My friend Dr. Peter Coleman posted last week said he was interested in my thoughts on how traditional corporations are responding to the innovation agenda. He also asked if we are seeing design thinking etc. embedding itself within the mainstream corporations thus affecting their operating models and recruitment strategies. This is a great question. So here are my thoughts and there are more to come. I did plan to write on this one anyway.
We all agreed that ‘Innovation’ is overused, it is now catchall buzzword and in most cases, people are trying to say that "we're trying something new" or "we're thinking out of the box.” Although this widespread spirit of experimentation is laudable, the meaning of innovation has, unfortunately, become diluted and, in most cases, meaningless, as a result. So how many corporations are truly responding to the innovation agenda. We will have a meaningful discussion here over the next few days.
What is ‘innnovation’? Advertising folks think it is about creativity or the next brand extensions. Creative folks and IAs think it is all about the next interface. Strategists think it is about a new economic model. Board members immediately think large R&D budgets where team of engineers and scientists work day and night to solve the next big problems. It means different thing to different people. Over the last couple of years I have been working to develop a more refreshing approach to help companies think ‘innovation’, I finally come to the conclusion that the best way to do this is to start thinking like a ‘designer’. In the experience economy, our competitive advantage lies in our knowledge of customer experiences. It includes insights into emotions, interactions, social connections, meanings from objects and interfaces which lie behind any experiences are crucial--what creates meanings, memories and deep empathies?
'Design thinking' is the 'catalyst' to create new ideas, or to recombine old ideas in new ways, or to allow the crossovers of different concepts. Many organizations have most of the right elements to be successful or create new value, they just may not necessarily know how to make that ideas transform their thinking or put them together just designers are trained to do. There’s always some tension between old management thinking and the new kind of management needed for tomorrow’s organizations and these are contextual. Go back 50 years organizations were working to develop some organizational principles that would bring predictability and stability. And as a result we get improved productivity. The world has changed since Ferderick Taylor invented scientific management, b-schools were teaching out-dated ideas and a generation of managers was trained with the wrong tools and ended up spending two years in manager-producing (MBA) factories. One exception is Roger Martin (Dean of Rotman School of Management) was first to introduce the idea of ‘integrative-thinking’ that is long needed. Arthur Little was a pioneer and the first to see the need for the convergence between business skills and engineer skills. Roger Martin is another pioneer and was the first to see the need for convergence of design skills and business skills.
Everybody talks about the ‘best practices’ but we really should be talking about ‘next practices’. ‘design thinking’ is the ‘next practice’. Everybody says that the organization needs to be customer-led. Yes, the customer is the king. But we need to be innovation-driven as well as customer-led. ‘design thinking’ is the glue to make the two connects together.
(These slides were taken from a 50 slides Idea Couture's deck that talks about how our company incorporate design thinking in up-stream strategy development. BTW, I took the picture below at a restaurant called Alinea in Chicago which is a true experience itself. This is comparable to the Jean-Paul Gautier bakery exhibition in Paris, I was there for the grand opening party. I was truly impressed with Alinea and I will let Scott Friedman write about it this weekend.)
Visionary managers innovate by operating in the intersection of business strategy + experience design + emerging technologies. Innovation is at the core of organization’s ability to create new value at the intersection of business, design and technology. To do that we have to have new insights, we have to do things differently and cannot rely just on invention or pure technology R&D for success. That’s where ‘design thinking’ is needed and here I mean more than just deep understand of user needs, I am talking about applying 'design thinking' that create user value as well as economic value; conceptualizing and prototyping opportunities early enough to create touchable and tangibles of different strategic futures (which was traditionally done on a spreadsheet). It is a process to understand strategy in a tangible manner. It will prompt discussions and debates on all interconnected elements and in a human-centered way. I need to stop here otherwise I will write another 2000 words. More later.
