Innovate Your Way to Continued Success

“In China, people are still afraid of making mistakes,” says Andrew Moline, CEO of Concepto Studios, Inc., at 2010 MEGA Forum

[Currently being revised]

“China right now is a country that has done a lot of effort in implementing innovation,” began Andrew Moline, CEO of Concepto Studios, Inc. He was presenting at a session of the China MEGA Forum for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, hosted by China Entrepreneurs (CE) in Beijing in October 2011.

On Concepto Studios

 So they are trying to foster growth within the country itself. Open a branch. Concepto Studios. We have done this with Asia the past twelve years. Good to do it from the inside out. Some of the brands we worked with, which are household products.. bring us into China. So that we found a niche in China itself. China has many things going for it… manufacturing… etc. Finding our own niche. Through innovation and creativity, we think we should be able to find these niches. Why innovation and creativity falls into place with a design firm. These guys are creative, etc. At some points, they can make some interesting things. No one sees the values of these things… the product creates other markets. Innovations can create other innovations within itself. The company is here within Beijing… creative innovation products and services… these services involve taking a creative solution and implementing it with innovative ideas in order to come up with better product development.. we have a vast client list. We are looking for different ways to help clients penetrate the market in Asia.. we have been trying to figure out a new way of doing this.

We build a product from beginning to end. Once a new product comes out, we should make sure we are thinking ahead… there are a list of things that need to be done. Understand the cost of making things… some of these things we have here is showing the process of how we do things… hydro products. Decker in SA market. LD farms. More active graph products. Because of being an initial designer, we had certain tools: modeling is one of them. Innovation is not used to having a new idea and coming up with something. Innovation is coming up with different ways of doing things.* Saving costs, in manufacturing, for example. We make sure that we can cost down the product. There are many different ways of doing this. Innovation comes very far along – that’s not innovation – it’s the mechanical aspects of things…

Engineering. Shows pictures of coffeemakers, etc. Voted best coffeemaker in the US. How is this product innovative? Mass market.. something that might not be the most beautiful coffeemaker, but it’s beautiful for the price. We work with the factories (!! Collaboration). Various ways that… for a client, it works in different ways. It becomes innovation for the company itself. My company is the only company that has done George Foreman products. A lot of technology behind those grills. What’s amazing with this product is that it’s a very simple product. The fact that the grill… not many people can see it, but it’s an innovation that has made millions of dollars* (He uses pictures a lot, and specific examples!). we have this girdle and rice cooker… simple looking products, but have a lot of technology involved as well.* involves technology

Using technologies that we have found through other resources.* Innovation also has a lot to do with collaboration.* helping them to continue developing their products. Hundreds of products we developed for them in the past four years. Taking something existing, and through innovation, and through rendering and modeling, we can do something very interesting.* However, the product was not that ready. What did we do? We used our privatization… what it did is save them about a month and a half.. as many people might not know, when you’re dealing with companies like Target and WalMart, if you’re late.. you pay large amounts of money.* We’re saving the client time and money.

This is a pretty cool project that we’ve been working on now.. and I think it’s in the price range of 200 million dollars... to help this client sell each product. Organization of buildings, interiors, and the products themselves. As I was mentioning before… my business partner is the guy who came up with this idea of showing a presentation… having a storyboard, etc. that shows the client how things are going to work. How the product is assembled. He’s also in the United States… once you buy, you have to put it together. And it is very complicated. And the returns were about 40% of sales returns. They come and said listen guys, we have some problems… our clients are not getting.. list

What we are trying to show is that with this… they cut the return rates by 60%. The literally had a 40% return from their site. That’s how much we saved them, we helped them*. There’s another thing that we do is models and… making innovation. Businesses that have ideas can see what they look like prior to things… Israelis will see how they look like. Easier to see what the product will be like. Having the actual object will help tell the story. Prototyping*

You can send this to your clients, and then the can see these realistic looking products. It will help them in an easier way to know what the product will be like. Having the actual object will. We’ve done your prototyping house. Cell phones and appliances as well. These are not real products, these are just prototypes of the final products. This right here is some brief recap of everything…

Problem, Market Research, Brainstorming- everything we do to get the product on the market.

Demo reel of our company, which also shows a lot about how… privatization and design… These are the presentations we handle… try to design… we’ve created these screen innovations. The feel, colors, etc. we’re able to make a product out of it.

I really don’t like this… I have a problem… I switched. Can you hear me? It’s pretty simple. We’re creative guys, right? We’re also businessmen*

Most companies care about all the time, but they do not know how to reach it. It is difficult.* Most people think, it’s difficult for me to… a lot of people come to us for that reason.* You guys have this design team, and … etc. different industries. How do you do it? The thing is that innovation and creativity comes from within. It’s in all of us. It’s in all of our businesses, it’s in all of our services.* (!)

On originality

I’m going to quote a few people:

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” – FIND THE PERSON WHO SAID THIS.

This applies to all of us in our businesses. Many times, people are afraid of taking the risks.* And I understand. Designing products, preparing for things, etc. We are trying to help our clients to come to a solution without having so much of a risk. Many companies nowadays are spending a lot of money on product development. It’s the only way to be competitive.*

“Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” – Carl Jung

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” – Albert Einstein

Everything we do with our products, we talk to different people… everything comes from different sources.

