In an article on the website of the Wharton business school, professor David Robertson describes a four-step process of innovating our current products.
1) What are your best products?
Finding the key product may not be easy. In Lego it is small brick, in the business mentioned in the previous article it was a can of paint. Try to understand what customers are getting from your product.
2) What’s going to stay unchanged?
You need a stable base for your innovation efforts. So decide what's going to stay the same.
3) Generate creative ideas
There are many ways of arriving at a creative idea. During this step, you'll be doing prototypes and experiments.
4) Give the product developers some freedom
Companies skilled in product development have set up roles and responsibilities. There are processes, metrics and reward systems, but that's working against the type of innovation we're looking for.
So now you need to change how your product development team is organized. It has to be organized around the product. They need to have freedom to think broadly. Encourage them to think about other services, partners or channels to market.
Whatever leads to your customers into getting more value from your key product is a step in the right direction. Trying to produce new, revolutionary disruptive products is really dangerous.
It’s very expensive, difficult and these efforts often fail. So perhaps you should also start small, and improve the things that accompany the product you're already selling.
-jk-