innovation playground Idris Mootee

10 Big Reasons Why Most Innovative Products / Services Fail? How Many Of Them Are Avoidable?

Why innovative new products fail? Because marketers believe they know the industry, the product market and the customer and their needs.  And after going through cycles of input gathering and any orginal innovative ideas were ultimately turned into something that a lot like their existing products with minor improvisation. Sounds familiar?

Too many firms “innovate” with very few real insight about the market, their customers, or customers’ aspirations, needs or wants. Rather than go out and understand what customers need and expect, they rely on anecdotal evidence and market research, or simply perform some "ethngographic" study performed by traditional marekting research companies. "ethnographic" field work performed withour an anthropologist is like goging to bungee jump without an instructor.  This is a ley failure point of the first order, like jogging on the rooftop blindly down a path that ends off the building.

What leads some innovative products and servies to succeed and others to fail? The answer to this question encompasses a number of different factors. In some cases, the product cannot deliver the promised performance, capability or attract sufficient interest.

Even if potential can be demonstrated early on, it may take a substantial amount of time to reach the projected adoption figures. Or the product’s innovative feature is being replicated by an existing product as an added function and there is no need for a stand alone new product. Or the economics of the new product is not attractive enough and cannot hit a critical mass. Insight into the minds of the early adopters can greatly reduce the risks of failure, which is generally due to one or more of the following reasons:

1. The innovative new products are not shown in the right user context thus creating a misunderstanding of the applications
2. The new technologies behind the innovative product are not linked to an exciting and worthwhile market opportunity or are too niche
3. The innovative new products are not positioned within any product category and also fail to open up a completely new category
4. There is insufficient knowledge and resources for marketers to drive consumer adoption
5. The core functions of the innovative new products cannot support themselves as stand alone products and only work as features.
6. The promised performance of the innovative new product does not materialize and does not provide enough customer value
7. The innovative new products were distributed through the wrong channel and compromise the value propositions
8. The innovative new products perform only a small function and can be included by others in other products as an additional feature thus diminishing the demand
9. The expectation of consumers adopting the new products is over estimated
10. Products are pushed to a skeptical customer group and fail to neutralize the perceived risks associated with the new product.

The innovative new products require an ecosystem of support which did not exist or were not built fast enough. Determining the suitability of market research for innovative new products or services is a challenge. Insights are not only needed in the early phase of ideas gathering, it is equally critical at the pilot stage. Many traditional market research methods are inherently more tactically focused (orientation on the customers of today) and lead to the development of small improvements in existing products and the big ideas eventually diluted. Read more of this in the next big INSIGHT issue of M/I/S/C available in bookstores in 28 countries.

Apple's Biggest Challenge Is What To Do With $100 Billion. Just Write A Check And Buy Sony Before They Further Destroy More Value.

Apple's current biggest problem is not the next iPhone. It is the 100 billion dollar problem. Microsoft had been criticized for years for having too much cash and not putting them to use. They eventually started paying dividend starting 2003. It is not easy to deploy them in a way that creates the expecatation of return Apple's investors are expecting. I think they will eventually start paying dividend.

With Apple's war chest hitting $100 billion soon (currently around $98 billion but was originally estimated to be $60 billion) investors are asking the same question: What are you doing with the money or return it to shareholders? Putting that kind of money to work is not easy. It is over $100 in cash per share. $100 billion is roughly the same as California's 2012-2013 state budget and can literally buy a few countries or pay for a year of student loan for every college student in America.

Apple's core business is like printing money. Apple recorded a $16 billion increase in cash sequentially and there is no sign of slowing down with 66% rise in revenue with 36% rising expenses. That makes Apple the most valuable company at $300+ billion, which is close to the sum of the market cap of three computer giants: Microsoft ($200.2 billion), HP ($72.5 billion) and Dell ($29.2 billion).

Unfortunate big acquisitions don’t always work because of many reasons. And there is no magic formula for successful strategic transformation post acquisitions and most companies ended up underperforming post acquisitions. The problem is the inability to articulate the strategic logic of an acquisition and developing an organization and cultural integration plan.

At Idea Couture, we help acquirers in visualizing the future state and show how the pieces fit together in a very tangible (and credible) way. The future strategy is manifested in a well-articulated way showing its value creation potential. It is done through applied design thinking. Power Point cannot do the job. We bring the future state to the present to excite shareholders, employees and customers.

Apple’s history of acquisition has always been late stage start-ups that bring unique capabilities or technologies rather than revenue. With $100 billion you can literally buy up every early-stage start-up you want. Google has $44.5 billion for comparison.

