I. INTRODUCTION

As part of the Innovation Management course taught by Tilo Peters during the spring 2016 semester, we were asked to re-conceive a music video in a creative manner. For this exercise, we were required to apply the innovation concepts and management tools we had learned throughout the lectures. The project called for us to select a song on which to innovate by May 19th 2016, which we initially took to mean that we should base our project off a song. However, we realized that the critical product was a video and as such we planned to choose the song after having committed to a certain video. In the course of coming up with ideas for different concepts, we came back to understand that the innovation process must not necessarily only refer to the product but can also refer to the business model or delivery method. As such, we came up with a strategy to deliver our project in an innovative, for the market-new, method. In this report, we will discuss the process of how we created our deliverables for this course.

II. DEFINING OUR GOALS

One of the most important parts of a project is defining its goal. Without a clear goal, we cannot achieve a better result than monkeys typing on a keyboard. In the context of this course, the goal is quite straightforward. We must work on a project that fulfils the requirements as highlighted in the assignment statement. Now, we needed to define what constitutes a good result. In other words: how do we compare two projects and decide which one is the best? In utilitarian terms, the best project is the one that gets us a good grade with the least amount of work. However, on a deeper and more meaningful level, we realized our goal was also to experiment with innovation methods and see which one might work for us and what we could learn from this.

III. DEFINING OUR PROCESS

To work towards our goals, we wanted to try to follow the ideas presented by Sana Elias in his lecture on Creating Innovative Strategies. One of his core messages we sought to follow were rules to encourage a positive outcome from brainstorming. Four principle ideas were to focus on quantity of different ideas, not giving criticism of an idea until after the session, encouraging wild ideas and combining ideas to improve them. Using this strategy, we thought we would best be able to take advantage of the three group members. During the brainstorming sessions, we generated ideas without regard to the many real limitations such as resources, time and money that we faced. This was beneficial as it allowed us to consider (some) ideas that didn’t make sense in the end. After this initial process, we filtered our ideas by means of ruling on which limitations were the most critical and then continued with our best guess of what would work. Having selected our idea, we then reevaluated the context to see if any other improvements could be made. In this way, we aimed to manage our idea creation and idea selection in a systematic manner. We also realized that the initial idea selection went through a different filter when compared to an idea at the later stage of innovation. For instance, at the initial points, one considers the resources and limitations of following through on an idea and at the later stages, one considers the overall strategy goals that can be achieved with an idea. Of course, we also made sure to remember the witticism that in innovation, everything is a remix!

IV. SELECTING THE IDEA

When considering what makes a good idea in the context of this project, we determined several factors. For instance, we determined that the technical buyer, the commercial buyer and the end user are the same person - our Professor, Tilo Peters. Knowing who the critical audience was gave us confidence in starting to choose an idea. In the context of this course on innovation and with a professor as our audience, we realized that innovating would be difficult. Many ideas that might seem innovative to us have likely been presented many times before. This led us to realize that our market is evolving slowly as we expect the professor to receive similar projects every year and that the pace of technological evolution is relatively slow when compared to the length of the course. Given these points, we determined that we were in trying to innovate in an environment termed “calm waters” by Fernando Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla in their Harvard Business Review article “The Half-Truth of First-Mover Advantage”. The thesis of the essay is that in these so-called calm waters, first movers tend to have a strong advantage. Hence, we determined that doing something radically different or completely unexpected would be key to success. Still, with limited time and resources at our disposal, we decided against a process of prototyping over several iterations and instead, chose to innovate on the final delivery of the report and video itself. We assumed our classmates, or rather, our competitors, would be likely to focus on a process of prototyping. As a result, we determined that innovating on the business model or delivery method would be the path with the least competition thereby increasing the chances of our product differentiating itself. Therefore, after having briefly considered several different approaches to making an innovative video including creating Persian music through a European interpretation, crowd-sourcing on Reddit and recording old music but reimaging it in today’s world, we settled on the idea of changing how the product is delivered. Our first idea consisted of asking the professor to pay a small fee to be able to grade our homework, in the process paying us to grant them a license for our material. Although we considered this to be a novel idea, we soon rejected it as the risk to our grades was quite high if the professor either didn’t want to or or couldn’t pay up. Instead, we considered embedding some advertisements around our written work as well as our video material. Traditionally, digital advertisments must been served many times before a sizeable income can be generated from the impressions. However, since one can know a priori who the audience will be, one can sell high targeted advertising spaces. To test this approach, we built a simple webpage The last step in our project was therefore to create the content which is called for in the assignment – a music video. Inspired by our unconventional delivery approach, we decided to film the process in which we reached our new idea. In the end, we chose Sigue Sigue Sputnik's aptly-named song, "Success", for the music video and added a few advertisements!

V. CONCLUSION

Innovation is hard. Especially if one does not know the goal, the customer or what the competition is. We discovered it is crucial to answer these questions before trying anything out. Even guesses are better than blindly trying to come up with something new. Even though fixing goals is crucial, in order to come up with good ideas one must trying to think around the goals instead of going for the most obvious choice. In the end, one may still ask if one defined the right goals. Did one identify the customer's need? How can one adapt solutions from other industries to the problem at hand? As non-experts in the field of making educative videos, our small team does not expect our project approach to succeed. However, this status may allow us to produce a product that is different and perhaps even more innovative than what experts would have produced. All this can occur when one tries to redefine the industry and how it operates!