Continuous Innovation Management (CIM)™

Innovations are crucial for businesses to maintain and/or gain a competitive advantage [1]. Any innovation aims to consolidate and improve the business position in the market niche or enter other markets. A business is trying to improve what it already does or trying to invent something new. Typically, a company assumes it has a clear idea of what problems need to be solved and what skills are required to solve them to produce innovations. However, in practice, creating innovative products is extremely difficult.

There are two fundamental types of innovation: disruptive and sustaining [2]. Disruptive innovations are scarce and often the result of luck. But supporting the innovation process is a strategy that, as a rule, all successful companies use. Sustaining innovation process occurs when a company repeatedly creates more efficient or better products to sell at a higher profit margin.

Project initiation is the usual approach to creating a unique and innovative product, and Agile methodology is the most popular for managing such a project. Principles of Agile methodology were outlined at the dawn of the 21st century by a group of leading experts in the field of computer systems [3]. Unlike waterfall methodology, where you need to complete the entire project to see the result, the Agile method involves breaking the project into smaller integral, autonomous components, which allows customers to see and even use partial functionality at an early stage. To date, Agile methods have been used primarily in software development. They are gaining increasing popularity in other areas of human activity, including construction, where the classical waterfall methodology is traditionally used [4]. The main attraction of Agile over the traditional waterfall approach is the speed of the project, increased likelihood of success, and greater customer satisfaction.

However, while Agile techniques adapted well to the uncertainty of final product vision, projects designed to create innovation often fail to produce it. For example, if a business does not understand the problem it is experiencing, the project is not progressing because its goal is not clearly defined. In other cases, the business believes it has a clear idea of ​​the problem it must solve to be innovative, but the underlying problem is misinterpreted. As a result, the final product does not solve the problem, and resources are wasted. Hence, for the project to be successful, the problem must be well-understood, and its solution must be well-defined from the beginning. However, in this case, this solution is obvious, not innovative, and doesn’t offer a competitive advantage to the business.

We suggest using the Design Thinking methodology at the initial stages of the project to overcome the difficulty of problem misinterpretation. Design Thinking was introduced in the 50s of the 20th century to systematize creating innovations [5]. Design Thinking does an excellent job of identifying and describing the main problem and proposing an array of possible solutions to this problem. In other words, it tells "what" needs to be created. In comparison, the Agile method effectively means "how" to quickly create what the customer wants.

What is Design Thinking? Design Thinking is a set of techniques for identifying and describing a core problem, suggesting possible new solutions to that problem, and finding the best innovative solution by creating simple prototypes and testing them on a representative group of consumers. The most popular model proposed by the Stanford University School of Design has five stages [6]:

1. Empathize: Understand the needs, wants, and constraints of the people you are designing for.

2. Define: Clearly define the problem you are trying to solve and formulate the dilemma.

3. Ideate: Generate a wide variety of innovative ideas for potential solutions.

4. Prototype: Build a simple physical or digital representation of your best ideas.

5. Test: Test your prototypes with real users and gather feedback.

Iterate: Incorporate feedback and repeat the process until you have a solution that meets the needs of your users.

Design Thinking and Agile methodologies aim to solve a problem and create an innovative product, and many of the methods of Design Thinking and Agile are similar. However, whereas Design Thinking focuses more on identifying and describing a problem, Agile is well suited for translating a solution into practice. Both frameworks use an iterative process; that is, the project team returns to the preceding stages to clarify and verify with the customer the correctness of the chosen direction for creating and implementing an innovative product. The Design Thinking process creates a simplified prototype of the final product, which is then tested on a small representative group of users. Testing this simple prototype allows you to filter out unsuitable solutions economically. The Agile methodology also has the minimum value product (MVP) concept. However, it is always a partial product that does not give potential consumers a vision of the end product. Suppose it were possible to add the concept of a simple prototype of an entire end product to the Agile methodology. In that case, this could significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of this methodology. Another useful Design Thinking concept is that an innovative product must satisfy three criteria. These criteria are feasibility, desirability, and viability. This concept should always be considered when creating an innovation. Design Thinking and Agile Project Management methodologies complement each other perfectly in creating innovation. However, since both methodologies employ many similar methods, it remains only to decide where one process will flow into the other.

