Institute For The Future

How do you select user innovations?

Tuesday I went to a reception at the Innovation Center Denmark, an outfit on Page Mill Road that helps Danish tech companies interested in doing stuff in the States. They're a small but very interesting group, and the evening featured a talk by architect and industrial designer Frederik Andersen. Andersen cofounded a small design firm, Goodmorning Technology (what an optimistic name).

 

A good bit of the talk was about user reinvention, and its increasing importance in the design and innovation process. For me, the talk brought up a question: how do you figure out which user innovations are worth paying attention to? If the great virtue of user-driven innovation is that-- to borrow the language of evolutionary biology-- its a mechanism for generating a lot of mutations, what's the selection mechanism? Ultimately, of course, useful mutations will be more widely adopted than others; but most companies would like a way to detect the most promising ones before then.

 

Frederik's answer was that, at this stage, the selection process is still largely intuitive; which I suspect is the answer most people would give.

 

Pelle Braendgaard has blogged the talk more extensively.