“It’s a stylized value chain that helps organizations think more broadly about innovation, and it gives them a tool and a language system for talking about it and creating some building blocks for it,” Melissa Quinn, chief operations officer at Doblin, told the Chicago Tribune. “One of the philosophies we have is innovation is more science than art. There are actual methods and tools and ways to approach it more systematically than just lying on the floor in a dark room and trying to brainstorm ideas. We help companies build their innovation capabilities more systematically.”
The app provides different examples of innovations and how they impacted their respective industries – Netflix’s subscription model, for instance, is an example of innovation in the app’s configuration category. Nike’s expansion into technology with Nike+ is an example found in the app’s offering category, and Virgin’s expansion into the aerospace industry is found in the app’s experience category.
Doblin reports that the failure rate for innovation is at about 95 percent, and this app is intended to improve that figure.
“We want to be able to democratize it so that anybody can start using it as a tool,” Quinn said. "The book was sort of the first step in sharing the ideas. The app is a tool for making them actionable and actually being able to use the tool in your own innovation efforts.”
A free version of the app includes sketchpads, curated newsfeeds related to innovation, a profit calculator, and idea-tagging capabilities. A $19.99 version of the app allows users to share their ideas with colleagues and clients to receive feedback.