Apple can use the money to purchase all patents over the years developed by Kodak, Research In Motion, Xerox Parc and Erickson and that can only account to a maximum 15-20% of the cash that they hold, but that patent portfolio allow them to sue anyone competing in their space in the next ten years.

Or Apple can use the money to buy up HP and Research In Motion and swiftly end Windows dominance in the enterprise market? Or buy Amazon and Netflix to reinvent and dominate content distribution.

Or Apple can just buy Sony? Funny Sony was looking at buying Apple when the company was at its worse shape in 1995. I still have a strategy deck I produced in 1996 about how Sony can leverage pieces of Apple and how the deal can create value for Sony. Now Apple could easily afford to buy Sony with its market value around $18 billion. If I am Apple’s CEO, that’s what I’ll do. Sony has been poorly managed from a corporate strategy level but does have great technologies, products, brand and talents. I would sell the studio business and concentrate on entertainment appliances. This deal can immediate further increase Apple's enterprise value. The integration part would be a nightmare.

Or just make it easy, Apple can acquire with cash HTC, Sony Ericksson, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola, Nintendo which together has a combined value of roughly $93 billion. That's a lot of fun to figure out what you can do with these companies. And you still have $7 billion left to play with. Perhaps acquire New Balance for $400mm, Jobs probably would like that idea if he is still around. We miss him.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.

The Dirty Secret Of "Creativity"? And What They Didn't Want To Tell You. Welcome to the M/I/S/C Creativity Issue!

What is creativity? How does it happen? How do we prepare ourselves for it? Or can you at all? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker, or do you only need the right side of your brain? Can you be rational and logical while being creative? I dedicated a whole issue of M/I/S/C/ to "Creativity" and this is now in bookstores in 25 countries.

Scott Adams, a popular cartoonist suggested, "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Mistake is part of anything and applied creativity is no exception, so I can be doing something uncreative and still makes mistakes.

Someone once suggested, “Creativity can never be achieved by imitations, and what is already been introduced.” That’s also not true. Some of the best creative pieces in science, art and engineering are results of imitations and experimentations. It is naïve to say creativity means not imitating.

Creative people usually have a few features that distinguish them from others. First, they posses both a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and well-developed expressive skills (verbal, body movement or drawing or combination of all). Academics and creative managers like to describe creativity as a process, I think that is just nonsense. I belong to the school of Vinacke, which believes that creative thinking in the arts does not follow any models.

Gestalt philosophers like Wertheimer have also asserted that the process of creative thinking is an integrated line of thought that does not lend itself to the framework implied by the steps of a model. There is no process. It is your brain working. Despite that, many design or creative companies will tell you that they have a four-step process. Don’t be fooled: these are marketing constructs designed by marketers to make clients feel comfortable with what is essentially a messy, inscrutable phenomenon. Leave the boardroom and ask the creative department if they follow a process and you’ll get a very different answer. Or no answer at all.

Trying to reduce creativity to a linear process is counter-intuitive. Real creativity emerges from managed chaos and applied fuzzy logic. It’s never about careful calculations. It is something we will never be able to understand for a long time.

Lots of crazy things happened in this world in 2011, we cannot change the past, but let's use our creativity to make everyday a productive one and make a world a better place. Wishing all readers of Innovation Playground and all my Facebook friends 2012 a year full of HAPPINESS and BLESSINGS!!!

Why Traditional Apporach To Business Transformation Don't Work Anymore?

Over 60% of companies out there are operating on a dated buisness model and 20% operating with a mental model that had expired for more than 5 years. There are little reasons for those 20% of companies to survie another 5 years or even 3 and for the other 60% they have a short window of opportunity to design and orchestrate their transformation.

Rapid changes in external environment, consumer behavior, global economics and disruptive technologies are throwing off the most rigor business strategies and the best trained managers. Although everyone expect to see big changes ahead but people reacts differently to change.

Many people become accustomed to the status quo and don't want to alter the way things are being done -- regardless of the potential benefits or the disruptive threats from emerging competition. For many, fear of the unknowns and the concerned about the ramifications on their careers are barriers to acknowlege the need for change. People don't like change. And winning belongs to those who thrive with change.

Success for operating in a neck-breaking speed and unknown environment often comes from the ability to drive the proper (or mulitple) transformation at different critical points -- for industry breakpoints. “Business as usual” simply means "end of a business or an industry." Being able to reimainge and reinvent offerings and models are critical to addressing economic volatility and staying on top of the market.

