Innovation Gone Awry: Products that Never Should Have Happened

I was directed to a web page listing the “15 Stupidest Products of All Time”(1), with the option to rank them from “really stupid” (low) to “No hope for the species” (high). Disclaimer: some of these products are not necessarily for polite company. However, most of them are good for a laugh.

Bald spots? No problem, there’s “spray on hair”; if you don’t like it, just shampoo it off. Carbonated soft drink not sweet enough? Soda Pop Top is a hard candy screw on top for your favorite sweet bubbly beverage. It adds even more sweetener and another layer of “flavor…” Two of the whackiest—for polite company, at least—are the Hawaii Hula Chair and the mobile treadmill.

The “Hawaii Hula Chair” looks something like an office chair. It has a unique (?) hula motor that rotates the seat cushion in a hula-like motion. It claims to tone your abs and middle section “while you sit.”

The mobile treadmill must be seen. It is a treadmill with wheels; you walk or jog on the treadmill and it moves down the road. Really. Truly. I’m not making this up…

Okay, now that you’re finished laughing… What happened? How did innovation—if I can even call it such—go awry? Let’s look first at the  Hawaii Hula Chair. This chair is made by a company called Perfect USA. They specialize in what I call “passive fitness gadgets.” They make gizmos that wiggle your ankles, jiggle your wrists, and wriggle your midsection (a fitness belt). I’m just guessing here, but I dare say that innovation went awry primarily because of too few ideas or two narrow a focus.  I visited their website to find that eight of their fifteen products on the website are wiggler-jigglers! They are all variations on a theme, and not a good theme at that.

The mobile treadmill or “SpeedFit SpeedMobile” is a different story altogether. The SpeedMobile is the brain-child of one Alex Astilean, a fitness trainer and inventor living in New York State. I researched the SpeedMobile enough to find out that Astilean is dead serious about developing it for alternative transportation. The SpeedMobile makes us laugh because, well, if we want to run or walk to our destination, let’s just run or walk. And if we want more speed, how about a bicycle? The more thoughtful among us might also shudder; what about the brakes? Are there brakes? What about uphill? Downhill? Steering? It looks like Astilean had input from one person: himself. Otherwise, he would have/should have/could have addressed some of these questions.

Certainly both of these products suffer from not having a process around innovation. In the case of the hula chair, a decent process around innovation and new products just might have revealed that the inventors hadn’t gathered enough ideas. And any decent innovation process should have immediately brought up some of the questions raised about the SpeedMobile.

It seems I can’t say this often enough: our Managing Innovation program provides the process that keeps innovation from going awry. The process is likened to a five-phase “innovation journey.” Right at the beginning of the journey, the Searching Phase, you hunt and gather ideas. But the Searching Phase is more than that; you focus your search, facilitate creativity, and identify your opportunities. In the second phase, the Exploring Phase, you begin investigating those ideas. I’d like to think that—between focusing the search, facilitating creativity, and investigating the ideas—someone would have decided that the hula chair was really stupid, or a better idea would have surfaced.

Each phase of the journey has an avatar who personifies the skills and mindset needed for that phase of the journey. Different people have different skill sets and mindsets and each of us leans more heavily towards one or two of these “Innovation Avatars.” I’m convinced that, if the inventor of the mobile treadmill had more input from a wider range of people, the results would have been different. The Alchemist types—the avatar for the Exploring Phase—would have investigated the ideas and asked some of the obvious questions. And the Judge types—the avatar for the Committing Phase—would have made or influenced the decision to move forward.

A sound process for innovation can weed out the bad ideas before they become the laughingstock of the internet. An innovation process can also refine good ideas by having input from many people representing all the “avatar types.” But most importantly, the Managing Innovation process can see your best ideas through to fruition. But then again, if everyone used the process, we wouldn’t have so much to laugh about, would we?

–Joel Kleinbaum

Which Avatar are you? Find out more about Managing Innovation and take our Avatar quiz.

(1) If you must, here’s a link to the entire article. However, you have been forewarned.