innovation playground Idris Mootee

"Innovation Should Be Seen As a Tactic, Not A Business Strategy" According To Al Ries. This Man Is Confused.

The headline "Don’t Mistake Innovation For Strategy" posted by my friend Bruce Temkin (Forrester) on his blog Customer Experience Matters caught my attention. He was quoting Al Reis' article in Advertising Age with the title: Innovation Should Be Seen as a Tactic, Not a Business Strategy. Here are some excerpts from Ries:

- What makes a powerful automobile brand today is not innovation, but a narrow focus on an attribute or a segment of the market…

- Innovations outside of a brand’s core position can undermine a brand…

- Most brands don't need innovations; they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for and then what they need to sacrifice to get there.

I was surprised to read this and almost jump off my chair. What is he talking about? With a generation of marketing folks trained similarly as Al Ries, that's why we have the problems we have in marketing. I know a lot of old school ad agencies people like Al Ries. That's also the reason why marketing remains to be tactical in many organizations and have less and less influence on a board level. Because they chose to live-in-a-box (see may post last week on radical innovation).  Mr. Ries is so wrong e on this one. Let me explain why:

- What the automobile industry needs today is NOT a narrow focus or an attribute or another brand. They have been doing that for decades and look at Detroit today. They need radical innovation, not brand focus. They need to get away from this brand bullshit and look at using innovation to reinvent the industry. If we look back 30-40 years,  Detroit gained its preeminence in the 20th century by being very good at the prevailing industrial business model. America used to be productive in making things to and Mr. Ford was a latterday Charles Foster Kane when it came to artifacts of innovation. 

Detroit's future is about innovation and transformation. For example, how to re-leverage capabilities that go into making the contemporary car, competencies that have been honed to a razor's edge such as the engineering of the propulsion system, the materials that go into its construction, the digital network and software that now reside in current prototypes, to say nothing of manufacturing efficiencies and logistics, supply chains and marketing prowess. That this concentration of talent, technology and know-how is considered valuable is validated by non other than the competition. Toyota — the world's biggest corporate R&D spender — has a large research laboratory right in the middle of Detroit. A powerful automobile brand needs innovation, not brand focus. There's only so much brand can do at this stage.

- Innovation should NEVER be limited by a brand's core position. A brand's core position also needed to change to adapt to this highly disruptive world. One of the best examples is Samsung. In the mid 90’s, Samsung Electronics’ chairman made an important decision that Samsung would not longer stands for "electronic components" and would no longer provide commodity electronics products to the world’s retailers. Instead they would  focus on the development of innovative product design and stake out its own claim to become a global brand. The company focused on product innovation that was not limited by their brand, and saw a meteoric rise in sales and brand value in just a few years and is not a serious threat to big boys like Sony. The transformation of Samsung's from manufacturer of commodity electronics to a product innovator was successful because they were not limited by their brand's vision. The company’s current brand value was estimated to worth between $15-16 billion.

- Brands needs innovation, NOT focus. You can knock yourselves out figuring what your brand stands for and all those brand bullshits while your competitors are eating your lunch. Without innovation, your brand ages. Innovation rejuvenates your brand and makes them relevant again.  Brand strategy and marketing can only give them a Botox, innovation brings new life ..at least temporarily like Viagra. When was the last innovation that came from Detroit? Saturn?  That was a long while back. Look at what Honda is doing, they understand why innovation is strategic. Read the article in Fortune Magazine called “Inside Honda’s brain“ that talks about Honda’s R&D/innovation efforts. Here’s an excerpt:

Honda researchers were curious about how the human brain reacts to images. They found that people recognize faces, especially angry faces, more quickly than other images. Honda has incorporated this research into its motorcycle designs (like that of the DN-01). By designing the front of the bike to evoke the features of the human face, Honda believes that other drivers will recognize the presence of a motorcycle more quickly and therefore lead to less accidents.....

Finally, INNOVATION is STRATEGIC, unarguably the most strategic of all. Treating innovation as a tactic is an ill advise and I hope no one is taking that seriously. Let me quote my friend Gary Hamel where he explained why innovation matters most:

"Innovation is Topic A in companies around the world. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, innovation is the only way to create wealth over the medium-term. In the short-run, companies can cut costs through off-shoring and outsourcing, they can capture the efficiency gains from industry consolidation and plump up the share price via stock buy backs. But in the longer-term, there are no substitutes to innovation.

