The July 3, 2006 issue of Business Week has a story on how innovation happens at Samsung. Samsung created a Value Innovation Program and have identified key brainstorming practices. The following quotes should give you an idea how they go about solving problems. One key tenet: each project works against a fixed deadline. Another one: they bring together everyone at the beginning to thrash out differences.

Find that perfect balance of cost, innovation, and technology that makes a product great.

Every step of the way, team members drew what Samsung calls “value curves.” These are graphs that rank various attributes such as picture quality and design on a scale of 1 to 5, from outright bad to excellent.

The story also suggests that it is not enough to look at a competitor’s product and replicate it. In today’s competitive world a company has to redo its culture to stay in a leadership position and be able to release one great product after another.

One of the many interesting stories from They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, by Sir Harold Evans is the story of Samuel Insull. His innovation was in pricing. He worked on understanding how his customers would use electricity, and then devised a pricing method to meet the estimated need. A key part of his understanding was that he saw the peeks and valleys in the usage chart between the very different customer populations. His insight came to him because he looked at the entire system of generating and using electricity.

If you don’t yet know who Phil McKinney is, then you need to look him up. More importantly, you need to listen to his podcast, Killer Innovations. Phil’s insight into the innovation process provides you with knowledge you can use in your daily work.