Towards Disruptive Innovation in Incumbents by Student Design Teams

Abstract

Managing
disruptive innovation and exploitative innovation simultaneously seems to be a
serious challenge since both activities require a different mindset and
approach. Current methods, such as the Stage-Gate method, seem to favor
exploitative innovation above explorative innovation resulting in the need to
create better understanding on disruptive innovation and how to organize it in
parallel to exploitative innovation. The field of design sciences seems to
offer an interesting perspective regarding this issue. This paper reports on an
exploratory study in which 8 teams of MSc design students hosted within the
incumbents R&D department (FMCG) bring and demonstrate the value of design
thinking in the early stages of NPD. Findings suggests that 1) design students
are able to initiate awareness of what design can do; 2) student design teams
are able to deliver promising and disruptive product-market combinations and
associated prototypes; 3) the NPD-process of the students seems to reflect a
full prototype run of the companies stage gate process, be it by passing the
respective gates in a qualitative manner as opposed to the existing quantitative
criteria. The prototype, the supporting reasoning and the fact that NPD
employees have been witnessing its development seems to enable its acceptance
for further development. In the next stage we will build on these fledgling
findings by means of an action research project.