INNOVATION IMPACT MAP: AN OPPORTUNITY EVALUATION TOOL

There is a need for advanced tools and methods to support the entrepreneurial engine er as they move their ideas through development and out to the market. These tools and methods are being developed under the new discipline of Comprehensive Engineering. These tools seek to bring together Technical, Human, and Business Issues in a compelling and useful fashion to support the development and deployment of innovative products and services. One of the first tools developed in this framework is the Innovation Impact Map. Currently in the early stages of development, the Innovation Impact Map creates a framework in which to explain past successes as well as assess current and future products under development for their innovation potential and market impact. The Innovation Impact Map brings together an understanding of customer needs, the economics of the market, technical feasibility, and the changing state of information in the competitive marketplace. This paper will develop the theory behind this model as well as exhibit its usefulness applied to real world design issues from industry. 1. Innovation Context Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm Model has become the dominant framework to discuss the development of the markets for high technology products and services. This model assumes that a product exists at the beginning of the life cycle. The work of the designer begins well before Moore’s model. The engineer is part of a team that transitions technology from the R&D centers into product architectures. There is a similar life cycle for this transition of technology into an innovative product. There is also an analogous gap to the Chasm referred to here as the Innovation Fence. The Innovation is the hurdle technology must jump before it is ready to be integrated into a product or service. Figure 1 below illustrates both cycles and the critical transition points for an innovation to make it into the greater market. Early Adopters Innovators Early Majority Late Majority Laggards M o o re’s C h sm M o o re’s C h sm Paradigms/ Macrohistory Artistic & Visionary Works Scientific & Technical Literature Mass Media Coverage Educational & Historical Materials Innvation Fnce Innvation Fnce Innvation Fnce Innvation Fnce Figure 1: Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Life Cycle [1] and the bibliographic cycle of technological innovations [2] with the Innovation Fence included. The Innovation Fence is the hurdle a technology must cross before it finds its way into a product. Engineers work to help technology over this fence and into products. These professional innovation-consulting firms assist enterprises in crossing the Innovation Fence and many times work with the client enterprises in the development and deployment of products into the market. By exploring the processes used by these firms to cross the Innovation Fence we hope to gain insights that allow others to achieve this practice of consistent innovation. It is understandable the rarity of these enterprises. Current academic programs ignore the skills necessary to cross the Innovation Fence. There has been a shift to include more entrepreneurship content in the traditional engineering curriculum. These programs teem with courses on business models, marketing, accounting, etc. In some ways they resemble mini-MBA’s, designed to bootstrap engineers and scientists up the knowledge level necessary to take their product from concept to market. The underlying assumption to building all these skills is that the students have an innovative product to bring to market. Few engineering curriculums teach students to innovate. The focus of the Engineering Curriculum is to prepare students for industry positions , not to go out and design their own jobs. This gap in the curriculum is illustrated in Figure 2 below. Pure Science i Pure Business