The truth must exist in everyday life.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Barn Ventures” (ID :gucangchanpinjia), author Su Jun.
There are a lot of people talking about product innovation, and there are very few people landing.
At the 2019 millet and Shun Capital Investment Annual Meeting, the founder and CEO of Zhimi Technology, Su Jun, and everyone said his “explosive view.”
More importantly, he shared an important topic with everyone:
How to use “explosive thinking” to make product innovation.
Growth comes from opportunities,Opportunity comes from blank
In order to find opportunities, I often observe the life of the citizens. The truth must exist in daily life.
One of them I found a phenomenon. The daily life of most family houses in China is not very neat. After I went to many very good and very expensive houses, I found that it was often the case.
I know that Chinese people have a habit: they like to take a lot of things, but they don’t like to throw things. So the home naturally becomes like this. But now, with the upgrade of consumption, everyone wants the family to be as clean and tidy as IKEA.
Whenever I see such a comparison, I feel particularly excited. It means that all consumer goods in China can be re-doed according to the standards of developed countries.
There are three huge opportunities for future development in China. These three opportunities are what Chen Dongsheng said during the lecture. He has a very macro vision. He said that the three major opportunities in the future are big consumption, intelligence and health.
Why is there a big consumption? It is very simple. When you have a very strong voice, it is natural to have a big consumption of world influence. China’s economy is now the second largest in the world and will soon become the world’s number one. This is a signal.
A more interesting contradiction. When we mention Japan, we will think of Sony, Panasonic, Toyota, and Honda. When we mention Germany, we will think of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. When we mention the United States, we may think of Apple, Disney, Coca-Cola. But what kind of consumer goods do you think of when you mention China?
Consumer brand is synonymous with the image of the country, it is not only a consumerDemand is also a huge rigid demand for the rise of a country.
I especially like the Sony brand. I took a look at its development and read all the books and literature about it. It has been from 1955 until now, and the brand value has been established through a product line that is innovative.
I was watching our electrical products one day, because I bought too many Sony branded appliances, I found that my consumption on this brand is the biggest, even far more than other brands, because I am with His emotions have been tied for nearly 30 years, and I am constantly buying its products. For example, its transistor radio, digital audio CD player, so he is such an innovative product.
Apple is also a typical example.
Between 1984 and 1988, Jobs left Apple. When Apple lost, he didn’t have some very powerful innovations, and its brand value would be affected. Because the foundation of Apple is very good, when it re-innovates, it can rise quickly.
The core value chain of product innovation is that product innovation can shape the brand, generate value feedback, promote enterprise growth, and more importantly, continue product innovation, promote the brand into the stratosphere, and enhance the company’s ability to resist risks.
We know that the process of taking off and landing is actually very expensive. When it reaches a height, it requires only a small amount of force to maintain a smooth flight in the stratosphere. The same is true for enterprises. When you establish brand beliefs with users, your company’s ability to resist risks will be strengthened.
The underlying logic of explosive thinking, divergent diversity becomes convergence focus
In this era, product innovation has undergone a big change. For example, Apple has a very important influence on innovative methods. It is to turn the divergent diversity of the past into a convergence focus, and its final result greatly enhances the product. s efficiency.
I used to do industrial design. When communicating with Party A, you found a lot of such phenomena:
Remember that once I saw a traditional mobile phone manufacturer, the owner of the Shouban factory was very proud to tell me that picking up a large mobile phone with 150 mobile phones may mean the price of 2 million mobile phones. But when I saw this kind of hand on the table, I was shocked because it was very divergent, and each looks different. In fact, for the designer, this is a highly divergent state.
But Apple is different. It can even reach an annual sales volume of 100-200 million units through several products. In the past, we couldn’t imagine that a product alone could generate market power. We didn’t have this idea in the past, but suddenly we found it through this example, so we found that this model converges, but the efficiency of innovation is Great improvement.
MacThis product from 2004 to today, if we use our traditional divergent thinking, the company’s designers are actually very satisfied.
But we see why this kind of product is produced?
Because Apple is the company that starts with the idea that the Mac is a desktop productivity tool, its best form is to have very good display, very good computing power, and a piece of floating on the desktop. screen.
According to this idea, you will find that its product iteration direction is very clear, so he does not need to swing left and right, it will continue to break forward in this direction, whether it is material, process, computing power, or cooling method.
And like the MacBook notebook, the thickness is thinner, the interface is getting smaller, the weight is getting lighter, what is the appeal behind it? Why is the type of his interface smaller?
Let it be compatible with the Type-C interface, even today only retains a Type-C interface. In fact, it initially thought that the computer is a tool for extending human capabilities, and it is a tool for extending people with computational power. What does the tool need to do? Such tools do not require line restrictions, but “full wireless” and “full data.”