Importantly, though, some forms of innovation deliver more in the way of competitive advantage than others. My research, and that of my colleagues at the London Business School, suggests that management research—fundamental advances in the way companies allocate capital, motivate employees, organize activities, create strategies, and set priorities—has the most potential to create long-lasting competitive advantage. Indeed, if one looks back over the last 100 years of industrial competition."

Where Are The Product Development Folks? How Could They Missed This One - Greenprint?

When I first read about new software that eliminates wasted pages I said Finally! I hate wasting paper so much that instead I often end up wasting my time cutting from web pages and pasting them on a word so I can then print the pages that I want. It is not a rational decision as my time worth a lot more than a few pages of paper and some ink. But like all human beings, I kept doing this as I hate to waste 5 pages of ink and paper and all I need is one paragraph.  I don't want to print the crab.  Remember when you print out a google map and it takes  4-5 pages to get the one diagram you want?

One thing I don't quite get it is I am sure there are many people like me, but with all these larger corporations that makes tens of millions on printers, how come they all missed this important feature despite all talk around customer-center innovation.  It should be a standard feature on any computer or printer. All office should make it a policy to have this installed across the enterprises. This Greenprint software lets you see the whole document, easily click on what you want to keep and what you want to disappear, and then prints it. Not only does this save forests; it also saves money on paper, disposal and ink cartridges. If you don't need paper at all, it has a PDF generator so that you can send it straight to your computer without paying for Adobe. Isn't that great? I will pay for this software anytime. I don't care how much that costs.

It still makes me wonder, with all those money spent on market research and customer interviews, not one big players can come up with ideas like this. We do get a lot of useless features that confuse us and the chance of people using those are less than 5%. What are these product development guys doing? This is an excellent example of ethnography can easily covered these unmet needs. If I send our ethnographers to spend a day with uses, I am 100% sure we can come up with another 5 of these ideas easily. And that's exactly what we are helping companies with.

Service Design and Experience Design: Starbucks Vs Le Pain Quotidien

Talking about "service design" or "experience design..forget Disney or Club Med, the Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien (Our Daily Bread) is one best example of great experience design. Currently there are stores in California, DC and NYC. Toronto is opening one soon. My friend Scott is obsessed with it. I love the communal table and everything is organic there (I teased the people by asking them all the time if the tea is organic). The chain now has more than 80 stores in 12 countries and it is still growing. "17 years ago, Alain Coumont was putting a large communal table in his shop and the people sat down around it.” This is how Harry De Landtsheer recounts the original idea of the founder of Le Pain Quotidien. The baker’s plus restaurant is still there in the Rue Dansaert in Brussels. The basic idea of eating good food together has not changed either. So the combined shops and restaurants have plain furniture made of pine; the metal or glass lamps are simple and the shelving for bread and bakery goods are old style. With classical music in the background, this makes a Starbucks experience like the food court of a second tier shopping mall.

Now we're on the topic of "service and experience design". What is service design? Particularly those that is delivered through a digital interface or through a peer-to-peer network. It requires a very different approach from traditional operations management and the economics is very different. Service is becoming a key part of any customer experiences. Many still find the concept a little abstract. Little attention is paid to service innovation or seeing services as structure.

Film director Howard Hawks once said that to make a great movie all you need are three great scenes and no bad scenes. Ok three great scenes, now look at your company's customer experience and see if you can identify three great ones.  It’s a pretty simple formula for success. I first came across this quote from Jeff Howard who is a designer and writes a lot on service design. We need more designers who think service or even experience.  My friend Mark Ury will like this analogy. 

Let’s try to look at service design through the same lens?  Imagine each service encounter is composed of touchpoints. (I hate to use the word touchpints as it is so overused by old school CRM folks) This is one of the most misleading terms in business and I think the concept itself is flawed. I usually look at those under 1/ data point 2/ dialogue point 3/ feedback point. Anyway, let’s use that for now. The question is whether it is enough to create three great touchpoints and no bad touchpoints? Or how many great touhpoints make up for one bad touchpoint?

Let's think of a few parallels. One is music. You bought a CD and the first two songs set the impression of the album. Another parallel from the world of book writing, the first twenty pages were the most important as it was written to attract the readers and they usually consists of the most interesting concept. If you come to a bad chapter, you would then consider whether to read on, despite the opening is so great. In fact, most books fall short of excitement when it comes to the ending. Other parallel includes retailing, open that Tiffany's blue box, untie the ribbons and then the little blue bag before you see what's in there.

