Crafting Future Innovations: The Network Structure of Ideas for Visionary Product Concepts.

While much innovation work is focused on pragmatic product concepts that solve a problem, at times the goal is instead to set out a vision for possible products of the future, such as with "concept cars" in automotive firms or the work of corporate innovation labs. Visionary product concepts—conveyed by verbal descriptions and visual prototypes—provide ideas from which subsequent innovations will be developed. The paradoxical tensions for these concepts are that they need to be open to incomplete convergence to a large set of ideas while still being coherent, and they must integrate both novelty and feasibility. Our exploratory research questions were: What practices support the generation of visionary product concepts? What are the relationships among the ideas that result? We studied 10 teams developing visionary product concepts and examined the links they made between ideas, discovering differences in network structure among them. Effective visionary concepts relied on three practices that together shifted from initial ideas, tightly linked novel ideas, and selectively integrated ideas for coherence. We contribute an understanding of visionary product concept generation practices that help to integrate paradoxical tensions between openness and coherence, and novelty and feasibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]