This year’s Consumer Electronics Show offered a preview of consumer products arising from new, more inclusive approaches to innovation.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the largest global tradeshow of its kind, touted by its producers, the U.S.-based Consumer Technology Association, as “the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies”. This year’s event, held recently in Las Vegas, Nevada, drew some 184,000 people. Amidst the ubiquitous AI-powered gadgets and robots, a particular trend stood out: Companies are taking new approaches to product development – essentially, being more innovative about innovation.
Chinese white-goods maker Haier, for example, showed a washing machine that reads the tags sewn into care labels on clothing and selects the right wash cycle. The machine resulted from cross-pollination of Haier’s product development with that of its GE Appliances (GEA) subsidiary. GEA has a subsidiary of its own, FirstBuild, dedicated co-creation. It focuses on crowdsourcing and testing design ideas via an online forum, then manufactures small batches of products in a micro-factory.
Early this year, GEA launched a FirstBuild start-up called Giddy, commercialising the FirstBuild innovation process with a co-creation SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. GEA sees the potential for this model to “disrupt the corporate environment”. According to Giddy CEO Taylor Dawson, “Companies are continuing to evolve the way they approach innovation and are more willing to go outside their four walls to generate good ideas.”
Japan’s Panasonic, along with new TVs, cameras, Blu-Ray players and other consumer electronics, also rolled out an innovation initiative at CES. The idea, exemplified by a deep-learning smart home project called HomeX, is to facilitate innovation through collaboration between different parts of the company. As The Economist explains, Panasonic “wants its divisions to work together rather than stay in silos, and is also collecting more data to understand customers’ needs” to develop new features. Last year Panasonic appointed Wataru Baba from SAP as Vice President of Corporate Innovation. Part of his focus is the creation of a “pre-packaged innovation method.”
CES also offered ample evidence of growing collaboration between different companies, notably tech giants such as Google and Amazon. It appears that with the addition of more and more “smart” features being added to objects, the consumer products sector is following a path similar to that of automotive, where the borders between manufacturing and technology firms blur.