The traditional distinctions between products and services are beginning to blur. Traditionally, a product was physical and discrete, somewhat tangible, something obviously demarcated in space and time. The designer's brief rarely encompassed more than the form of an object, and there's a well defined usage.  But with Web 2.0  and  ubiquitous networking and the open standards it gives rise to, all is changing  fast: no longer can the designer of any product assume that it will stand on its own, autonomous and serenely uninvolved with the others. A product has become a node connecting to other both from a data and social perspectives.

London Business School released a paper on Innovation in “Experiential Services “with some great examples that bridge service design and experience design. The research references about 100 case studies from companies like Royal Caribbean, Virgin Atlantic, American Girl Stores, (picture above) the Apple Retail Stores, Build-A-Bear Workshops, Joie de Vivre Hotels as well as European examples from YO! Sushi, first direct, the Eden project, the Guinness Storehouse (picture below) in Dublin and Die Glaserne Manufaktur (the Transparent Factory) of Volkswagen in Dresden. There are some interesting insights.

Here's how they explore the metaphor of “the service journey”:
A customer experience is built over an extended period of time, starting before the actual sales experience or transaction to include pre and post purchase experiences; The journey consists of numerous touchpoints between the customer and the organization or the brand; these touchpoints need to be carefully designed and managed; Each touchpoint has a potential for innovation.

The question remain:
You can design a service but you cannot design an experience. Service designers can only stage or create favorable conditions for great customer experiences to happen.  If the customer contributes to the “experience”, how do we co-create these experiences with them?  Stop using the word “service designer”, call them “experience architect” or “experiences co-creator”.

Have a great weekend.

Everyone Loves Innovative Ideas But No One's Doing Anything About It?

How often we hear that managers complain about their innovative ideas are not heard and that there's everyone is only interested in the immediate bottom line? Senior executives are popular targets for this type of blame, with comments such as: “They’re stuck in the past,” “He doesn't want anything different,” or “I’ve brought that idea up many times and nobody listens” or "These people have no vision'. Simple asking people to come up with more ideas only adds to the organization’s inventory of unused creativity, even creative agencies have truckload of unused creative ideas, so there seems to be no shortage of them, then why there's so little innovation output on the other end?

Having too many creative idea can even be counterproductive. It distracts organizational focus and I have seen many times the core team spending months of valuable time running in circles. Not only does it fail to produce tangible innovation that drives new products, experiences and markets, it reinforces the idea that nobody is willing to act on new ideas. OK, is it unwilling to act on or incapable to act on?
  These people are not incapable in the sense of their skills and experiences. The reason being that they see all the barriers up front and they realize the difficulties to overcome these challenges due to their experiences. Every manager sees a box, the box symbolizes the individual’s views about the limits to his boundaries of work (like inside a cubicle). The area inside the box represents the person’s job—what he thinks he is supposed to be do and has certain freedom.

Now everything outside the box is forbidden territory or high risk territory. The question is who define the boundaries? well, 50% of the time we define our own boxes. There are times where organization structures and control dictate that, but not all the time. Sociologist Karl Weick described this phenomenon as the “enactment of limitations,” the passivity of managers in accepting the limits of their own private boxes. He says: “On the basis of avoided tests, people conclude that constraints exist in the environment and that limits exist in their repertoire of responses. (Therefore) Inaction is justified by the implantation, in fantasy, of constraints and barriers that make an action ‘impossible.’” So what do you need not only to "think" but also "act" outside the box?

D-Schools Are Innovating Faster Than B-Schools

Stanford D-School is innovating and now offers a few exciting class options. I must say I am very  impressed with them. Interesting enough, all four courses are so relevant to our current innovation projects. I just wonder why B-School are not doing the same. I guess B-School are often behind the curve in this fast moving world. I really like the course "Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability", I think B-Schools should design new courses similar to this such as "Business Design for Triple Bottom Line" or "Business Model Design for Sustainability" or "Driving Innovation in Large Organizations". I'd love to teach all these. Oh you know what, how about "Visualizing Your Future Business Strategy"? Unfortunately B-Schools are still using old case studies that were written for the industrial age and disruptive technologies were uncommon or unheard of. If they don't do something, B-Schools themselves can slowly becoming irrelevant.

