Ideas on making innovation work
Practical thinking on product innovation, commercialisation, design and the teams behind them.
apex relaunched
I don’t know what you do, but I think I may have finally figured out what it is that I do.
And, to be honest, I’m a bit fed up with pretending to be something I’m not.
So with the relaunch of Apex Ideas, I’ve decided to just focus on the thing I’m actually good at.
It’s a tiny corner of modern product development. Probably a tiny corner of business full stop.
But it’s the bit where, at the heart of it, there’s something physical.
Something that moves. Something that has to actually do something useful. And ideally, look good while it’s doing it.
That’s really where I sit. Somewhere between mechanical engineering and industrial design, inventing stuff on demand, working out how to manufacture it, protect it, and turn it into something people might actually want to buy.
18/9/26
Is your innovation moving at a snail’s pace?
There are lots of different reasons why innovation moves slowly in businesses. And, despite the picture, “walking home and squashing snails” probably isn’t the answer.
Although, strangely enough, one of the best ways I’ve found to get a stalled project moving again is to try and kill it.
Because suddenly people engage. People who haven’t really had much to say for weeks or months suddenly get very interested in the fact that the project might actually stop.
And quite often that tells you what the problem was in the first place.
It’s not necessarily that the design team are slow. It’s that, although everyone understands innovation cuts across sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing and the rest of the business, during the actual development process the project tends to spend most of its time with the people doing the designing.
Other departments may have agreed the brief, signed off the forecast and sat in the early meetings, but maintaining genuine involvement as the product develops is much harder.
Then eventually the project lands properly on someone else’s desk and suddenly they engage.
Which is when you get one of those deeply irritating moments every designer knows:
“Ah. We can’t sell that. It’s the wrong colour.”
The answer, of course, isn’t to keep threatening to kill projects. It’s to keep people genuinely involved while decisions are still being made.
Give people clear opportunities to contribute. Give them actual decisions to make. Put a timescale around those decisions.
And make the rules clear.
If you want to be involved, get involved. If you don’t make the decision, somebody else will make it for you.
And then you have to live with it.
22/9/26