Business transformation traditionally takes the form of unfreezing to refreezing and briding the gaps in capabilities, mindset and performance. And these changes which can take the form of business strategy, management style, culture, organization design and business processes.  One most popular model is the classic model proposed by Lewin which argues that the process of change involves three stages 1/ unfreezing, 2/ change and 3/ refreezing. This model was valuable in recognizing the importance of not only new learning, but also “unlearning” old attitudes, habits and behavior patterns. Today many question the practicality of this model suggesting that a “refreeze” implies a resistance to future change and partucular the future is uncertain.

The Idea Couture Brand-Driven Transformation Model has a strong future oritentation and focused on bringing strategic foresights and organization insights to reimage futures. It uses a lot of Design Thinking principles and makes the process very tangible and collaborative. It is a process of organzation co-creation which people put their stake on what shared destinies they wanted to particiapte in creating and thus releasing energy in the process. It will take 80 Power Point slides to illustrate the process, a high-level view of this model is captured by the following formula: Successful Brand-Driven Business Transformation = P+N+C+M+I+F

• P = Develop a perspective of the future(s) informed by strategic foresights (both customer and technology contexts) and deep organizational insights;
• N = Develop a co-created brand narrative that inspired people of possibilities and put purpsoe at the core of the story;
• C = Develop a compelling case for the need for change developed and shared by all executives, investors, employees and B2B business partners;
• M = Develop a practical means to tie innovation (roadmap) and projects to the desired future(s);
• I = Design an incentive systems that are aligned to identify and encourage appropriate behaviors compatible with the desired future;
• F = Develop feedback mechanism for each stage of the process to monitor progress and provide input for continuous improvement.

Any Business Transformation process is painful. The way many organisations manage change or transformation using existing model is facing the challenge of speed. They are too slow and by the time they refreeze, the market has shifted and they need another transformation. The other important issue is key decisions are made in isolation and the change piece comes later which I argue often is too late. The future of Business Transformation is a co-created one.

Creativity And Innovation In Small And Medium Size Firms

I am in Egypt this week and trying to finish three big Power Point decks, writing 6 documents and finished reading 63 documents with a slow Internet connection. And trying to finalize the editorial content for March 2012 issue of my magazine. It is not easy.

The December issue of M/I/S/C/ is the big "Creativity" issue. It will be out in 25 countries in the second or third week of Dec. This is thickest issue so far  and will also available on iPad. I like the idea of "Creativity" as a magazine theme but also wanted to make sure they are relevant to business and not just pure creativity.

People often ask what is creativity? How does it happen? How do we prepare ourselves for it? Or can you be prepared for it? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker, or do you only need the right side of your brain? Does it require for other profession that are usually not associated with creativity too? There is no simple answer.

Creative individuals have a few features that distinguish them from their peers. First, they possess both a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and with well-developed skills to express them through different medium. And second, they find their work intrinsically motivating and enjoy the creative process not only interested in the outcome.

Creative people also tend to have a “discovery” orientation, which leads them to view situations from different perspectives, to find problems, and to ask novel questions and to avoid group-think. Almost every entrepreneur/start-up person is a creative person at heart, because it requires a lot of creativity to start and manage a new business (with the exception of franchise business). It is harder to find creativity in large firms not because there are not enough creative people, but the organization design and business processes make it almost impossible to be creative. And for them, creativity means finding ways to work around the system but not creating new ways to meet customer needs.

For that reason, many believe that small firms are more creative and innovative than larger firms. Not only they are more creative, they are more agile and nimble. But what about mid-size firm? There are companies that are too small to be big and too big to be small?

Medium size companies tend to lack resources and expertise whereas larger firms tend to have more resources and knowledge (including hiring consultants) but more vulnerable to external shock and any radical change. People think the sheer availability of resources means larger firms should be able to innovate along product, channel, process, and paradigm more effectively. That's not true at all. Any large established businesses carry their own old mental models and operational legacies make them hard to adjust to any changes - in particularly new ideas that cannibalize their core businesses.


I am not saying it is easier for small firms to innovate, it is not for the lack of creativity. Small medium companies tend to suffer a lack of knowledge cross-pollination and carry a higher degrees of path dependency. There are basically three strategies for innovation for small and medium size firms:

1. Advancing creativity and technological competitiveness based on new processes to deliver better products
2. Advancing technological and design creativity to design innovative new products
3. Advancing creativity and design thinking to turn products into experiences

Generally these three distinct models identify three trajectories for innovation that are largely separate from one another, although some complementarities exists. Medium size firms often suffer due to a lack of strategy or expertise to develop a robust strategy.  Their innovation in processes are often the results of the need to search for greater flexibility and minimize resource requirement. The high performance small and medium enterprises are usually the results of access to strategic advice combined their speed and agility in execution.