Here are my favorite courses:

Design for Agile Aging - Maintaining mobility is critical to successful aging. Impaired mobility limits daily activities and independence. For individuals who are already mobility-impaired, or are at risk of becoming so, small improvements in mobility can dramatically improve quality of life. This two-quarter interdisciplinary course sequence is designed to explore innovative ways to integrate computer and device technologies with behavioral and social interventions to maintain and enhance mobility in seniors. 
Transformative Design
- Designed products have always had tremendous impact on individual, social and cultural behavior. This project-based course investigates how interactive technologies can be designed to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will be structured around interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change in domain such as weight-loss, energy conservation or safe driving; accompanying lab sessions will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for interaction prototyping.

Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability - Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability is a two-quarter project course in which graduate students design comprehensive solutions to challenges faced by the world’s poor. Students learn design thinking and its specific application to problems in the developing world.  Students work in multidisciplinary teams at the intersection of business, technology, and human values.  All projects are done in close partnership with a variety of international organizations.  These organizations host student fieldwork, facilitate the design development, and implement ideas after the class ends.

Teams will develop empathy with all stakeholders so that they can develop a solution that fits into the culture, aspirations, and constraints of their target users.  Teams will iterate on their designs and business models through a rapid sequence of prototyping and testing.  Students also will interact with entrepreneurs who have launched ventures in the developing world, including several alumni from the class.  The final deliverable is a product or service framed in a comprehensive implementation plan including the business model, the technical innovations, the cultural rationale, and the appropriate next steps. 

Innovation in Complex Organizations 
- The purpose of this course is to offer students a chance to pause, discuss, and integrate design thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format.  This centerpiece of this small seminar will be three or four “live” case studies where, executives from large, complex organizations come to class and describe their efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation. They will describe how their organizations screen and move along promising ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that journey.  Student teams will analyze each case and provide recommendations to the executives, who along with the teaching team, will judge the work.  The final project will be a general analysis and set of recommendations about this vexing organizational problem.

Business Practice Innovation -
Treating Business Practices as Prototypes. In this small, team-based, multidisciplinary class, students will work in dyads or larger teams.  They will apply the design process to specific practices (like talent management, organizational design, and communication with external stakeholders) in organizations that may include a software firm, a professional services firm, and an airline, and treating the targeted practices as prototypes. 

How MBAs and MFAs Operate With Incomplete Information?

There is a common false expectation that anyone graduate with an MBA will be capable of making difficult business decisions. The same apply that may those who graduate with a MFA is automatically a big thinker and is capable of creating the next iPhone or Twitter. 

I have been hearing rumblings from clients about the quality of MBA graduates these days due to big quality gaps between of b-schools. Most MBA graduates are undoubtedly smart but often unprepared and unequipped to handle the most crucial of managerial responsibilities: quickly solving problems with less than perfect information. In my b-schools days, people often complained about the lack of information when reading a case study and believing that having complete information will help them make the right decisions. Let’s face it, there’s no perfect information in the world and everyday we are making decisions based on limited information.  More often today we are dealing with too much information and a sea of useless or meaningless data. We need to make sense of all this ourselves.  Business is about managing uncertainty; strategy is about winning in an uncertain world.

What about MFAs? Well my observation is designers are sometimes over reliance on getting perfect information about users. They develop dozen of persona and hopefully it will give them more rigor. It won’t. Design teams sometime spend a disproportional amount of time on developing personas and not spending enough time on dreaming and crafting the solutions. Design is about managing uncertainty too, the beauty of personas is that they can help designers to create and communicate information about users to the larger development teams.

The approach is to gather information about users’ needs, behaviors, and preferences, and uses those data to construct vivid descriptions about explicitly fictional individuals. The three advantages compared to traditional user research are: 1/ the ability easily to engage teams to think about users; 2/ the possibility for designers to extrapolate from the personas to make design decisions; and 3/ freedom from problems that arise when a full spectrum of user data is presented, such as paralysis or inappropriate generalization which happens all the time.  Of course the big question is whether the chosen personas are accurate and reflective of user needs.

But the whole “personas” approach suffers some practical limitations. Two significant issues involve how personas are reconciled with other information, and actually who is responsible for interpreting them. It is not not uncommon that fictional personas would frequently conflict with other sources of data usually quantitative research. Design teams receive information about users from many sources: self-observation, spouses, friends, technology media, and so forth. They form impressions about customers and those naturally show variance from the precise data presented by personas. Even with good personas, there’s still plenty of unknown.

Whether MBAs and MFAs, their commonality is that their jobs require them to make important business or design decisions with incomplete information. There's only so much tools can help.

Is Design A Team Sports? Or Should We Treat Designers Like Rock Stars?