The Design Thinking methodology has one significant drawback. The ideation phase of this methodology generates so many ideas for solving a problem that it can take a lot of time and resources to test them (prototyping and testing each with real users). One can circumvent this obstacle by adding methods from another methodology to the combination of Design Thinking and Agile: the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). TRIZ is a problem-solving methodology developed in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s by Genrich Altshuller. The theory is based on the idea that there are patterns and structures to the way that problems are solved and that these patterns can be identified and used to solve new problems more effectively. It is currently adopted to resolve non-technical contradictions or dilemmas [7]. The set of practices within the framework of this methodology makes it possible to reduce the set of possible solutions to the optimal (ideal) solution. However, TRIZ assumes that the problem and the dilemma have already been defined. If the problem is unclear, which often occurs in the case of non-technical processes, then the use of TRIZ to find a solution is premature. In this case, Design Thinking comes to aid TRIZ in identifying and describing the main problem and reducing the problem description to a dilemma.

Thus, combining three methodologies (Design Thinking, TRIZ, and Agile) gives us a new framework to create innovative solutions to technical and business problems. We have called this framework Continuous Innovation Management (CIM). The framework consists of the following steps (Fig. 1):

A. Identifying and describing the problem and reducing it to a dilemma. At this stage, the process uses methods and approaches of Design Thinking: empathy to analyze and better understand the main problem, a clear description of the problem and reducing it to the dilemma (focus), as well as the generation of all kinds of ideas to solve this problem (ideation).

B. Using TRIZ principles to select the optimal solution from the pool of ideas generated in the Design Thinking ideation step. First, we recommend using such TRIZ principles as separation in space or time.

C. At this stage, an Agile project should be initiated to implement the selected innovative solution. It is essential to schedule the creation of a simple prototype of the entire product as early as possible in the project iterations to adjust the characteristics of the final product during testing on a representative group of real users. This modification of the Agile methodology would correspond to the concept of Design Thinking and allows you to create a practical innovation with the least expenditure of resources.

D. If the prototype testing is successful, the project continues according to the Agile methodology: multiple iterations (sprints) consisting of planning, design, development, testing, and validation until the launch of the finished innovative product.

The whole process of the new framework is iterative. If necessary, the team would return to the previous step in the process to clarify the problem or dilemma. If a current assessment of feasibility, desirability, and economic viability changes, the team adjusts the requirements.

In summary, each of the three methodologies (Design Thinking, TRIZ, and Agile) separately can give good results in particular cases when creating innovative products. However, each of these methodologies still has significant drawbacks that often lead corporate teams nowhere while spending excessive resources. The synthesis of Design Thinking, TRIZ, and Agile creates a new architecture for managing the process of creating innovations. This new framework is called Continuous Innovation Management (CIM). Organizations can use CIM to develop technical and non-technical innovations while streamlining the process, optimizing resources, and increasing the likelihood of success. CIM can optionally be applied using the methods of all three component methodologies (Design Thinking, TRIZ, and Agile). When the problem is apparent and the dilemma is easily formulated, CIM can only include TRIZ and Agile. If the solution implementation is simple, CIM can only have Design Thinking and TRIZ. If its solution is quite evident after defining the main problem, then it is not required to use the principles of TRIZ.

The use of CIM in practice requires knowledge of all three component methodologies. Project managers are in a better position than specialists solely in Design Thinking or TRIZ because the creation of practical innovations that help businesses compete takes place within companies and is directed by project managers. Knowledge of all three methodologies allows the project manager to use their synthesis to quickly and successfully create an innovative product, becoming a key player in the growth strategy and maintaining the company's competitive advantage.

References

1. Innovation and commercialization, 2010: McKinsey Global Survey results (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/innovation-and-commercialization-2010-mckinsey-global-survey- results)

2. Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovation: What's the Difference? (https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/sustaining-vs-disruptive-innovation)

3. History: The Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/history.html)

4. Embracing Agile (https://hbr. org/2016/05/embracing-agile)

5. Cross, Nigel (2018). A brief history of the Design Thinking Research Symposium series. Design Studies, 57 pp. 160–164.

6. 5 Steps to Design Your Career Using Design Thinking (https://online.stanford.edu/5-steps-design-your-career-using-design-thinking)

7. Rubin M.S. On the contradiction of requirements and the contradiction of properties in business. (https://triz-summit.ru/confer/tds-2016/303275/

Fig. 1: Continuous Innovation Management (CIM)