Recently, a post on 280 Group LinkedIn discussion board asked whether innovation was a science or and art. My response to the question was that innovation is an art, but the productization and exploitation of the idea is more of a science. If you have a truly innovative product, you usually can't ask the consumer about it until you have a working protoype (whether storyboards or an actual product). Truly innovative products are the ones that the customers don't even realize that they want (yet). A great example of this is the iPhone. Just before Apple released the iPhone, the overall trend for cell phones was to make them smaller and slimmer - think of the Motorola Razr for a prime example of this trend. If Apple had gone to the consumers and asked them what they wanted, I doubt whether we would have ever seen the iPhone. Apple had an innovative product that went counter to the market trends...they went on their intuition. (Obviously, Apple would have market tested the idea and some prototypes - but they didn't just rely on market research to tell them what to build).
Truly innovative product do not have a precedent that you can follow - there are no predecessor products for marketing or pricing and packaging. They change the shape and form of the market place and create a new demand that catches competitors unawares. Look at the iPhone again as an example of a market changing product. The old cell phone manufacturers (e.g. Nokia, RIM) are struggling to maintain relevance in the new market - Apple turned the market upside down and now the major manufacturers are getting left behind in their dust.
So...to get back to the original point, innovation is an art. You cannot 'focus group' an innovative product - someone in the organization has to have the spark of genius to see the opportunity and how to address it in a way that no-one else has imagined. You then need to 'productize' the idea so that you can market test it on selected customers. In this context, productize does not mean build it to completeness. You need to have enough 'product' to show it to customers - so it might be a storyboard, or a v0.1 application, or a working protoype. This requires some investment, but at this stage you haven't built a manufacturing plant, or assigned 10 software engineers to build the application. The market testing will also provide feedback to allow you to refine the product. You can incorporate the feedback in subsequent releases if you have a product that can operate with rapid iterations (e.g. cloud-based or web-based applications).
So the 'art' is the original idea and growing that into the first iteration of the product. The 'science' is the subsequent market testing and feedback, iteration and feedback, and so on.
P.S. If anyone is interested in the concept of "prototype (or v0.1), market test, get feedback, and repeat", Steven Gary Blank coined the term "Customer Development" to explain this. He writes about this in his book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and recorded a series of lectures at Stanford University that are worth watching (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/steve_blank).
In fact, anyone interested in innovation and entrepreneurship (Stanford use this word, so it must be OK!), should visit the Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner web site (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/index.html) and watch videos of some of the leading innovators delivering lectures at Stanford University. I promise that it will be worth your time.
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