I received a lot of emails regarding my post yesterday on “Super Normal Design”, I thought we should explore this topic a little more. There’s a good interview on the latest Business Week of Richard Sapper (the 75 year old designer that is till playing with new ideas). His famous designs including the ThinkPad and the Tizio Lamp for Artemide. Both were once my favorite items. I have 8 Thinkpads and one old broken Tizio in the basement. His signature is usually consists of advanced technology, simplicity of form, and surprise.  According to Sapper "The most important thing for me is to give everything I do a form that expresses something, it's not neutral. It has a point of view and a personality."

Over a career spanning 50 years, he has designed more than 200 products—everything from the rearview mirror on the 1956 Mercedes 300SL Roadster to the 1998 Zoombike foldable bicycle for Elettromontaggi. According to Sapper, "I think that I have proved through my work that you do not need big teams to create innovation. As a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation," he says. "However, you need big teams to translate innovative ideas into mass-produced products."

Here’s an interesting question: Is great design a one person journey or a team sports? What are they teaching at D-Schools? Is there enough balance between “design thinking” and “design doing”? For design to be truly useful as a profession and as a discipline, designers can’t just use “design thinking” to come up with strategies and concepts. It is much easier to come up with big ideas than overcoming different kinds of hurdles to bring a design to life. I found many D-school graduates are lacking on product development skills. In order for MFAs to play a key role in powering up the future of business, they do need to learn the logical decision making skills of product development.

Are we going to end up with a generation of so called “innovators” who are basically MFAs that can talk business or MBAs who can draw? What about those anthropologist and social scientist? Shouldn’t they be part of the team? Or designers or market researcher just continue to pretend that they can do the job of a trained anthropologist which requires years of training to do what they do? What about those product engineers that lacks design sensitivity? Bringing new ideas to life is a team sports. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a star in your team. Relying on a star to be win a name is a risky business. I think I’ve answered that question.

With all respect Mr. Sapper, I have to disagree with your statement "big teams often act as brakes to innovation”. Your thoughts please.

Does "Super Normal Design" Goes Against The Mainstreaming Of Design?

What is “Super Normal Design”?  This is the first time I’ve heard about the term. As an economist I am more familiar with “Super Normal Profits”.  When design guru Naoto Fukasawa admitted to feeling "a bit shocked and a little depressed" on discovering that the aluminum stools he had designed were plonked on the floor for people to sit on at a Milan Furniture Fair, rather than displayed on plinths like other new products. He was worried that no one would notice them. Later that day Fukasawa, received a call from the British designer Jasper Morrison, who raved about the stools and congratulated him on having designed something so subtle, yet distinctive. They coined the term to describe the stools - "super normal."

A few months later they decided to put together a collection of products, which were similarly enjoyable to use and to look at without resorting to stylistic gimmicks. Not so much of anti-style but more of ordinary looking. The pieces they chose -ranging from inexpensive items like a paper clip and Bic biro and workspace designed by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra.  They see this as a celebration of “normality” in design.

"Too many designers try to make their work seem special by making it as noticeable as possible that the historic purpose of conceiving things that are easier to make and better to live with has been side- tracked," he says. "The objects that really make a difference to our lives are often the least noticeable ones, that don't try to grab our attention. They're the things that add something to the atmosphere of our homes and that we'd miss the most if they disappeared. That's why they're 'super normal.'"  Reported IHT.

I started to think how many objects together are made without much design thought or any attempt to achieve anything other than a good ordinary tool, happen to be successful? It raises the question of what constitutes a good design. How many great designs are lacking noticeability?  Does it goes the current trend of using design to create “branded differentiation?’ The current business climate of hyper competition forces company to use design to create maximum noticeability by means of color, shape and function.  Design can make everyday things special. Isn’t that part of the job of “design”? Isn’t a designer’s worse nightmare when his client tells them his designs are “ordinary”?

Questions for us:

- Can “normal” just come to mean “unstimulating” or more about “low key” design?

- Can “normal” be also “unique”? Are they mutually exclusive?

- What’s the equivalent of “normal” design in interactive design? Is it about an elegant and efficient approach to design?

- Is this a lifecycle issue where one needs to be very special before it earns its right to design for “normal”?