Apple has evolved its products to today, whether it’s a battery’s long-term battery life or a streamlined interface, its purpose is to push it to the ultimate goal of “no interface.” Because of the cable tie, this tool is not free, so it is from the beginning, the nature of the object is considering this problem, so the designer does not have any entanglement, and iteratively continues.
For example, a popcorn mill air purifier.
This product is very good at sales, and when it breaks through 5 million units, our choice is to actively iterate it.
First of all, the internal process level is very good, and the internal products of the product are presented. Our laser particle sensor can provide users with very accurate numerical display of pm2.5 close to professional instruments. step.
Everyone sees that there is no major change in the outside, but we have iterated to this one every year, and every detail has been optimized. We are constantly optimizing at the bottom of the technology, pushing the purifier to a smaller size, quieter, higher performance, and at the same time more powerful purification capabilities.
This product is actually the ultimate in many details, such as its air duct, we have used the most extreme polishing process, in order to reduce the noise generated by the friction between the air and the inner wall.
The idea of our evolutionary products advances in the direction of simplicity, exquisiteness, power and humanity. At this time, you will find that when the explosives appear, your innovative thinking will not sway, you will always Evolution in that direction.
Focused product innovation not only gets explosive, but also talent structure optimization and talent trainingA reasonable way to raise.
For example, when we start thinking about things clearly, we use a very convergent method to make products. It is like going to a field with a needle tip. At this time, we will get a positive feedback with a high probability. The products are sold well, the scale is large, the whole system runs smoothly, the employees have a higher sense of accomplishment, then we will focus more, and then you will produce better products.
The way of the past is to diverge when you come up. For example, if you design 10 out of the first plan, you will try to get a trial first. Then the result of trial and error will probably get a negative feedback. Because it is difficult for you to get a blast, it is difficult to get positive feedback from the market, it is difficult to create a very good value for employees.
Next, because the market feedback is not good enough, it is likely to generate greater risks. For example, the initial design is not ideal, and the next 20 or 30 plans? If we follow this line of thinking, in fact, employees and teams will always work in a negative state, and human effects will be seriously dispersed and consumed.
We imagine that in a focused team, and in a divergent team, if the employee stays for five years, and finally the people coming out of the team, the difference is great.
There is a key piece of data. The company’s industrial design team has only 21 people, but they are the best engineers in the world. They are a way of focusing on positive feedback, constantly honing such a highly efficient team.
Then we are deeper. In fact, we can use the method of biological positive feedback to think about this problem. There is a very important law in biology called forward law. If you just use supply to satisfy simple needs, new needs, and then supply, then one of the results we get is “survival” – survival.
But everyone knows that in the long process of the whole biological world, the organism does not stay in the original place, it is from a single cell multi-cell, amphibious breastfeeding, it is caused by a kind of mutation due to some kind of power. These success factors have a positive driving force and promotion for the whole system, and then they have achieved greater success. So we see the cycle of “success” and “motivation”, the so-called positive feedback ability, and finally form a noun called “evolution” – evolution.
If you look at this with the principle of positive feedback from biology, its practical focus on product innovation can enable companies to get positive feedback, which is the most important thing.
The essence of product innovation, such as Apple has a very interesting product, called Apple III, this machine is a classic failure case. At the beginning, Jobs said that it should not be equipped with a fan, we should use natural cooling methods. Because the fan is very noisy and consumes a lot of power, we should kill the fan. We should make it simple and elegant, highly compact, like a piece of art in life.
The final result of this product is: first, very expensive, the price is about $3,500. Second, due to poor heat dissipation, the technology at the time did not support such heat dissipation, and finally the temperature was so high that the disk was taken out and melted. This product is undoubtedly a very very failed product.
Let’s take a look at Apple’s 12-inch MacBook, which uses a chip-scale package to make the entire computer’s motherboard. It uses multi-layer batteries and shaped batteries to make the largest possible capacity, hoping to maintain a day’s energy consumption. He hopes that this thing is not attached, for example, completely through the body cooling, instead of using a fan, exactly the same as the Apple III, it is to create an elegant, compact, quiet human intelligence extension tool.
But this product is very controversial, and the MacBook 12 has failed because it has been removed. But these innovative thinking on its products directly affect today’s MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, and these products have been greatly inspired.
But why have you experienced failures again and again, are they still so persistent? Because they know where the right direction of this thing is, they continue to persist and strive to break through. So I think that the core of true innovation is actually grasping the essence of things. It is the beginning of the question: What exactly do we want? What is the final outcome we want?
Therefore, it is necessary to insist on the essence of the product with simple, clear and focused ideas.