What Every Innovation Manager Needs To Know About Value Creation? Let's Start With Something Simple.

What is value creation? Something commonly used in strategic discussions but not well understood among managers as well as business or design school students. If a company needs to reinvent itself, they need put value creation first. If a disrupter wants to attack an industry leader, it needs to put value creation first. If your company want to grow your way to greatness, put value creation first. If your company wants to stay relevant, put value creation first.

There are many practical issues that affect value: from the nature of owners and investors to the shifting perception and behavior of the financial market, smart and foolish ways to invest, divest, reorganize and acquire etc. At the very core, it is about how companies create value by investing capital to generate future cash flows at higher rates of return than their cost of capital. And how different ownership structures and organization designs could affect value. Here I am talking about one level below.

For business managers, technologists and design professionals this means creating value with everyday decision. Value is the source of competitive differentiation. Here are a few ideas for you to think about:

• Every innovation manager needs to know or consider constantly how each new ideas will benefit consumers and in what way whether helping them to perform, produce, organize certain things or feel certain way. Value can be both tangible and intangible. Customer value needs to be created first before you can think about capturing them. Value creationn before value capture.

• Every innovation manager must understand and better than their competitors at understanding where, how and why value is created and destroyed within your industry and your company. Not only by business unit, by product, by customer, by channel, by market, by technology, or whatever that best reveal your formula that drives value creation.

• Every innovation manager needs to know how their decisions will enable the organization to create, deliver and capture new value from change and foresight. By bringing new perspectives, they can help executives to make better future-informed decisions that create value.
• Every innovation managers need to stay focused on the objective of creating value through purposeful innovation. Don’t be distracted by other management measurements and indicators that don’t build organizations (they are for managing organizations, not building them) and avoid the trap of spend time managing the lagging indicator rather than creating real value for the future.
• Every innovation manager needs to remember that creating value is also about managing expectations. They need to accept that even great ideas will fall flat and some mediocre ideas will be successful and timing can be a key factor. Avoid "short-termism" and confusing product extension is innovation. The best way we can build successful innovation that delivers growth is by putting value creation first.

A misunderstanding of “value” is causing many companies to be “recklessly cautious” or "creatively overwhelm" and forgetting that they are competing for tomorrow’s market and cash flow – not yesterdays. And by their “short-termism” they are passing up terrific opportunities to create long-term value. “Short-termism” is not good for innovation.

Random Thoughts On Muggles, Magic And Design Thinking.

For those of you who are not familiar with Muggles, they are people who are incapable of magic, and who are usually unaware of the wizarding world. Design Thinking is sort of like wizardries, it takes certain type of people with the certain type of training, Hogwarts or Harvard.

When Muggles think Design Thinking, they see nothing new there and they believe it has been around for a long time, it basically means they still don’t get it and may never will. They hardly see the real challenge, it is simply not to invent a better mouse traps. We care capable of doing more and being more innovative. The power of our imagaination is what it is.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

Design Thinkin is alot more than lateral thinking and creativity de Bono style or ad agency style brainstorming. Design Thinking fills the gap created by management theories and business schools which analytical thinking and data-driven decision making override intuition where empathy is never part of the equation.

Companies have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of strategic making, leadership styles and management model. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards Design Thinking. Design Thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. It takes a certain type of people who are comfortable with different thinking styles. I’ve read so much poorly written papers about design thinking and many of them don’t even grab the basic principles and its true transformational power.

Often people talk narrowly about design and prototyping, but Design Thinking is not just bringing the power of empathetic creative problem-solving to bear on a human needs, it is an organization culture, a mindset, a framework and a toolkit to solve complex wicked problems that we created. It provides a balance between the needs to create customer value, shareholder return and social value. Design Thinking is strategic.

Everyone comes to me hoping to join Idea Couture claims they are creative, they have great ideas and can turn ideas into great products and create new markets. Go deeper and I ask the how… there comes the sound of silence. Great Idea, great products, great business is a tagline, not a strategy. Design Thinking can be applied to fill the gaps of traditional strategic thinking. The increasingly complex needs of the business need a new toolkit and Design Thinking is exactly what is needed. It helps to uncover new needs, creatively redefine value, reconfiguration of value-chain activities, develop compelling brand narratives and create markets that are yet to exist. When my friend Roger Martin advocates Design Thinking, he is not talking about ethnography or prototyping; he is talking about a whole new management paradigm.

