The Innovation Canvas - A Tool to Develop Integrated Product Designs and Business Models

The innovation canvas is a tool for teams to develop integrated product designs and business models. The canvas focuses attention on critical technical, market, resource, and execution issues that can determine the success of a new design or venture. The canvas inspires innovation by examining the difficult challenges from multiple perspectives and encouraging the rapid association, revision, and alignment of critical themes. The design process is often presented as a sequential or structured process with the common understanding that, in practice, the process is anything but structured with iterative decisions and tradeoffs made among a variety of technical, production, and market issues. The canvas includes themes from product design and systems engineering processes and merges them with themes from the popular Business Model Canvas from the entrepreneurship field. By focusing attention on key design and market themes and not process steps, the proposed canvas presents an innovation inspiring approach to design that is more closely aligned with the realities and complexities of developing a successful product, process, or service. In practice, a team interacts with a poster sized version of the canvas and populates it with Post-it® notes containing relevant information associated with each theme. The process is team oriented, engages all participants, and encourages iterative development and alignment of multiple themes across the canvas. For educators, the innovation canvas is a teaching tool for design and entrepreneurship courses that integrates technical and market content. In design courses, the canvas can improve product and service development by including business and market issues in the development process. In entrepreneurship courses, the canvas can improve business model generation by incorporating high level design themes as integral components of the venture vision. As the canvas concept and tools are rapidly being adopted by practitioners, this prototype innovation canvas is presented to disseminate the tool to a broader group of engineering educators, designers, and practitioners and to encourage use and feedback on its utility. Importance of Innovation The term “innovation” has become a priority for all types of organizations (corporate, academic, and government) to ensure prosperity and future success. In a Boston Consulting survey of corporate executives, innovation was named as a top three corporate priority by 72% of respondents. A recent Ernst and Young report notes that “it is not enough to just be innovative, it is essential to be innovative all the time” and they further their argument by presenting a spiral model for business model innovation . Wagner notes that “the solution to our economic and P ge 23218.2 social challenges is the same: creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates good jobs without polluting the planet. And there is general agreement as to what that new economy must be based on. One word: innovation.” (64p.2) Wagner also notes that parents, teachers, employers, and our education system in general must take bold steps to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. As the field of innovation emerges as an organizational competency, it has become essential for engineering educators to ensure that their graduates enter the workforce with skills that will allow them to be effective innovators and to be able to function effectively in innovative organizations. Innovation can take place at a variety of levels and during many activities within an organization including business model innovation, product and process innovation, and enabling and managing for innovation. In this paper, we consider innovation in the context of developing innovative designs in the context of business and market factors. In Schoen et al., innovation and invention are viewed as distinctly different activities. Both are viewed as cyclic processes with the “innovation cycle” translating inventions and ideas into tangible products and services that have value to the marketplace and customers. An “innovation stage” project starts with a concept, an invention, or intellectual property but the project often lacks a detailed specification for development. The challenge is to evaluate a variety of design concepts and implement the best result in practical and innovative ways that moves the concept toward commercialization. Kline et al. captured eight best practices of innovation from managing innovation stage projects in a technology commercialization program. These best practices include focusing on speed, teamwork, allowing project scopes to creep, and cracking the tough problems first. They are applicable for the individual or the organization wanting to be more innovative. Further, in The Innovators DNA, Dyer et al. identify five discovery skills of successful business innovators. These skills include associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. It is noted that these traits can be developed and strengthened through practice. The theme of innovation has come to academic organizations as well. In The Innovative University, Christensen and Eyering urge universities become more innovative through online and other delivery approaches, use of technology, and improved utilization of resources. Universities across the nation have developed centers, institutes, programs and courses that focus on innovation. Despite the attention to innovation, the philosophies and best practices of being innovative, developing innovative designs, and teaching innovation skills are still emerging. Just as the philosophies and academic discipline of leadership have emerged over the last decades, it is believed that innovation will follow the same path. The presentation of the innovation canvas in this paper, even though still a prototype, is intended to spur further work by the engineering education community to develop teaching tools that enhance students’ design abilities and inspire innovative designs. The Engineering Design Processes Design is a fundamental skill in engineering. It is essential that teaching tools be developed that promote the skills of design and innovation within design. The engineering design process P ge 23218.3 has been the subject of many studies of how best to teach the concepts, tools, and processes. In a comprehensive review of design teaching and learning, Dym et al. note that designing “effective solutions to meet social needs” p.103) is a fundamental skill for engineering graduates and that “design thinking is complex” (22 . The process of design is often taught in a “crawl, walk, run” approach by introducing fundamental concepts that are applied in a number of project based learning (PBL) experiences of increasing complexity throughout the curriculum. These experiences may range from reverse engineering exercises, small design projects, to capstone design experiences with a corporate partner. The methods and tools we use as engineering educators to describe the design process often fall short of capturing the complexities and context of the process as it happens in practice, and the complexities of the design process are often not fully understood by students until they are revealed through design projects and experiences. In the popular text by Ulrich and Eppinger, models for the product development and concept generation processes are presented describing the design process in block diagram form with sequential paths sometimes including feedback and looping. Ulrich and Eppinger also note that “rarely does the entire process proceed in a purely sequential fashion, completing each activity before beginning the next. In practice, front-end activities may be overlapped in time and iteration is often necessary.” p.16) This thought is also accepted by other design researchers and educators. Sheppard et al. state more generally that students’ transitions from novice to competent practitioners require “not a onceand-for-all movement from theory to application, but a continuing back-and-forth between general theoretical principles (i.e., design and innovation skills) and the particularities of the problem situation (i.e., design and innovation skills in authentic contexts) as the student builds more sophisticated skills through experience.” p.24) The interconnection and overlap between steps and need for iteration have been recognized in several works. The simultaneous engineering concept overlaps engineering and business steps throughout the development process to both accelerate and improve the quality of results. The interconnections between design process steps are noted in Ford and Coulston where a web model for the design process is presented which denotes all the possible connections and loops between the design steps. In a study of student performance in design projects, Figure 1 below shows the design paths taken by freshman students in a design exercise. The charts show a variety of paths taken and significant iteration and looping in certain steps. In another study of freshmen and senior design students, the number of transitions (or iterations) between phases of the design process was positively correlated to the quality of both freshmen and seniors’ final design products.