Hello everyone. Today we will talk about Part 3 of our Product Innovations presentation. Developing product innovations and again to reconfirm, we are looking at holistic framework of innovation that includes not only product, but service innovation, business model innovation, brand experience, innovation through sustainability, and overall internal process innovations. And we'll focus in this presentation, on the last few aspects that we've talked about, of product innovation. So, we've already talked about platforms, aesthetics, price, materials, safety, and ergonomics. And today we will talk about packaging, we'll talk about graphics, performance, and then technology. And the last two are sort of related to each other but let's talk about these four in part 3 of this presentation. So let's start with packaging. You walk around in any store, and in this case, what you see here is a grocery store where they sell food and a whole set of other items as well. But you see a lot of the things that we see are outside. In some cases, there might be some vegetables and some fruits that might not be packaged. But in very, very, very many cases, when you go into stores, it's different if you go to a farmer's market or an outdoors market, things are packaged. Things are put into bags, into boxes, into cans and those forms of packaging can also be something that you can create some good, interesting new innovations around. One of the things in this case is packaging is a bit of a problem from an environmental perspective because it a thing that has a shortest amount of life. You buy a product, the product might last you two years, five years, six months, but the packaging itself lasts only a few minutes, right? You pick it up once, you pick it up from the store, I take it home, you open it. There are some people who like to keep packaging for a long time, but in many cases it is tossed out instantly. So packaging is important from the time that something is created in a factory, that it's put in a box, it's safe for transportation, for display, to prevent vandalism, etcetera. But it is a problem from prospective consumer because it takes very little time to toss out. So, what kind of innovations can we create in packaging? For the most part, very much of the packaging uses cardboard, right. This essentially is pulp, it's paper, very often we see styrofoam, or it's also referred to as EPS or expanded polystyrene. Polystyrene is a material that's foamed to create something like this, which is light, which can create a safe packaging material that then goes into the cardboard boxes. In some cases you'll see certain polyethylene foam, this is also foam that's used to ship delicate devices. Sometimes you see paper pulp in a different form. So this is an egg carton that uses paper as well, in many cases to prevent food from damaging. These are papayas that are transported and then displayed in little polyethylene bags. And then of course, the packaging that you might use to take groceries home. So very often you have plastic bags or paper bags, some innovations around this could be creating packaging or stuff to take home which are made out of jute as you see in the image on the left. Or what you see on the right is actually packaging, or bags that are made from recycled packaging. So can we find a second life for some of the packaging? Because packaging has a short life, can we extend the life of the packaging by creating things like this, by creating bags that you could use. So, these are some of the innovations that you could think about in packaging. Changing materials, but also extending the life of the packaging in some way. Here, what you see is another form of what you can think about in terms of innovations, is graphics. Can you create innovations by graphics? Now, in case of a complex product like this, which is a laser printer, you will have a series of occasions but you need to communicate something to the user, to the person who's going to actually use the printer. What might be some locations? So for example you have a large interaction area here, right. So there's a display, there's some buttons, you might need to open up the front. You may need to pick something up over here which is a paper. You might need to open the back that looks like a handle. Here's an on/off switch. So there's several areas on the device that need some communicative expression. Something that will tell people what to do with it. You also need maybe the name of the company to be on the product somewhere. So all of those locations make graphics play a big role. And what kind of innovations can you come up with refers to graphics? So, in some cases what happens is you have buttons. So this clearly, you can see that in this case, of this device there's a blue button that tells you how to turn on the product. Clearly the on/off switch is the most used, it's probably the most important, has to be the most predominantly visible. You also have the name of the company, that also has to be predominantly displayed for branding purposes. But you can see that these graphics play a really important role in communicating what the product does. So when you think of innovations, you can think of how can you use graphics to get the meaning across. Certain company, one case is Another company actually is Ikea. These companies try to create all the messaging just by icons without using language. So one thing to keep in mind, is if you're creating a product that you expect to have a global market for, you have to keep in mind, it can't be Spanish, it can't be English, it can't be in any language, it has to be through icons. And icons can be a form of universal language. So when you think of graphics, think of who is the audience and what kind of innovations can you come up with that reaches a broad audience that you might have in mind. In addition to print graphics there also are digital graphics. So if it is something that is on a car, which gives you mileage but also gives you amperage, gives your speed, how do you design, what kind of innovations can you come up with in these graphics as well? In many cases so, this what you see here, this form of a display, this is a digital display, but its designed to look like an analog display, right. The same thing here, this also gives you miles per hour. So both of these are different ways of showing speed, one is very digital, one is very analog. So when you think of expressing information digitally, can you use analog devices? In some ways it's good to do that because it is something people are familiar with, it's something that goes back to history. So when you design graphics, when you think of innovations around graphics, keep in mind who are users, what are they used to, and what might be a good way to do these kinds of digital graphics. The third aspect of product innovations is performance. And performance essentially refers to all the features and functions on that product that it'll help you do what it does. And companies that do incremental innovations which are small innovations that happen over time to improve the product in some way. They often focus on