We want this really innovative practice… you have a design team as well.

In China, people are still afraid of making mistakes.** !!

You have to play with this fantasy world in order to come up with…

How do we come up with the innovations? Every time we do something, we need to come up with a way of being better, or being more competitive.* We do some research. We do market research, product research. It is something that we do… most people have made tons of mistakes and they have cost tons of money. And we can apply those mistakes to come up with a new innovative solution. Philips – shares knowledge and findings every month. These are all the technologies we are using right now.

Chart: understanding people & trends

Insight, forecast, foresight

Understand Chinese people, you will be able to develop products for them. If you understand the people, you will .. country itself, emerging values and needs. Education is a big business. … so if you see these, “all of these things are drivers” that if you keep in mind in your business, you will be able to come up with many innovations. The emotional aspect of it. People are very emotional, there are certain things that drive them.* That has a lot to do with it… in order to understand who you are doing business work and developing products… you have to get to know them well.  (!) This applies to China. This applies to business as well.

Businesses.. we have to listen.* Most of the times we don’t; most of the times… the census. Most people take for granted. We only have five.. and there are two of them. If we relaly understand how we sense the world, how our clients sense our companies, our business, how they feel about them, we would be able to come up with better solutions.*

We create user scenarios. For example, what would this guy be doing, he lost his car… where it is by creating a context out of the watch itself. By doing this like this, they have been able to capture another market they did not have before*

Before, parents would buy for their kids.. now, kids are the ones that really love technology. We have some profiles.. of people as well.

“If you really understand what a person is like, then you can .. “create something. You can figure out what he wants- “can help me do something that I do every single day in a better way.” “The problem that most people think innovation is about technological advanced things, and it’s not.”

“Innovation is just different ways of doing things: utilizing different resources, putting them all together, and improving people’s lives. That’s what people find innovative.”

Ex. A rice cooker. A rice cooker is an extremely boring product. I’ll just put rice cookers everywhere. As I was doing this, I found this one… a rice cooker is a pretty boring thing. We figured out that a way to be more creative is to give some feeling to it. We started thinking about how Chinese people consume the rice. Looking at how people are cooking, etc. Trying to understand how people eat the rice itself. With that, we came up with some interesting idea. Before today, most people were thinking it was going to take a few years for people to come… innovation and creativity comes from different steps… understanding that if you’re not afraid of making a mistake, you might come up with something really good.

They really listen to me. They really felt that they need to crank it up and turn on the power. From China, some from Beijing and some from China. And we turn on their creative and innovative powers.* So we turn it on… and these are the graphics we created… quite innovative. We borrowed in order to innovate some other technologies. We applied this to our product. Our product is not only a rice cooker. Make it an actual alarm clock. People are using this product for cooking as well. This is the product itself. The way it opens is very innovative. We won design awards for this.. it’s not so impressive, it’s not so picky… it has some heritage to it…

You guys see from the top, it kind of looks like a spoon. It was all considered on purpose. We talked about these things… the way it opens, as well. Touch it… etc. we borrow technology. This is the final image of the product. This is the end of it… so with these guys, I conclude this presentation, this case study

QUESTION

You mentioned a lot of steps for creativity, but very much from a product design perspective. Those of us not in product design.. maybe we provide services, etc .What do you think are the key things from your presentation that are applicable to a service organization? What steps would you be careful not to translate it?

I have had that question before. Most times when I talk about this with my clients, they think about the design aspect about it. We do the design aspect, but not collaboration. The way of resolving an issue… I’m going to create something. Creativity is not only designed… ways of solving issues. In an innovation aspect… etc. creativity is at play. Innovation is the same thing. If you can’t have an innovative way of teaching, then you can’t have kids go through school… When we do choose ways… understanding where the brand comes from , that’s what most people have to do to have successful businesses. When any company tries to penetrate any market, they need to understand who their clients are, what their clients’ needs are. User experience. The way services work. We do that as well. We create maps. It shows what the person will go through as they are going through the service. It can be done for any business.

QUESTION

From an HR management standpoint. One of the things my students have a problem with is letting go of their “face” and “honor”- how do you instill that ability to let go into that humble world? How to get them to let go of that

What we think works… we have given them samples of how companies grow out of nowhere and become multimillion dollar companies… They’re not afraid. These are the companies in the cell phone business. Whatever you guys are doing right now… you do it. If it doesn’t work again, I’ll hold your hand until you get it done correctly. When I was teaching… I saw that a lot. We had a class of 50 students… they’re very afraid of making mistakes… “I told you to think of a new solution” etc.

It doesn’t really mean that a drawing is a good solution. After that, the same thing. They come up with… design firm… do some sketching. Do you do many sketches?

QUESTION

Do you find that your Asian designer will do this?

They do. They have been educated wrong. Most people are uncreative, and innovative. You can play. As you grow up, things like those have to change. You are very open. You want to know. You are not afraid to be wrong.

In the creative world of design and innovation and companies… we should be the same way.*, where we should not be afraid of making a mistake.* However… if we take that risk, and we question the way things have been done, then we will be able to have new solutions..*

Students who have survived GaoKao, etc . – once they have been

QUESTION

How do you apply these same lessons to your own business? How do you stay creative internally?*

I have had three companies, but this is the most challenging… all those things have been a challenge. We always try to come up with new solutions. New products…