Shipulski On Design

I’ve been solving problems for a long time.  And what I’ve learned is that it’s important to know the specific problem you want to solve.  There’s nothing worse than solving the wrong problem because you spend all the resources and get a solution to something that’s non-monetizable.  Here’s a post I wrote that talks about how to know if a problem is worth solving before investing the resources to solve it –  Solving The Wrong Problem.

Engineers see problems as opportunities to provide novel solutions to customers, which can lead to creating whole new markets.  But, often, engineers can struggle to communicate the problem, opportunity (a whole new market?), and potential solution.  This blog post defines a process to formalize the commercial space, to create a distilled definition of the problem, and communicate the solution.  And in the post, there’s a link to a template to help you – How Engineers Create New Markets.

Customers don’t always know what to ask for because they don’t know what’s possible with new technology.  That’s why the Voice of the Customer (VOC) can sometimes lead you astray.  And though technology can be fickle, it does have ideas about what it wants to be when it grows up.  I call this the Voice of Technology (VOT).  In this blog post I describe the importance of understanding VOT and using it to move forward in a fruitful direction Voice of the Technology.

Pulling it all together, once you know you know the right problem to solve andTur where the technology wants to go, you can create an Innovation Burst Event to investigate the relevant design space.  The blog post describes the Burst Event and its elements – tightly constrained design challenges (perspective shift), starvation of resources (too little time), and immediate report-outs to tighten the feedback loops. Don’t Boost Innovation, burst it.

The thinking contained in the set of blog posts has helped me deliver innovative new products.  I hope the thinking is helpful to you.

Image credit – conall, strike a match