To develop winning products, Samsung, the Korean electronics company isolates artists and techies for months on end. Because daily routines can interrupt the flow of great ideas, Samsung segregates development teams in its VIP (Value Innovation Programme Centre). Product planners, designers, programmers, and engineers are asked to outline the features and design of new products such as the company’s mainstay flat-screen TV. Department heads pledge to keep them posted there until they have completed the assignment. The facility is a sort of boiler room where people from across the company brainstorm day after day — and often through the night. Guided by one of 50 “value innovation specialists,” they study what rivals are offering, examine endless data on suppliers, components, and costs, and argue over designs and technologies.
By bringing together everyone at the very beginning to thrash out differences, the company believes it can streamline its operations and make better gadgets. The centre, at Suwon, Samsung’s main manufacturing site, 20 miles from Seoul, is open 24 hours a day. Housed in a five-story former dormitory, it has 20 project rooms, 38 bedrooms, a kitchen, a gym, traditional baths, and Ping-Pong and pool tables. In one year some 2,000 employees cycled through, completing 90 projects. Products that have come out of the center include a notebook computer that doubles as a mobile TV, yet is thin and light enough to be carried in a handbag, and the CLP-500, a colour laser printer that was built at the same cost as a black-and-white model.
Every step of the way, team members drew what Samsung calls “value curves.” These are graphs that rank various attributes such as picture quality and design on a scale of 1 to 5, from outright bad to excellent. The graphs compare the proposed model with those of rival products and Samsung’s existing TVs.
By deliberately forcing the mixing of project teams and removing distractions Mattel and Samsung speed up the innovation process. People in the teams are encouraged to be creative and to break the rules. They focus on getting the innovation moving. And they bring co-operation, enthusiasm and diversity to bear on the problem. An incubator can overcome the problems of corporate inertia and inter-departmental fault-lines by concentrating the resources of people, skills and time needed to make deliver new products.
Taken from The Innovative Leader by Paul Sloane, published by Kogan Page
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This post was previously published on Destination Innovation.
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