As competition eats away at the market you live from, loyalty in all forms erodes and consumer tastes grow ever more fickle, the task facing marketers in charge of fielding their organization’s next product winner could drive any normal person insane with trepidation and angst. After all, many contemporary marketing pundits profess that the average business today will be or should be generating at least 50% of its revenues five years out from entirely new products. No pressure to deliver…right? This need to innovate products has produced some interesting theories about ideation, development and deliverables – many of which are often incongruent with one another.

The first conflict arises around ideation – an otherwise organic and serendipitous process now meant to be encapsulated into a repetitive formula and thrust upon participants who are expected to save the day with sudden ingenuity. What depends on the intersection of diversities and timing is all too often boxed into a series of steps with the hope of replicating the collision of free-wheeling conversations, notions, ideas and experiences based on interest - that need to collide by randomness rather than in contrived settings. I was watching some kids the other day snacking on cheese cubes – they decided to start using them to play dice – should the company print dice patterns on the wrapping and a packaging is idea born to drive more sales? Maybe – but the point being that the process was natural – un-staged, un-aided and un-provoked; it just happened and they all loved it!!!

The second conflict is about creating competitive differentiation while remaining in the tight confines of existing production, marketing and staffing frameworks. If you want to be different, you need the flexibility to be different – act different, execute different and deliver different – otherwise, what is it about you or the product that is going to be different?

The third conflict is scale - has its own set of problems – the desire to command and control form a central point has stifled the benefit for distributed tasking; when a simple measurement and recognition structure could free managers to experiment more on their own without driving the existing business off a cliff.

Managing Innovation for new products should be a ongoing, collaborative and passionate adventure, rather than the corporate equivalent of a root canal. The participants can be engaged from all walks of life and the tasking around the process distributed to trusted and passionate stakeholders. Without them, it will not only be increasingly difficult to discover desirable new products to market, but also incrementally more difficult to pull together the disparate parts needed for success.