Everything is designed—from behavior, systems, organizations to public policies. Design is universal. The dirty secrets of why how big corporations destroy shareholder value are actually no secrets. Everyone from the board of directors to the frontline employees knows 'why' a company is 'stuck.' Because their structures and management systems are so rigid and can’t adapt to changing market shifts or respond to any disruptions; their over focus on core competencies and optimization that prevent them to see beyond the core and; fail to see and anticipate the future and even if they see it they fail to act on it. This is where Design Thinking comes into play.

Everyone understands the need to make money and everyone hope they can do magic. And everyday many moguls are trying to create magic with cute packaging and fancy taglines and hoping to make a lot of money, off course it won’t work. The real magic lies in understanding deep human desire and unmet needs and anticipate emerging behavior, not every company truly understands how to do it. They teach those at the Ministry of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

Design Thinking Can Help Organizations Making The Quantum Leap In Strategic Innovation.

Lately I have been meeting with dozens of potential candidates who are seriously interested and passionate about design thinking and understand the role it plays in transforming organizations, design thinking can help companies to make the next quantum jump in organization, human and social evolution? It is a new managerial logic as well as competitive logic and in then years every business school will have this in their core curriculum. The problem is there are far more people interested in it and not many understand the ‘what’ and ‘how’. I am getting an average of 10 resumes a week and most people think design thinking is super cool.

The relationship between design thinking, system thinking and strategic innovation are pretty muddy and many conversersation and writing are mostly around the simple notions of observational research, prototyping and design. We’ve beaten that one to death long time ago and many of these conversations are missing the point.

I don’t think design thinking has come to a point when it is over hyped nor it has come to a point where people truly understand what it means and how to apply it. There is a design perspective, an engineer perspective and a business perspective to it. The challenge for many is the ‘how’, Idea Couture is the only company that has taken this to a practical level for business applications, and beyond telling people you need to be creative. Here is good piece on design thinking from Will Novosedlik's blog.

So far there are no empirical studies that look at a directed implementation of design thinking in business with the aim of improving strategic competitiveness, innovation capability and business performance. We don’t usually ask for a business case of HR, legal, compliances, risk management or strategy department, why are we asking for design thinking investment business case? Another reason for lack of concrete evidence is that is it is hard (and wrong) to compartmentalize design thinking into the format of a method, process or tool. Rather the approach should resemble an emergent learning journey where rapid experimentation, broadening of new perspectives and challenging of dogmas needs to be at the fore.

Design thinking is an emerging discipline and our work to date is a work-in-progress. It is not about getting brilliant ideas from the minds of geniuses or creative superstars. We don’t want creative superstars; we want people who understand cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration and the importance of rigor, play, balance and discipline to create elegant objects, solutions and systems.

I have a great respect for Tim Brown who introduced the word design thinking although we have a very different definition and approach to it. He is a designer at heart and I am a strategist. Our jobs are similar which is to help identify patterns where others see complexity and confusion; we synthesize ideas from seemingly disparate fragments; and uncover solutions new opportunities. Design thinking is a method in which genius is not needed, just ordinary people with a lot of commonsense and empathy.

It has been a very productive week in Vienna talking to many interesting people including the organizer of Vienna Design Week and I am thinking about dong a special feature for our next issue. Vienna is an interesting city where it has a history of music and engineering, the two very different or similar domains depend how you look at it.

In addition to music, Austria has made a name for itself with the electronic engineering of customized electronics like microprocessors and integrated circuits for airbags, ABS braking systems and components for airplanes and high-speed trains etc.

I was staying at the top floor of Das Triest, loving it. The hotel is in the fourth district, which is set back about ten minutes straight walk from the city centre. An old hotel that was transformed into a luxurious, warm and unique contemporary design hotel by Sir Terence Conran, it was the first design hotel in Austria. The building was originally used as a stable for horses pulling stagecoaches between Vienna and Trieste - hence its name, "City of Trieste." The hotel design provides a sharp contrast to the city 19th-century Art Nouveau architecture. It has a lovely courtyard garden, which reflects Sir Terence Conran design philosophy and give a sense of Viennese flair with a little English touch. Perfect for Viennese summer party.

I literally had most of my meetings in the courtyard. It is very popular event venue for the entertainment business. I am thinking of hosting our next client's event there. Client innovation workshops with sacher tort for coffee time to be followed by a Mozart concert. I think that’s a really good idea.

