem-solving and Industrial Age methods that are so last century.  Our advanced, easy-to-apply concepts and tools you will use are particularly well suited to knowledge work.

  • One- to two-day design workshop, depending on your needs
  • Facilitation of your team on a particular design issue
  • Facilitation of your team on a product introduction
  • Facilitation of your team on a entirely new product concept

 

 

 

Description of Approach

Product Design and Innovation consulting with Robin Lawton energizes and empowers your design team to consider directions they would never have considered.  We will challenge you to think out of the box, applying the C3 methodology and principles to your product or service issues.

We will focus on:

  1. Principles that cause customer bliss

    Product Design and Innovation

    Design in customer bliss in your knowledge and manufactured products with C3.

  2. Determine who your customers really are in every context
  3. Use the “word formulas” that always uncover priorities
  4. Common (and apparently unknown) reasons customers mutter, “That sucks!”
  5. The VOC-driven Innovation Roadmap to customer love, competitor envy
  6. The main principle enabling divergent thinking and innovation
  7. The #1 attribute required for a successful innovation (product or service)
  8. Ten tactics for introducing an innovation
  9. Why improvement projects can be constrained by convergent thinking
  10. The steps you should take next to strengthen your strategic design initiatives

For more information on how we can help you with your current design frustrations, please fill out the contact information below.

 

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