performance, right. So, can I for example, in case of a computer, can I offer some more services in terms of a little faster speed? Can I increase the amount of data that it can store? Can I have a new operating system that does something different? Can I do an upgrade to the operating system? Can I change the fact that it's not a keyboard that's connected by a cable but it's wireless? Can I create a mouse that has more features and functions? So those kinds of performance characteristics, those kind of performance aspects of the device, are also a form of innovation. What kind of new performance characteristics can I give these products, as I keep coming up with version A, version B, version C, version D, etcetera, etcetera. So we talked about the enormous amount of innovations that happen from a technical perspective, on microprocessors on chips. These microprocessors go into the computers and each time there's a new microprocessor that's designed, you can put that in the next version of the product, thereby increasing the performance and having a new implemental innovation in place for that product. That same thing could be applied to storage devices, right. So this could be a hard drive in a laptop, in a desktop computer, by coming up with new technologies, new performance characteristics, faster drives, drives with more storage, drives that work more quietly. All those kinds of innovations lead to better performance and lead to more incremental innovations overall for the device itself. The next one is technology, and it's the last one. And technology in many ways connects back to performance, right. So we have, we present new technologies, we come up with new forms of expressing these technologies because we want better performance from these products. So technology is important not in it's own sake, but because it allows more features and functions and better performance on the products themselves. So one of the things that is useful to do in terms of thinking of, what kind of new and emerging technologies may I be able to use to create the next innovation in my product? So something that some of my students do it as in our state university, is create this what we call a biaxial map, right. So you have two axes, you have the vertical axis and the horizontal axis, the Y and the X. And you can think of, when you looking at new technologies, which ones may I be able to use for my product, my device? You could look at several parameters, you could look at several criteria. What is really expensive? So the high cost ones and the low cost ones. What is really cutting edge, it's still being developed, it doesn't quite exist yet true, tried, and tested all technologies. So when you look at this, you can see for example nano robots, these are some things that are really expensive and not yet developed, they're still in early stages of development. On the other hand, you have some cosmetics that already exist. So this is a map that looks at nanotechnologies which could be usable. So if you are interested in creating new a product now, a new innovation now but you only use some nanotechnology, there's no time to develop it further, you want to keep the cost low, you want to do it immediately, you might want to focus in this quadrant, right. But if you want something that's really cutting edge, you have some time and you have money, then you can focus towards here where you can explore emerging technologies for what you're working on. So this is how you can decide what sorts of technologies can I use to come up with innovations that I'm thinking about that I'm coming up with. Another example of this similar kind of a thing, where here in this case, you have all the technologies listed from 1 to 14. These are relevant, these are irrelevant, so may not be necessarily existing or not existing, but could be what's specific or appropriate for your project that you're working on. And then here is existing technologies and emerging, like we talked about in the last case. And then, again, for us, you can say okay, so for me, the technologies that I really want to consider are these because I want something that is relevant, but I don't care if it's emerging or it's existent. But if you want to focus more on things that I want to really explore, something that happened in the future, you can be in this space, right. So depending upon your goals of what you want to do with technology, you can decide how to strategize and what are the best technologies or the most appropriate technologies to use to get the innovations that you're looking for, that you need. Very often institutions do technology road mapping. And what could be some technologies of the future, so in this case, this is The Future Brought to You by NASA, which is the aeronautical agency. And so they have, what you see here, they have a series of, in this diagram, a series of technologies that are demonstrated here. So for example, NASA is looking at, so this is number one, they are looking at propulsion systems. So what could be some future technologies that could be used for propulsion, so to send rockets up in space, to send satellites up in space, to send things to interstellar devices to go to other planets.There could be things that deal with propulsion, there could be things that deal with energy storage, there could be robotics. So what you see here in this landscape, and you can click on the, you can look at the link, and you can go to this website to look at this interactive diagram. You will get to see a series of new technologies that can then be useful from the perspective of NASA as you move forward. So this is, this could be referred to as something of a technology mapping, some kind of a road map, that looks at what could be some technologies of the future, that might help NASA approach its mission of looking at what's happening elsewhere in the Universe apart from Earth. So what we have covered in this presentation today is this aspect from packaging to graphics to performance and technology and like I mentioned earlier these two are somewhat related because it is through new technologies that you can get specific kinds of performance. So what worked out in these three presentations on product innovation, part 1, part 2, and part 3, is a series of different mechanisms, processes, approaches from platforms to technology and everything in between, that can help you create innovative experiences for products. So this wraps up the presentation on product innovations. It includes the part 1, part 2, and part 3 that we looked at, that covers the gamut of possibilities that you can utilize to come up with product innovations. And one thing you can keep in mind is, you may not need to have one massive breakthrough disruptive crazy innovation that'll launch the product into the market. If you do, small incremental things in each of those you can have pretty significant impact in the long run. So keep that in mind as you think of product innovations. Doesn't have to be one big thing, it could be a series of little things that could also have significant impact. So that covers our presentation on product innovations. Thank you.
