Thoughts from FEI Europe

Earlier this month I spent a few days at FEI Europe in Copenhagen. For those who don't know FEI Europe is the annual gathering of practitioners interested in Front-End Innovation, normally held in and around February and always in a different European city. It is organised by the guys from IRR in the USA, who are the people responsible for the much bigger FEI USA.

This European event attracted 220+ delegates from all over Europe and the Middle East, and there were 8 main sponsors, of which Pure Insight was one. I don't have any data to back this up, but I am pretty certain there were more people at the corresponding event, which took place in Zurich in 2012, and I KNOW there were more sponsors last year than this.

Why were we there?

First of all, we were sponsoring the event, and secondly I had a speaking slot at the pre-conference workshops on Monday morning.

I'm sure at some point in time in my working life I will find the right time for a speech at one of these things, but at the moment I am not convinced that Monday morning and before lunch is the best time for one of these things, as you are always battling against people's stomachs!

The actual talk was about Front-End Innovation (surprise, surprise), but it focussed on some work we had been doing with Nedbank in South Africa. They want to develop a new product area for start-up businesses in their market, but the elements that make up this sort of product are offered by every other bank in the region and therefore they are all competing in a red ocean.

We worked with them to help them identify value curves for their products and also who the most important customer is in their value chain. We also taught them how to contextually interview their most important customer, as well as carrying out and analysing six paired interviews for them.

The output from this work was a to be value curve that identified a number of new opportunity spaces they had not previously identified. They are currently working these up in value propositions they will launch to the market later this year - lets's see what happens from there.

I can't share with you the slides from this case study, but I can share the slides from the rest of my presentation. Click HERE if you want to view them.

What else was there to see at FEI Europe?

There was a good presentation from Vince Veron, who is Head of Design at Coca Cola and was formerly one of Jonny Ive's team at Apple. He talked about integration = innovation, and how the design team worked with finance, packaging etc to create designs that excite and delight the consumer. The output is the new Coke Freestyle Vending machine, which you can find on youtube if you search. It was an interesting and engaging presentation, and certainly better than the BMW chap from 2012, who just bought a concept car into the presentation and everyone went "wow". I am sure, though, that if someone from finance had made the same presentation, they would have said they had worked with design and packaging and got the same result. The key insight from the whole presentation is that you cannot innovate in isolation and it is much easier to do it together than apart!

Also at FEI was an interesting presentation from Nicola Millard at BT, who talked about their innovation spaces and how they are using internal crowdsourcing to find better ways of doing things - they encourage their engineers to upload videos of them working on problems to an internal youtube site so other people in the field can see how to solve the same problem, without the need for another manual or training. I have seen the AA do the same thing, a sort of professional internal network sharing system.

There was also some interesting stuff from the former CEO of 3M, who talked about their innovation story so far and how "Six sigma nearly killed their innovation process", well surprise, surprise!!!

Overall FEI is one of those conferences you need to be at if you work in innovation. I think it is declining and it has always been the poor relation of it's sister event in the USA. It would be great if not all the stories were not "good news stories"and if a practitioner stood up and said "we messed up big time and this is what we learnt from it", but I guess that never really happens at these sorts of events.