Anaesthetist develops ‘smarter epidural’ to win clinical innovation award - Irish Innovation News. Dr Peter Lee, a consultant anaesthetist with Cork University Hospital, has won a clinical innovation award after developing a solution to improve the delivery of epidurals. Lee is now set to work with the US medical centre Cleveland Clinic on the commercial feasibility of the solution, in addition to Enterprise Ireland. Lee won the 2012 Clinical Innovation Award, now in its second year, which is sponsored by Enterprise Ireland in alliance with Cleveland Clinic. He collaborated with researchers at University College Cork via its biomedical design module to come up with an improved epidural solution. The aim was to develop a simple, cost-effective and globally applicable solution to tackle the problems associated with administering epidurals. Lee will receive a grant of €15,000 and the opportunity to work with Cleveland Clinic and Enterprise Ireland to develop the commercial feasibility of his idea.
Carmel Doyle. 23 super creative repurposed items. Eric Von Hippel on Innovation. Eric Von Hippel has long been an advocate of user-led innovation but it is not always clear what user-led innovation really means. A newly released study on consumer innovation by Von Hippel reveals more than you might think. Haydn Shaughnessy delves deeper..
Like many in the innovation space I think of user-led innovation as a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t talk to their users? It makes so much sense it’s almost a cliche. Reading through Eric Von Hippel’s study of consumer innovation in the UK, written with Jeroen De Jong and Steven Flowers, however, shook me out of this complacency. Consumer innovation is much more profound than simply being influenced by user’s needs.
The big news from the report (conducted for NESTA, London) is that consumers spend twice as much as companies in their own product development and adaptation efforts. “We were asked to find out how much innovation ordinary people do with the products they use,” says Von Hippel. And the result is astonishing. Indeed. Mothers Of Invention: How Moms Help Huggies Innovate. As the maker of Kleenex, Kotex, Depends, Huggies, and other products, Kimberly-Clark is already a leader in most of its markets. But they were looking for the next big thing, something they could develop into another hit.
So they assembled a team to explore the options and asked me for assistance with guiding the process. One of the first things we did was set up several innovation sessions to explore possible new directions. As a way to spur our creativity and push beyond our current mindsets, we invited a number of outsiders to the sessions--external experts in fields related to (and also unrelated to) Kimberly-Clark’s core businesses. One of these leaders was Maria Bailey, a renowned author and talk show host, and the go-to authority on anything and everything related to motherhood. “I realized that the only way to do it right was to go out directly to the innovators, to the moms themselves,” Steve recalled.
The main question was how to do it, and the answer wasn’t entirely clear. Collaborating With Customer Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group. The User Innovation Revolution. According to innovation expert Eric von Hippel, users are often the first source of new products — and that has important implications for businesses. Eric von Hippel is a professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What if much of what you know — or think you know — about the innovation process is wrong? That’s a question Eric von Hippel thinks many companies — and businesspeople — should consider. Von Hippel, who is a professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, has spent much of his professional career doing research that has led him to a radical conclusion: The traditional view of the product innovation process is flawed.
In the traditional view, companies get too much credit for product innovation, according to von Hippel — and users get too little. Von Hippel has decades of research to support his theory. The Age of the Consumer-Innovator. Recent research shows that consumers collectively generate massive amounts of product innovation. These findings are a wake-up call for both companies and consumers — and have significant implications for our understanding of new product development. It has long been assumed that companies develop new products for consumers, while consumers are passive recipients — merely buying and consuming what producers create.
However, a multidecade effort by many researchers has shown that this traditional innovation paradigm is fundamentally flawed: Consumers themselves are a major source of product innovations.1 Recently, this consumers-as-innovators pattern has led to the framing of a new innovation paradigm, in which consumers play a central and very active role.2 Rather than seeing consumers simply as “the market,” as the traditional innovation model has long taught, this new paradigm centers on consumers and other product users. National Surveys of Consumer Innovation Support user innovation. 3 Ways To Predict What Consumers Want Before They Know It. The insight that sparks innovation appears to occur randomly. After all, the iconic shorthand for innovation is a light bulb, implying that ideas come from sudden flashes of inspiration. While such flashes are surely good things, it is hard to depend on them, particularly if you are at a company that needs to introduce a steady stream of innovative ideas.
Steve Jobs once said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” That’s absolutely right. It is yours. And don’t think you don’t have a customer because you work in an internal support function or for a company that provides components or services. Everyone has a customer, whether it is a purchaser, user, or co-worker. The quest to identify opportunities for innovation starts with pinpointing problems customers can’t adequately solve today. 1. In 2000, when A.G. Lafley is gifted at communicating complicated ideas in simple ways. Lafley urged P&G to understand their boss as never before. 2. Consider jeans shopping. 3. Charles Leadbeater on innovation.