Innovation has become an extremely hot word in the last few years as companies work to push the envelope on the products and services. On Wednesday (October 4, 2006), I had the opportunity to listen to a brown bag discussion presented at the AOL Mountain View Headquarters. The event titled “Heresy!” featured Ant Creed, formerly of IDEO and currently a user research manager at Intuit, and Chris Quinn, sr. product manager at Intuit. The event was organized by Mike Macadaan, director of creative design and innovative leader at AOL.
Ant and Chris spoke about innovating to produce products that people can use and like but challenged some common assumptions or as they call them "hereies." They stressed the importance of the people you select when creating a team explaining that the people on the team will make you successful. Also they explained the keys to product development success as follows:
- solve a problem
- solve a problem well
Finally they urged synthesis (taking a more active role) rather than spending a lot of time analyzing data. Interestingly, the strategy and principles presented reminded of the simple, less for success, “Get Real” the rally cry of software development shop, 37signals. If you are interested in listening to the discussion in it entirety, search for “AOL Mountain View” in iTunes and subscribe to the AOL Mountain View, Behind the Scenes podcast.
