The Age of the Consumer-Innovator
Today we are seeing more and more individuals innovating either through modification of existing products or out of necessity. With the use of the internet and the right tools this is becoming increasingly easily. Even I’ve made simple things in my home. One time I made a two wheeled cart to carry around a wide, flat bottomed canoe I had. Yes, I could have purchased something like this, but I never did find exactly what I needed for the price I wanted to pay.
Now the best consumer-innovator I knew was my grandfather. You can go back to one of my earlier blog posts to read about his reversed John Deere tractor with the scoop over the large back wheels. He was in Phase 1 of the consumer innovator paradigm. His need was for himself on the family farm to make chores easier.
Even in the cooperate world those of us that are following the Toyota Production System(Lean Manufacturing) are doing small scale innovation for our own company’s and our production team member’s own use. We use highly creative team members called moonshiners to make special tooling, part racking and ergonomic work stations. Our moonshiners have modified hand tools(don’t tell SnapOn), made returnable storage racks for specific parts, designed specific work stations for improved ergonomics and even specific pieces of capital equipment for our own internal use.
The advantage we have with our moonshiners is that we can internally exercise “dimension of merit” and modify existing products to fit our internal needs. It also allows us to innovate within phase 1 of the consumer innovation process and make new products for ourselves. None of these projects would have any market beyond our company in most cases. But we do share our innovations with other businesses in the corporation.
A few years ago I helped a local entrepreneur who was entering phase 3. He had found an individual who had developed and patented a mechanism that would allow a farmer to pull up to a piece of equipment with a tractor and hook up the PTO (power take off) shaft without leaving the cab of the tractor. The inventor did not have the means to manufacture and market his product, but the entrepreneur did.
In my own company we also do need base innovation. I remember talking to one of our lead engineer's and one of the devices he created. One of the draw backs of being the city of firsts, is that everything is also first to get old. Boston was one of the first cities to have an underground electrical distribution system, unfortunately even today there is still equipment out there with Thomas Edison's finger prints on it. There are these old manually operated oil switches (the oil cools the conductors) that have a tendency to blow up and kill everyone within 5 ft. He developed this sort of iron mats that wrap around the switch and this really long mechanical pole that keeps the operators our of harm's way should the switch blow up.
ReplyDeleteEdison had great fingerprints!
ReplyDeleteIf something still works, what point do we have to get to justify a change?