Product Innovation - Where has it gone?

I recently read an article that discussed how most companies face challenges and fall short when deploying new innovations for older products.  This is not a hard concept to understand.  When I first came out of school and got my first job I entered into my new “real world” engineering position and was ready to innovate, change, patent, and invent new ideas as they came to me.  Within my first two months of working I had at least 5 ideas that would make a part better, cheaper, the process flow easier, etc.  My first couple of ideas were brought up to senior engineers and shot down for various reasons – some of which included this is how we’ve always done it, shutting down the production line to initiate the change would take too much time away from production, the part can’t be made with that material because it has never been tested, no resources available to do the testing, etc, etc, etc…

 

I started to become frustrated as I realized that I was surrounded by old engineers who have worked at the company for 20 or 30 years and have become brainwashed to how things “have always been”.  They agreed that some of my ideas were good but they lacked the spark that it took for the idea to go from paper to reality.  They have become stuck in the “why bother” mode.  Assuming that they put in a little extra effort to think outside of the box and create a better process or part; they wouldn’t get more money, in fact, they wouldn’t get anything positive.  The company would benefit but who cares?  There mindset was go to work, put in enough effort so they won’t get fired, drink enough coffee so they don’t fall asleep at their desk and collect their paycheck.  Why would they want to listen to some young and energetic college graduate fresh out of school?

I quit and got a new job at a R&D (research and development) company.  For sure I would be able to come up with new innovative solutions that others would appreciate and implement.  Within no time I had some good ones.  Others agreed but once again they never turned into a reality due to big nasty process blockages.  You would think that an R&D company would be a fast paced, prototype environment.  Nope.  New management came in and insisted that we will be a production facility.  I’m not sure how outputting four products a year is a “production environment” but employees are buying it…after all, management says no lie, so it must be true. 

 

Sadly many companies are getting away from rapid prototyping, inventing, and coming up with new and genuine ideas.  The economy today has squeezed companies hard and the first thing to get scratched off of the finance sheet is the R&D department.  The mindset is; Work on increasing output of the “good old products that work”, increase revenue and forget about the innovation departments.  Hopefully things turn around soon and companies begin to bring back the departments that are in charge of creating new and innovative products.