Slow Design + Local = Innovation Opportunities

It has not been easy to keep up with the habit of blogging and I try to do at least 5 posts a week. Mine were exceptionally long so I was told. Particular the last 12 weeks with my weekly travel, I hardly have time for my personal life. I am definitely the opposite of the "slow" movement, but I do need to slow down a bit as my friend Mark has suggested. Talking about "slow", the two concepts of SLOW + LOCAL are now converging in what NY Times called "Slow Design".  It talks about designers of everything from T-shirts to housewares, who are sourcing manufacturing from local artisans. Although I am a "fast" personality but I'm loving this. I think the bigger opportunities are SLOW + LOCAL + WEB 2.O. I can easily think of half a dozen of ideas that can bring in tens of millions. Slow Design can bring Fast Growth.

Here's an excerpt from NY TImes: The Slow Food idea is now in its third decades, an established global movement with an official manifesto and about 85,000 members in over 100 countries, Slow Design is still in its infancy. But it does have an increasing number of proselytizers, like John Brown, an architect in Calgary, Alberta, whose year-old Web site, theslowhome.com, urges consumers to say no to “fast-food architecture,” and Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational speaker whose Web site slowplanet.com, which is to go online in mid-March, has as its goal to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design, he said. Ms. Chanin, meanwhile, has a book, “Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating Hand-Sewing, Quilting, and Embroidery for Contemporary Sustainable Design” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) due out in March. It gives instructions on how to make her stenciled, poetry-embellished sheets and teaches her Slow credo, which is to use discarded materials to make something new — and to take as long as necessary doing it.

Back to writing blog, a few friends of mine just started and I think they will bring interesting perspective to things. One of them is Mark Ury's blog Restlessmind (I've added a permanent link here). Actually I am pretty new to blogging (8 months) but I love the idea to sharing my thoughts with a few thousands of visitors everyday on topics from strategy to innovation and design. I am getting some great e-mails now and then from readers and I am very grateful for that. Pls keep coming. 

I really want to thank those Very Special Visitors including Andre, Bart, Rory, Morgan, John, Bilal, Peter, Jonathan and many others who always bring new insights and thought provoking ideas to these topics. Someday I think we should publish a book together. I must have missed some names. There are a few emails that I'd like to share with you. Here's twi I received yesterday: one from Natasja, London and one from Scott, Palo Alto. Thank you both.

Hi Idris,

I've been reading your blog on my RSS feeds for a long time now (in fact, I've saved 75 of your posts that I want to re-read because I liked them so much!), and have been meaning to write to say thanks, but kept on putting it off. No more, so: thanks for a great blog!

Your most recent post on design and strategy really struck a chord with me, since I'm a fairly newly minted MBA from LBS (MBA Class of 2007), working in a branding and design firm and I'm also a current part-time student doing an MA in Design Studies at Central St Martin's in London.

I'm very excited by and interested in the intersection of business and design, and your post really hit the nail on the head for me, especially when you wrote "“Design” thinking brings those needs to the decision making core of the organization and activities should be developed around these “Design” ideas. That’s strategy." Bingo. That's what I'm trying to tell people on both the b-school side and the d-school side, but I'm finding that both sides most of the time have a hard time getting it. Or maybe I need to find a better way of explaining it. My b-school friends think that I don't have a 'real' job because all I do is fiddle with colours and my d-school friends think that all businesspeople are evil and that commercial is a dirty word.

So, I think what I'm trying to say is thanks. It's great to see that there are companies out there that do great work where b-school and d-school collide!

Yours,
warmest regards from London,

Natasja

Hi Idris,

what's up man...was checking out the blog, pretty interesting, good dialogue...
With respect to 'Designs seat @ the strategy table' I'm going to sum up the sentiment from within the design trenches... The irony, after having been subjected to 3.5 days of intense strategy disection, It's actually a remarkably simple correlary.