Seven Steps To Better Brainstorming. Or May Be There Are More. Is Brainstorming The Right Word?

Let’s start with this…this is not the best title. I really don’t like the word "brainstorming." It means a group of people getting together to generate a lot of deas for the solution of a problem. In 1953 Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the method in his book called Applied Imagination, he proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming. Fully the book title is called Applied Imagination, which is very appropriate, and the trick is on the “Applied” part.

The authors of BRAINSTEERING by Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne pointed out the problem with brainstorming today is a bunch of people selected (for technical or political reasons) and put together in a room and an external moderator asking people to think outside the box. Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow which I am in full agreement. By taking a more well planned approach can get better outcome from their ideas/solutions generating workshops investments.

I’ve seen how many moderators have no ideas of how large organization functions or any training on advanced group problem solving techniques, design thinking concepts and tools or system thinking or sense-making, and that’s usually a recipe for failure.

The McKinsey Quarterly article “Seven steps to better brainstorming,” taken from the author’s new book BRAINSTEERING, attempts to address some of these issues. They called it “Brainsteering,” it may be another buzzword but anything is better than brainstorming.  Here are their key recommendations from the authors and I’ve added my comments for readers’ considerations:

• Know Your Organization’s Decision-Making Criteria - Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas. Are there any absolute restrictions or limitations, for example?

My advice is this may be appropriate in some instances, generally speaking it puts way too much constrains on the creative process. For those of who have worked in large organizations, we know how difficult and almost impossible to know the criteria for decisions making. It is a political process as well as a realization process and it is not what is written down in any company’s operating manual. I think this is unrealistic.  Plus the fact that the change in external environment can quickly change the risks appetite of senior executives and any criteria we impose may be not valid at all. I would say ignore this one.

• Ask The Right Questions - Decades of academic research shows that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques (“Go for quantity—the greater the number of ideas, the greater the likelihood of winners!”) are inferior to approaches that provide more structure. Build your workshop around a series of “right questions” that your team will explore in small groups during a series of idea generation sessions. The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective.

I would say this is the number one most important part in any creative exercise.  How we practice this at Idea Couture is we apply Design Thinking techniques in helping them to frame and identify the issues, better framing means new perspectives and better solutions. There is a lot of science and art in doing this. We use visual sense making, customer journey mapping, strategic foresight scenarios and other 5 or 6 techniques to get the job done.

Strategic framing can involve using many different lenses, and one example would be time. Time could be a frame of reference. Whether we are talking about past, present, and future. Younger people frames the world in optimistic terms where mature people are realistic as they come to terms with many things in life. An organization’s past history carry forward certain orthodoxies that also limit how they see things. 

• Choose The Right People - They suggest only picking people who can answer the questions you’re asking. As obvious as these sounds, it’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart.

I understand the authors’ point, but it is about balance. I don’t think we can ignore the fact that decision-making in large organizational setting is always a political process. We need a balance of domain knowledge, outsider perspectives, and project stakeholders in order to get momentum. This is a necessary evil. You cannot ignore people who have a prominent voice in an organization and part of the power circle. That’s life.

• Divide and conquer - When assign people to subgroups, it’s important to isolate “idea crushers” in their own subgroup. These people are otherwise suitable for the workshop but, intentionally or not; prevent others from suggesting good ideas. They come in three varieties: bosses, “big mouths,” and subject matter experts. The boss’s presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. Big mouths take up air time, intimidate the less confident, and give everyone else an excuse to be lazy. Subject matter experts can squelch new ideas because everyone defers to their presumed superior wisdom, even if they are biased or have incomplete knowledge of the issue at hand.

The authors have a lot of good suggestions here about carefully picking the people and assign them to the group and managing "big mouths" is a very good one. This requires a little bit of advance planning but our experiences says it is an important step that we should not ignore.  Yes, brainstorming needs strategic planning.

One big big one the authors have missed is the role of social technologies play in the idea generation and management value chain. This has a big implications on how ideas are collected, socialized and activated. Ideas are far better when they are built on top of one another, at that point, you can't even chase it back to where the idea was originated from. That’s another post, next week perhaps.

 

Design Thinking Is Failed Experiment? How Can That Be Because The Experiments Have Barely Started? Bruce, Not Too Fast!

This is my response to Bruce Nussbaum’s lastest Fast Company’s blog declaring “Design Thinking” is over and that he is moving on to something new. He is calling it "Creative Quotient" which is really his new book, I was wondering why he would make that statement. People hardly fully understand what Design Thinking is, now he wants to introduce another idea. Not too fast! I was writing this while waiting for the airport to clear as President Obama Air Force One was there and they closed down the runway.

