INNOVATION SPECIAL... Innovators Must be User Oriented Too

 Innovators Must be User Oriented Too

    Lars Erik Holmquist, principal research scientist at Yahoo Labs — the technology nerve centre of the internet major — and head of the firm’s mobile innovations group, has had a strong academia-industry linkage. A former professor of media technology at Sweden’s Södertörn University and manager of the Interaction Design and Innovation Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, he is perhaps best placed to speak on the difficulties of transforming innovations to successful technology products. Prior to Yahoo, he’s been a co-founder and research leader at the Mobile Life Centre, an academia-industry joint venture hosted at Stockholm University with Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia and Telia Sonera as partners. While delivering a talk in Bangalore, Lars Holmquist spoke to ET on grounded innovation.
“An innovation is more than just a ‘great idea’. While invention means the creation of something new — an idea, an artefact or a procedure — innovation requires attention to other people: what they value and what they will adopt. It must contribute to transformation in a society and be adopted by users. This is why it takes so long and it is so difficult to transform scientific discoveries into innovations.” But how long is long? “It takes on an average of 20 years for a new technology to make it from a research project into the real world. And this timescale seems to hold equally well for disparate fields as medicine, mechanics and information technology.”
Lars gives examples, “Take the archetypical user-friendly input device, the mouse. It was pioneered by Stanford researchers in the 1960s, further developed at Xerox Parc in the 1970s and made into a successful niche product by Apple in the 1980s. But it did not reach a true mass market until Microsoft introduced Windows — almost 40 years after the original mouse demo!”
So, does this mean researchers should give up any hope of turning their ideas into products? “Not necessarily. Transforming new knowledge into a successful product is difficult but it has nowhere stopped researchers in innovating. They still come up with new ideas that have resulted into billiondollar companies.”
Since he’s played a role at both ends of the innovation story, we asked him: how much of a buyer’s input do research labs take before tweaking product specs? “Most research labs today take inputs from buyers as they are the ones who will benefit the most. This is an important step in identifying the right target customer and understanding behavioural patterns,” he says.
Lars Holmquist has coined a term, grounded innovation, which puts this much-used word (‘innovation’) in today’s context — in the days of rapidly-changing technology. “Grounded innovation is an approach that aims to balance the two axes of inquiry: understanding how the world works and invention. Today, we are living in a world where we have to consider both technology and users as drivers of innovation. Simply put, grounded innovation is when your technology meets utility. When the technology finds a new usability, or even if you make a 10-year-old product 10 times cheaper, that in itself is an innovation. The aim is to be both inventive and grounded — without getting stuck in either,” Lars explained.
Why is grounded innovation needed? He says, “By its nature, innovation does not follow a well-trodden path. With smart products popping up everywhere, we are constantly presented with newer, better ‘things’ that enhance our everyday lives — the pace is really fast. But adoption of innovations integrates business, technology, systems and human behaviour. The focus is not on a single invention, or creating just a new technology, but on the entire ecosystem. So, it is important that these new ideas are not just technically novel but are implemented into meaningful products, adoptable by the ecosystem.” Lars says grounded innovation has been put to use too. “For instance, the technique of shaking objects together to connect them is today used by Bump, a company of a million users. In another example, early experiments with digital photography and unusual user groups are reflected in successful contemporary companies like Instagram,” he says. For successful grounded innovation, it is important to understand both systematic methods and computation. Lars believes that today’s digital products lend themselves to grounded innovation. “Many products like cars or home electronics rely on computation to perform. While some of them do just what an analogue product used to do, but better, others introduce completely new functionalities. Some of them are physical things while others are virtual and run on personal or mainframe computers. So, a digital product is a manmade artefact that relies on computation to perform its functions. What’s important is that the intrinsic qualities like information processing, networking and sensing can be used to create new, but definitely usable, ideas.”

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