Ready.  Here we go =
Before I divulge this truth, a quick context needs to be mutually agreed upon --- "The end-game strategy for companies is to make $$$".  Nothing more.  That premise can be veiled under the articulation of 'Creating value,' 'Sustaining & driving growth,' 'Increasing market share,'...the vernaculuar is of little consequence --- we exist, you the strategist, me the designer, to advance the corporate ambition of making $$$.  Okay, agreed.  Now, whether your business is service, consumer product, or durable goods, that goal requires the goodwill of the consuming public.  in this game, as you indicate in your blog, the consumer is becoming increasingly sensitive to 'design.'  'Good design' is nothing more than 'brand management'...now, not brand management in the sense of a P&G juggling a million sub-brands, but 'brand management' as 'brand control'...brand ownership.  That's it.  Brand ownership allows you, the company, to control you destiny----deliver a good product, good value, reasonable price, right sales channels, appropriate segment...so on, sor forth.  These are support activities.  You get those support activities correct, marginally better than your competitors, you win.
Now, what I know to be true, and what I think I'm reading on your blog (we are in agreement my friend) is that 'brand ownership' is not just some incremental piece of the overall picture...IT IS THE overall picture---the rest are details, some big, some small, relatively speaking.   Authentic 'brand ownership' requires design...graphic design, product design, interface design, environmental & retail design, design of advertising, design of PR, design etc....Anything (& everything) that forms public perception of your product/ service requires these design inputs...The proportion & scale of each of these inputs is highly dependant on what is you do (what business you're in), but in essence, you need MANY of these design inputs "SIMULTANEOUSLY"....Not just a good interface, not just a good marketing PR campaign, not just gorgeous ID surfacing, not just a beautiful interior space...it's the intersection of multiple design inputs.  ID is one element in this sea of plug-ins. Often times, as in the case of an Apple, or much of my HP work, and truthfully most consumer products companies today, ID is an extremely LARGE component of all of those design inputs.   Okay, enough talk, what does this mean.

In consumer products (different for the service business) the Industrial Designer is the only true 'design' representative @ the process table. Add to that the pedigree a good designer has from years of heightened cross-media design appreciation & finely tuned design sensitivity, it appears that the Industrial Designer is the perfect respresentive to help guide this destiny of 'brand control.'

The trick is in finding the right designer...that with the right quiver of business acumen & technical skills, for he will be the single greatest asset that makes the difference.
Thanks for allowing me to opine.

Cheers

Scot Herbst
Palo Alto

If you want to share your ideas and perspectives, pls send them this way. Have a great Easter weekend.

Shoud "Design" Have A Seat At The Corporate Strategy Table?

I decided to read Mark Dziersk’s paper after meeting him. It is called Visual Thinking: A Leadership Strategy published by Design Management Review. It was a light read and I did that in 5 minutes on the flight back from Chicago. He has articulated a couple of very interesting points on business and design.  The core of his paper is around the idea that “design” and “strategy” should come closer together. He urges designers to communicate with those responsible for strategy by using their talent for visualization and storytelling—“languages” that can powerfully convey content in such areas as consumer experience, innovation options and approaches to decision-making. It is good read for designers….not only industrial.

He wrote, “The truth is, very few designers understand strategy, much less leverage is in their work. But the design world is trying, and making inroads……this is a new territory for design—demonstrating business and brand leadership by creating and visualizing companies strategies.” Funny enough, this is exactly what my company is doing. Yes, there are not many firms (if any) out there that bring “Design Thinking” to “Business Strategy”.  On this topic, I have a few thoughts....

Great designs can only go so far, not that I am not an advocate of great designs. I am an advocate of great designs. The challenge is most industrial design firms can only engage with clients at a middle senior level and their scope of work are often confined to a product or product family mission. Any innovation would only have impact on a product level. If “Design” wants to fully leverage its influence, it needs to happen at the corporate strategy level. That’s where you can have the most impact and influence. But what can a bunch of creative designers do in corporate strategy planning session when they hardly understand how organizations operate and how (and why) decisions are made?  (May be that's fine because 60% of senior executives have no idea of what strategy is anyway) That’s when things fall short.

People often ask me “Idris, you are a hard core business strategist with a 20 years real strategy experience and your extensive b-school training, why do you need designers to help you on strategy? What can they bring to the table? What languages do you speak B or D?’ These are all valid questions.

First of all, I truly believe “Design” is our future. It can help shape and change the destinies of many large organizations. Think beyond products and packaging, think bigger. “Design” is  “Strategy”, but “Designers” are not “Strategists’. Design should be the core of all organizations as they switch from product-centric to customer-centric, I know this word is so over-used.  I don’t mean CEOs now need to become designers. “Design” is a culture, something that helps bring back the sensitivity and empathy that were long lost in many large organizations. Thanks to B-school training and all those quantitative research, companies think that there have formulas for success. These formulas or numbers can magically bring profits. Wrong. Profits exist because customer buys your products and they buy your products because you fulfill their needs (both articulated and unarticulated needs). “Design” thinking brings those needs to the decision making core of the organization and activities should be developed around these “Design” ideas. That’s strategy.

Designers or design firm alone cannot achieve this goal. They need to work together with strategy consultants (I mean real ones, many claim to be strategist because they have an MBA, a grad degree does NOT make one a strategist) that understand business economics, marketing adoption and most important has a balanced mindset between market-driven and market-driving. My wish is to be able to acquire a good design firm over the next 8-12 months that can work with us and our clients at the most senior level. In the meantime, we continue our B-School meets D-school hiring strategy. We're building something very special.