Bruce writes “The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ. I am writing a book about Creative Intelligence, due out from Harper Collins in fall 2012…...”

He can move on but for sure but not me (Sorry Bruce, I really can't agree with you on this one.)  Although there is some truth there about consultants quick to turn any ideas or practices into ‘processes’ that companies can buy out of a box and consultants can help them implement in 60 days. Most of the time they don’t even know what they are doing. Even if they do, they often ignore the soft side with an over emphasis on the hard side. On that note, the comment is equally true if apply to any practices. Processes are important and that’s how large organizations function, it is easy to say let’s improve our creative quotient throughout the organizations and we will be fine. For me, Design Thinking is much getting more solid that ever as we develop them further into business practices and if fully integrated in the organization culture decision-making and support toolkit, it can be very powerful.

On the other hand, “Creative Quotient” is like saying let’s is more creative. Sometimes I wish I could detach the word ‘creative’ from ‘design thinking.’ I know I cannot, but design thinking is not all above creativity. There is a lot more than being creative. When Bruce suggested that the success rate for design thinking processes was very low. I am not sure he can make that statement. It is like saying the success rate for strategic thinking processes was very low. We need to look at the maturity lifecycle of how it is implemented and to what extend it is embraced my organizations and well as aligned with the company’s business strategies. It is large small change effort, not a quick process redesign. Let’s wait for at least five to eight years to make that conclusion. A case in point, it took the academics and the business community more than 25 years before someone publicly declared the “Death of Strategic Planning”.

The increased adoption of multidisciplinary approaches to business problem solving and including the application of “Design Thinking” (but not exclusively) helps organizations fill a critical and often over looked knowledge gaps and solve some of information deficiencies. Problem. By combining the two organizations establish more comprehensive and ultimately competitive bodies of actionable knowledge and insights that reflect and avoid from pitfalls of linear strategic planning. This approach does not discount or diminish the value of traditional business methods in problem solving– rather – by leveraging the best qualities of both business and design thinking- it establishes a more sensitive, powerful and potent analytical tool and resulting in a more holistic perspective and learning experience that is meaningful, valid and agile.

"Design Thinking" is here to stay. “Design Thinking” allows us to provide a systemic response to the challenges that we all face. Not designing bandages or tactics that ultimately create more problems than they are designed to solve. “Design Thinking” brings empathy into the core of strategy making and allows rapid decision-makings with insufficient data, which is where most people structure with in innovation.

“Design Thinking” also has a positive effect on changing organizational culture – reveals and introduces new behaviors and challenges people to communicate and learn in new ways – while empowering them (through the adoption of tools, techniques, and culture) to think differently. But this is NOT the “Design Thinking” they teach in design schools. So don’t be confused.

The world of MBAs likes the quantitative assurance even though they know it is just a false sense of confidence. Microsoft Excel is only marginally more accurate than a crystal ball or tarot cards. I’ve seen many smart MBAs struggle with innovation be in the process or the problem identification and solving approach and most of all they don’t understand very core values of design thinking. This is why innovation is so hard for management consultants. Equally it is hard for the designers waving their banners saying ‘design thiking here’ and what they are selling is raw creativity or cute ideas or prety designs. Not solutions to wicked problems in an increasing complex world. We have enough buzzwords, there’s no need to introduce a new one. Let’s stick with “Design Thinking” for now.

"Build to Fail" And "Fail To Build" Can Have Different Meanings. To Fail Is Part Of To Build. To Fail Is To Hep To Build To Last. I Hope I'm Not Confusing You.

In London this week, fully packed with meetings. Staying at St. Marins Lane and it is one of my favourite hotels in London. Both for style and location even I am not the saturday night crowd that hangs out in the cocktail lounge. I am getting a lot of work done writing and editing for the next issue of M/I/S/C. Deadline is a few days away.

We love to read successful innovation and design stories of how a cool idea turns into great success story. The reality is most cute or good ideas don’t make it to the executive’s desk and even for those who did, most products and services launched to the market ended up failed. What good is innovation if the failure rate is so high and how we wonder how it would impact our credibility or career future? Is it a good thing after all? Do we know why we fail? Most don’t have any idea.

