This simple statement by a veritable expert in this field (as opposed to my son’s father) had deeply impressed my son. Each time we go skiing and one of our family members is not satisfied with some external conditions, such as the slope or the snow, he quotes his instructor. The statement even turned into an earworm for all of us while going downhill.

As so often, simple, precise statements in a specific field of interest have a broader impact — some of them can be regarded as general wisdom. If we replace ‘slope’ with ‘situation’, we have a good example of a general pearl of wisdom: Not the situation must change — you must!

Most of us experience several situations each day we would like to change or rather not lived through altogether. Typically, we find explanations of why this situation emerged and why other people or circumstances are responsible for a potentially negative perception of this situation. Also typically, it’s not us who are responsible, but someone else. I’m not talking only about real problems happening in real life, I’m talking about our stream of consciousness that produces millions of different thoughts each day and creates this kind of (virtual) situations we then start assessing. Being honest with ourselves, we must admit that in most of these situations we don‘t feel responsible for any negative outcomes, but we blame other people, or the situation itself.

As we know from psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, everything we experience does not have to happen in real life in the exact way we experience it. Each individual has a slightly different perception of what is going on around her. What we see isn‘t what we get. What we see is a mixture of what we are capable to see, what we remember having seen before and — perhaps most interestingly — what we would like to see. However, a situation per se is a neutral element of life — it is as it is. It totally depends on ourselves how we interpret a situation, how we experience it. In other words: there is a multitude of ways in which we can experience one and the same situation.

Change Yourself Before You Try Changing The World!

Just give it a try: think about a situation you have experienced lately and your original assessment of it. Now, take a different perspective and try to interpret the situation anew. Does it work? I have been using calendar entries to continuously remind myself of the simple truth that it’s me who has to change, not the situation. It works.

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Traditionally, ideation and screening of first product ideas have focused on research, brainstorming, SWOT analysis, market and consumer trends, and so forth. All these activities imply certain hypotheses and more or less tangible perceptions of products or product components. This works fine, as long as the final product is a one-way product; i.e. once produced and sold it won’t change (other than to age and break, ultimately). However, smart things aren’t one-directional, but bi-directional: they communicate, they change, and therefore their effects on consumers are far more complex and variable than those of their “dumb” predecessors. The smarter a thing, or a group of things, is, the more complex the situations they will create for their environment and their users. The much-discussed self-driving cars which algorithms must decide whom to run over in case of an inevitable accident provide a good example of the complexity future products will create.

Smart Product Development For Smart Things

Now — what are the implications of smart things and the IoT on new product development? The answer is pretty easy — we just have to look at the discussions regarding the IoT: privacy, responsibility, sustainability, awareness, acceptance, relevance, and ethics. Is my data secure? Who takes the responsibility for data provenance? Do I want this thing to be smart? Do I accept a thing’s decision? Do things add value? Do others accept me using my smart thing? Can I defend using my smart thing against my beliefs?
We can sort these critical questions into three categories:

• philosophy (ethical aspects),
• sociology (responsibility/acceptance aspects) and
• psychology (awareness/relevance aspects).

Philosophy, sociology, and psychology are the “new” fields for benchmarking new product ideas. As distinct from present techniques of finding new product ideas, corporate innovation managers will have to broaden their scopes, and companies will have to adapt by hiring and training their innovation departments towards these fields of expertise. Today, only very few companies seem to have inherited this new way of thinking: just look at how Apple creates and markets its products: there is no talk of product features, but of sustainable production chains, of family accounts or enhanced well-being.

New Product Development In The Age Of Smart Things

Would you have thought that philosophy, sociology, and psychology would play a pivotal role in new product development? Could that mean that philosophers sleeping in ceramic jars now can afford posh apartments, or formerly unemployed sociologists can choose their employers, or psychologists leave their universities to actually develop new products? Does this require the enterprise to develop a new model, or to enter a new phase in its own evolution? And — will we see a lot more useful, meaningful, usable, and accepted products? I think so.

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Guy liefert dazu den Ratschlag von Bikshu Sangharakshita, Autor von ‘Essence of Zen’:

Try to discover what it is you most dislike in others, what you most often criticize and condemn them for. A little elementary self-analysis may reveal that those qualities are hidden in the depths of your own mind and that in criticizing others in this way you are, in fact, unconsciously criticizing yourself.

Klingt vernünftig. Aber nicht einfach. Und ausserdem muss ich dabei unwillkürlich an die Spezies der Motivationstrainer denken, die wie aufgezogene Hampelmännchen auf Bühnen herumspringen und offensichtlich genau vom Gegenteil überzeugt sind: dass nämlich das Auditorium überaus positive Erwartungen in sie hegt und sie diese daher noch übertreffen wollen.

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