405: Create serial innovation product teams – with Abbie Griffin, PhD, and Carmel Dibner

How product managers can support serial innovators

Today we are talking about being a serial innovator and how that can greatly improve the innovation results of an organization.

Joining us is Dr. Abbie Griffin, who holds the Royal L. Garff Presidential Chair in Marketing at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. She began her career in chemical engineering at Polaroid, went on to do product commercialization at Corning Glass, and later became a university professor after earning her PhD from MIT.

Also with us is Carmel Dibner, who is principal and co-owner at Applied Marketing Science, where she has helped dozens of companies uncover critical customer insights to improve products, services, and customer experiences. Before moving to consulting, she was in brand management at Unilever, working with the Dove brand. And if Applied Marketing Science sounds familiar, it may be because of a very popular interview, back in episode 71, with Gerry Katz, also of Applied Marketing Science, who detailed the steps for conducting Voice of the Customer research, which is based in part on research Abbie did several years ago.

Abbie and Carmel, with the help of a few others, have created a public workshop titled Product Innovation Master Class: How to Become a Serial Innovator. If you find the discussion helpful in this episode, check out this masterclass, which is being offered virtually from November 1st to 3rd. They are offering a $400 discount for listeners of this podcast. Register here and use the discount code ProductMasteryNow.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[4:51] Can you define serial innovator for us?

Serial innovators are individuals at large, mature companies who are associated with one after another radical innovation commercial successes. These individuals work in middle management and have to figure out what others want and how to make innovation work in the context of the corporate environment.  They have to manage politics, fit into the company’s processes, and do upfront work.

[6:21] Do you see innovation getting pushed out in large organizations?

In our PDMA best practices research, we’ve found just to stay ahead you have to keep evolving, which is difficult to do. We’ve had trouble getting US companies to even participate in the best practices research. Our hypothesis is they no longer have as much innovation internally because the push toward open innovation has decimated their internal innovation capabilities.

We see three different ways large, mature companies can organize and execute radical innovation. Christensen’s innovation theory is a market-driven simplification approach that does innovation in a startup outside a mature company. Gina O’Connor’s research focuses on a technology-driven approach for doing radical innovation in large, mature companies. Our research focuses on a people approach, driven by people who want to solve unbelievable problems. This is a problem-driven approach—they need to understand the problem in order to solve it.

[9:41] What impacts have you seen as a result of the Serial Innovators book?

It’s wonderful to get emails about how this research has changed people’s lives. Equally important, this research provides managers of serial innovators with the ability to understand how to better manage them. A lot of serial innovators have succeeded because they found a manager who lets them go away at the front end of innovation and be quiet for six or eight months while they do background work to understand a problem in enormous detail.

[13:15] Can you talk about serial innovation teams?

For radical innovation, there are three major sets of tasks: invent,