How do we anticipating failing as part of design thinking? How fast should be fail? How soon should we fail? What’s the right mindset? “Dream to Fail” or “Fail to Dream?” Or should be thinking about how to “Build to Fail” or “Fail to Last?” What is right approach to embrace a culture of failure? Fail often and fail faster is a bad idea, I know how easy it is for people to say, “oh you should fail more and fail often”. That means you’re no good in innovation management or don’t understand how to manage innovation risks.

Business schools do not celebrate failure and design schools spend too little time understand how not to fail. If you've failed too much and too often then it doesn’t reflect well on you. And if you’ve never failed, it means you never tried anything innovative. And if you tell me your innovation success rate is 70% or 80%, you don’t know what innovation is all about.That's part of the reason I wanted to publish M/I/S/C Magazine.

So what design thinking has to do with failing forward? Design thinking is about helping business managers (with no design training) to understand “play” and "exploring white space." We should question the practice of segregating design thinking solely for use by so-called “design professionals.” What’s the social bases of separating design and business?

There are semantic gaps, conceptual blocks, and social and definition barriers between design and business. What are the first stops teaching business managers the concepts of design thinking? And what’s design thinking? Most common description includes application of ethnographic research, strategic foresight, sense-making, multidisciplinary teams, strategic framming, visual mapping, strategic prototyping and iteration and form-giving. So how can entire organizations benefit from design thinking in their everyday jobs?

With some exceptions, both design industry and business community is lacking an understanding of design thinking and its potential role in business strategies and decisions making. Design thinking is a mind-set, common languages, a practice, a set of tools as well as a framework to generate more and better solutions or options. It is where D-School meets B-School.

It is not creative brainstorming; in fact it is quite the opposite of that. Design thinking is a systematic way to identify and frame issues; develop multiple solution options; test them with rapid prototypes; and iterate on them. To prototyping is to strategize.

With The Emerging Of The New "Object-Culture" - Meanings Are Sought Through Social Identities, Visual Information and Interfaces / Interactions

There are objects that I love for many different reasons. They range from my Leicas to my JBL speakers, LV bags, Prada shoes and Mac computers. Objects that are highly functional can also be highly personal … expressive, reliable and artistic. Designers, brand marketers and product development executives often have to deal with the philosophical dilemmas such as subject vs. object; humanity vs. nature; function vs. style; and simplicity vs. complexity. Every time we come up with an innovative product design or experience we need to consider all of these things.

When does the value of a product exceeds its functional value and at what point the emotive value reaches a point of diminishing return? What is the value of the emotive premium or should there be a premium at all? Can we engineer emotive elements into the design without adding cost? Whose job is it? Did they teach that in MBA or MFA ? Or neither? It is something we think about everyday at Idea Couture. The engineering of desire; emotive attributes as product features; and interactions as gateways to collective experiences.

We are definitely reaching another higher state of our “object-culture” when consumer electronics such as cell phones and other gadgets replace or compliment our usual “badges” and these new form of badges are more than just symbols of tribes and tastes, they are windows to our other world – somewhere that our identities are developed and validated. It is worth to deploy our anthropologists to study the new role and meaning of social objects (electronics gadgets) and what it means to marketers.

Honestly speaking, I think men need badges more than women and men likes to see the world in groups and believe people in groups (including clubs, schools, sports, tribes, politics, religions or nations) tend to differ from one another to such a degree that they perceive each other as though they were totally different species from another planet. These groups (reflect by badges) provide their members with a strong sense of distinct and superior identity.

As designers and marketers we design objects that wonderfully fit in the palm of our hands; sometimes bring us a sense of confidence and occasionally moments of delights in the form of a text message. This is what it looks like. It’s got a little touch screen on it; you can shake it and it will respond to your command. It is ultra thin and fits nicely into the pockets of your Hugo Boss jacket. Call this the period of late modernity or postmodernity if you wish. We are living in a time when the legacy of the modern era, in which empiricism and utilitarianism rise to prominence. It is simply just part of being human. And that’s why marketing and product design is never a true science despite people come up with useless fancy tools.

Philosopher Charles Taylor has offered an explanation of the meaning of these activities within modern societies. He says that in the modern worldview meaning is sought through concepts such as progress, reason and freedom and a sense of meaning in one’s life. I think technology is a clear sign of “progress”, collective thinking and reasoning in mass and real time code is the redefinition of “reason” and “freedom” is reflected through Facebook and other social media. Let’s see what our anthropologists have to add.

Now back to my day job. It is not so fun anymore when my to-do-list is longer than my blog post.

Can You Teach MBAs To Be More Creative? Or Can Creativity Can Be Taught At All? I Think So. Same For Making Good Cupcakes.

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets.  “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.