Design of Innovation Processes: Flow from Idea to Market Launch with Higher Speed and Value, Time after Time

By Darrell Velegol

Design of Innovation Processes: Flow from Idea to Market Launch with Higher Speed and Value, Time after Time introduces the concept of seeing innovation as a type of process manufacturing operation and offers a coherent set of principles that will accelerate innovation in the chemical processing industries. The book provides actionable practices for innovating chemically related products and services faster, and with higher value. The author shows that by coordinating an Integrated Innovation Team (IIT) consisting of R&D, marketing, manufacturing, regulatory, toxicology, analytical, legal, finance, VP-level leadership, sustainability, and other functions, it's possible to increase innovation throughput.

The author, Dr. Darrell Velegol, Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Penn State University, sees ineffective innovation processes as the reason why chemical process industries are growing less than industries like digitech, hence he provides valuable information in this updated resource.

• Explains, in detail, how to form Integrated Innovation Teams (IIT)
• Helps identify bottlenecks where innovation processes might be stalling out
• Suggests valuable questions and multiple hypotheses (VQs and MHs) that help users ask clear questions and test against clearly stated hypotheses

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780323904667

Darrell Velegol

Info to be populated in this space Darrell Velegol attended West Virginia University for his BS in Chemical Engineering, and he earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 working with Professors John L. Anderson and Stephen Garoff. In 1998 Velegol won the Victor K. LaMer Award of the American Chemical Society for the best PhD in the field of Colloid & Surface Science. He continued with a post-doc in the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology at Carnegie Mellon, working under Professor Fred Lanni of the Biology Department. In June 1999 Velegol joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005. Velegol won an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, and has continued to be funded by NSF, DOE, EPA, PRF, the Air Force, and other organizations for his work with colloidal systems, including forces and stability, directed assembly, electrokinetic flows, colloidal motors, and chemically-driven transport. His research group uses a wide range of experimental and modeling approaches. In 2009 Velegol was promoted to Full Professor at Penn State. He has won numerous teaching and research awards, and he served as ABET accreditation coordinator in his department over many years. For his research in experimental and theoretical problems in the dynamics of complex colloidal particles, Velegol was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2011 and appointed as a Distinguished Professor at Penn State in 2012. He is a member of ACS, AIChE, AEA, AAAS, and ASEE. In part of his research, he conducts value-creating studies in colloidal systems. His expertise lies in chemically-driven transport (e.g., diffusiophoresis due to salt gradients and chemical gradients), colloidal motors (i.e., self-swimming particles), colloidal forces (e.g., van der Waals, electrostatic), nanoparticle stability and transport, and colloidal assembly fabrication (e.g., by particle lithography, or stimulate-quench-fuse methods). His research requires fundamental studies in colloidal forces, electrokinetic flow modeling, and instabilities in sedimentation operations. His lab group combines experiments (e.g., video microscopy, confocal microscopy, electron microscopy, Nanofabrication, synthesis, zeta potentials), numerics (e.g., Brownian dynamics simulations, eigenmode problems), and theory (e.g., hydrodynamics, electrokinetics, colloidal forces, mass transfer). More recently, he has started to develop Econochemistry and “chemical game theory”, a re-framing of classical game theory (e.g., from Economics and Political Science) which involves using chemical engineering principles to examine questions in collective decision making, power, trust and deception, and dialogue. He teaches a Chemical Engineering technical course CHE 444 in this new field. From Fall 2013 through the present, he has co-taught a MOOC called “Creativity, Innovation, and Change”, which has enrolled over 250,000 students from over 190 nations, among the 25 largest ever. And he has published numerous books, including “Wild Scholars” in 2011 about education, “CENTER” in 2013 about imagining great dreams and winning great victories, “Physics of Community” in 2015 about chemical game theory and decision making, and most recently “Colloidal Systems” in 2016 about technical fundamentals of colloid science. His goal at Penn State is to mentor students to imagine great dreams and win great victories. In 2017 he started the Knowlecular Processes Company, in order to extend both the technical and team ideas into industry, in order to increase the value and speed of research, engineering, and decision making. The aim is to help companies become the smartest innovators in their industry.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Overview. Use process manufacturing principles for innovation

Abstract

In this chapter, I’ll discuss the challenges to increasing throughput, and then I’ll take you on a rapid-fire tour of innovation process principles, highlighting some of the key concepts. I’ll leave the details and explanations for later chapters. If you don’t grasp everything in this chapter at this point that’s OK; we’ll spend the rest of the book unpacking the details. My personal journey as a student of innovation has been that I am not a person who naturally innovates quickly; however, I recognized this, became a student, and applied my abilities with processes and algorithms to the topic, to give some step-by-step recipes that you the reader might benefit from. My assertion is that to innovate well, you don’t need to be a genius or run into a huge streak of good luck. Innovation can happen by process, if the right recipe is used. Of course if you have genius ideas or hit a few positive events, that can help. But just as successful poker players win money even with poor cards on many hands, so you can innovate well even without a perfect situation.

Keywords

Process manufacturing; innovation process; research & development

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

—W. Edwards Deming.

You can’t have speed without process.

—John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco.

