PDMA 2006 - Track 4 - Disruptive Innovation Tools to Predict and Drive Growth

Speaker: Michael Clem (J&J), Ruben Gavieres (Deloitte)

J&J hired Clayton Christensen for advice because they wanted to conduct more of their own innovation, it was becoming to expensive to grow through acquisition. They decided to set up a special division and to hire Deloitte because Michael Raynor was the co-author of the Innovator’s Solution.

Ruben reviewed the core idea behind the innovator’s dilemma. See Wikipedia for a written explanation.

Michael had a great slide that illustrates the difference between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.

Sustaining innovation is like fortification (picture a castle under construction)
Disruptive innovation is like exploration (picture a 15th century ship out on the ocean)

Michael gave a laundry list of techniques that recur in successful innovations in the medical field. It’s a good list that reminds me of TRIZ although tailored to medicine.

They found Jobs-Outcomes-Constraints (JOC) very helpful in framing the needs.

They’ve adapted a spiral development model from the software industry. Basically it entails an iterative model with recurring go/no-go decisions. Each pass around the spiral should reduce the risk by collecting more information about the market and the technical feasibility. They tried to keep it to 3 turns around the spiral.

By the way, I’ve not tried to reproduce the presenters’ slides which covered the material pretty well.