In practice the development of new ideas and concepts are often a quite chaotic process without a clear structure and specific phases.

If however you want a more structured understanding of the innovation process, I recommend a paper on Service Design written by Stefan Moritz.

The paper is a guided tour in the evolving field of Service Design, but a lot of the paper will be useful for developing new concepts in general. Especially because of the very practical outline of the different phases and because of the very rich appendix with loads of methods – but also because most products will have a service element, when they are brought to market.

For the general understanding of the phases of concept development I recommend pages 122-149 (+ maybe the case study on pages 85-109) and the appendix from page 185 to 238.

The process described is very similar to the process I am using in my lectures. Unfortunately that method is described in a book, that is only in danish: Vinderkoncepter by Søren Merit & Trine Nielsen, but if you read danish, I strogly recommend that book.

One of the buzz-words in innovation these years is User Driven Innovation. In plain words user driven innovation is about developing things, that people need and like – and of course buy. The basic idea is to involve users in the innovations proces or observe them as preparation in order to get a deep and detailed understanding of the people, that we actually innovate for.

On Monday the 18th February we will take a closer look at different methods used in user driven innovation.

If you want to go a bit deeper in some of the methods, there is a brief description of 13 methods on Usability.gov. The descriptions is focused on testing web usability, but most of the methods can be applied in a lot of other contexts.

If you want to go really deep – more than necessary – you might want to read “Observing the user experience” by Mike Kuniavsky.

By the way, LEGO Mindstorms User Panel is a famous example of user involvement in the innovation proces.