Always seek to marry the theory and the practice.

—Dave Velegol (Dad).

No products in 20 years … a case for needing an innovation process

The ideas had been in the Company’s R&D lab for more than 20 years—20 years! —with almost no commercial output. A dynamic new R&D director at the Company was promoted to move ideas from the lab to the market quickly. She had a smart and ambitious team, a supportive boss, but couldn’t quite find the path toward change. At first most people just thought, That’s just the way it is. You can’t rush innovation. It takes a long time.

By this time I had been a student of innovation for a few years and had started to frame innovation as a type of process manufacturing. My previous experience with numerous companies was that most innovation decisions were decided by gut feel rather than based on process manufacturing principles. I wondered whether applying fundamentals might help to improve the innovation process for this Company. I was hired to help, and we set out to try this approach. Although at the time (2017) I understood how a Chemical Process should be designed, I hadn’t yet fully envisioned how an Innovation Process should be designed. With time and practice, I’ve been able to assemble some of the pieces into a learnable and repeatable set of skills and recipes, which is the essence of this book.

As with any process, the goal is to get higher throughput¹,² (i.e., here, innovative offerings taken to sales) in a repeatable way, using less resources.³ In this book we go beyond just some team reorganization (i.e., expensive, lots of time, dubious change in results), or rearranging the chairs into a circle (i.e., no real change), or some similar cosmetic change. But at the same time, we don’t want to change everything at once, so that the team processes become chaotic. We want a step-by-step, end-to-end process.

In this book we go beyond just some team reorganization (i.e., expensive, lots of time, dubious change in results), or rearranging the chairs into a circle (i.e., no real change), or some similar cosmetic change. But at the same time, we don’t want to change everything at once, so that the team processes become chaotic. We want a step-by-step, end-to-end process.

The call for change is given in part in Fig. 1.1. If you have low innovation throughput, you aren’t even able to cover your fixed costs (e.g., buildings, parking lot, labs), and so the profit is negative (i.e., loss). As you increase your throughput, there comes a point at which your profit reaches zero (i.e., you break even), meaning that you have covered your fixed costs, and the operating costs are also paid for. As the innovation throughput increases, your innovation process is producing monetary profit for your company. Let’s say you reach a profitability at the level A in Fig. 1.1. Based on the relative scales of the given axes, this is roughly a 10% return on the fixed costs indicated for when throughput=0. Now let’s say that you want to double your profit (i.e., move to B). Here’s the magic of what Eliyahu M. Goldratt taught us: To double your profitability, you don’t need to double your throughput! In fact, given the relative scale of the graphs, we’ll need to increase throughput by only about 20%! That is, a 20% increase in innovation throughput will result in a 100% increase in monetary profit due to innovation! Here the profit versus n curve flattens for higher n.⁴ It might be otherwise, especially over a small range, and in that case the same principle holds.

Figure 1.1 The importance of throughput for monetary profit. To double your profitability (i.e., increase by 100%, going from A to B in the figure), you need to increase your throughput to the right by only about 20%.

How much is an increase in throughput speed worth for innovation? As discussed later in this chapter in the section on Monitoring, one day might be worth $10,000 or more in lost profit, not to mention the lost service you would have been providing for your customers! If you delay 10 days, that might be $100,000 gone forever. This is why it’s important to think in terms of improving delivery times by even days or small weeks—nudges can result in improved service and big dollars for your company.

In this chapter, I’ll discuss the challenges to increasing throughput, and then I’ll take you on a rapid-fire tour of innovation process principles, highlighting some of the key concepts. I’ll leave the details and explanations for later chapters. If you don’t grasp everything in this chapter at this point that’s OK; we’ll spend the rest of the book unpacking the details. My personal journey as a student of innovation has been that I am not a person who naturally innovates quickly; however, I recognized this, became a student, and applied my abilities with processes and algorithms to the topic, to give some step-by-step recipes that you the reader might benefit from. My assertion is that to innovate well, you don’t need to be a genius or run into a huge streak of good luck. Innovation can happen by process, if the right recipe is used. Of course if you have genius ideas or hit a few positive events, that can help. But just as successful poker players win money even with poor cards on many hands,⁵ so you can innovate well even without a perfect situation.

Core idea: go from genius, accident, or gut feel to repeatable processes

Here I’ll offer definitions⁶ of what I now see as innovation and profit, which I think are a bit more useful (and inspiring) than the usual definitions. First, let me define innovation:

Innovation is your gift of LOVE to your customers, in which you

1) hypothesize a vision of their future needs and wants,

2) express that vision in new offering prototypes,

3) test the prototypes with customers, iterating until a win is found,

4) and make it easy for them to attain the winning offering.

Some of my students and colleagues cringe a bit when they read gift of LOVE,⁷,⁸ but it’s important that the creators of the innovation recognize that their work has a great purpose beyond just money. Otherwise we arbitrage away part of the value and meaning of innovation! After all, innovators contribute magnificent advances to all of us. Importantly, this identification with a greater good builds morale in the innovation team.⁹,¹⁰ Next I’ll offer a definition of the word profit, which has a dirty connotation in many circles, but which I see as an extreme positive for everyone