DMNews originally posted my commentary on the iPhone 4 issues in the July 26th issue. They were kind enough to let us repost our comments here to share with our readers.

Ever since the antenna problems in the iPhone 4 were first uncovered, there’s been a plethora of experts and consumers insisting Apple is making mistakes that will cause long-lasting damage to the brand.

One mistake they made was briefly mentioned by Steve Jobs at the company’s press conference: the break in the external antenna that forms the casing clearly indicates where to put your finger to drop a call. What could have been a product feature to help users from interrupting the signal strength was unexplained and misunderstood by the public.
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Most product executives are constantly struggling to match their product investments to their companies’ innovation goals.

Join us on Wednesday for the fourth of our five-part webinar series on Transparency, and you can learn how you can maximize your return on product investments by developing the right products for the right markets at the right time, all the time. In this webinar, Roy Wildeman, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss Product Portfolio trends and highlight best practices for better, faster, more effective product development.
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My previous post in this series described a method for making data-driven product decisions. But the planning process doesn’t stop once those decisions are signed off. In fact, it may be just the beginning. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Customer feedback uncovered during the development phase could challenge planners’ assumptions
2. Sudden or unexpected changes can occur in the market place, economy or competitive landscape

And so, the fifth and final ingredient in our recipe is: Make the innovation process iterative.

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I’m especially pleased to see Forrester analyst Tom Grant applying Agile principles, visibility and collaboration into his own research. Tom’s conducting research on thought leadership in which the entire process will be visible online and the online community can have input into the research methodology.

I’d like to encourage our readers to participate in Tom’s research on thought-leadership at http://community.forrester.com/docs/DOC-3383. He’s already got a great dialog happening on what thought leadership is and how you measure it. Community input will be used to adjust the methodology and outcome of Tom’s research.

So far in this series of posts, I’ve described three ingredients for turning innovation into a core business process:

1. Create an integrated product innovation framework
2. Replace the many truths with a single, shared truth
3. Embrace the voice of your customer

This trio lays the foundation: It defines the process ground rules. It ensures that there’s transparency throughout the organization. And it opens the door to discovering what the market really needs.

The fourth ingredient ties it all together, and is simply this: Make objective decisions based on what is best for the company.

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