I wrote on this blog 2 weeks about “How to visualize your business strategy?” May be I should write more on that one.  Landing in 10 minutes..... need to turn off my MacBook.

Should We Take "Industrial" Off "Industrial Design"

I was watching Mark Dziersk's presentation about industrial design and his view of the world through the lens of an industrial designer. Mark is a well respected industrial designer (he was president of the Industrial Designers Society of America from 1999-2000). Mark is currently VP of Design at Herbst LaZar Bell in Chicago. He is a great storyteller and mentioned many times the about the needs for multi-disciplinary team., well that is not that simple. I like one of his quotes:  "There's no half insanely great products." How true? But there are many half successful companies...too many.

One question came across my mind. Should industrial designers be called industry designers? In particularly we’re talking about this network-driven post-industrial age. The role of industrial designer has definitely gone beyond usability and all above, their jobs is about uncovering new needs and  adding emotive elements. He raised the question if there is a difference between industrial design and brand. I see where he’s going.

The relation of conceptual design and social interaction is an important issue that influences the future of industrial design management. Web 2.0 have made astonishing progress the last two years while advanced manufacturing technology emerges in an endless stream. The results are extensive amount of accessible data that can promote endless new ideas for innovation. The environmental effect and social moral concept of design, the manufacturing place and method of product, the materials, function and usage of product, as well as abandonment and recovery of product have become the new connotative meanings of conceptual design. This goes beyond traditional product design.

The design of product into the design of service, from the design of material object into the design of virtual product and the design of service into social interactions… a complete new mode of industrial design is emerging. The whole world is moving into the era of accelerated digitalization and extended collaboration.

I was reading the NY TImes article on Japanese industrial design guru Naoto Fukasawa,it is an interesting story on his design journey. He is being called a later day Charles Eames amd is highly respected in his field.According to Brown, "He is able to interpret the relationship between people and objects in a way that is at some level obvious, yet nuanced and sophisticated. His approach to to design isn't intellectual, it's human." This is an interesting one, I find that architects can design great things while striving for an unrealistic level of perfection, yet industrial designers are looking for all the human elements or solving little problems of our lives. Two very different schools...just my personal experience working with some of the best people in their fields.

The world of industrial design shows great culture consisting of humanistic spirit,  appealing aesthetics, philosophy, science, human interactions, space and technology. The industrial design culture is a product of this period stigmatized distinctly with times. It is easy to see that the method and means of industrial needs to evolve. I propose we stop calling it Industrial Design.

Human Factors Are Often The Missing Factors

Scott and I were hanging out with some friends at a bar in Chicago. Hey it is St. Patrick's day. Didn't wear my Green Hornet outfit...left it at home.

The last two years, we are all catching the ethnography and human factors fever. I guess it is due to the proliferation of electronic devices and increased sensitivity to design. Product development people and their engineers can not longer to push out ugly products when their competitors are talking a holistic design approach. Many companies are incorporating human factors into their product development processes. There are obvious reasons to do so.

Only a few years ago, human factors was a discipline virtually ignored in the medical device and consumer electronics world. They exist mostly in the military, automobile and aerospace industries. Device design was a field normally dominated by engineers, and their main concern was whether the device functioned properly or not. How easy it was to use, how well it fit into a caregiver’s workflow, and whether the design contained the potential to prompt use errors were factors considered secondarily, if at all.  Can't imagine how many die because of this error in hospitals.  Error proofing is a big deal today. Everything is too complicated and nothing is easy to use, so designing for error should be a big part of any design process from websites to smart phones or insulin pump.

Human factors has its origins in the Industrial Revolution and emerged as a full-fledged discipline during World War II. It was recognized that aircraft cockpit design needed to consider the human interface for controls and displays. Design Engineers were focused on the technology while Industrial Psychologists worked to optimize the interface. In some cases, Human Factors design can affect bottom-line profitability or can be a life and death matter, e.g., you don't want to push the wrong button or mistake meters for kilometers in a spacecraft. Companies came to realize that a products success is dependent upon good Human Factors design.

Many consumer device companies are incorporating principles of human factors and ergonomics into their designs. Some are hiring human factors experts for their staffs, while others are using consultants. More devices go through some form of usability testing before hitting the market. There are a number of reasons why the human factors discipline is finally catching on in the medical device industry.

Unfortunately, there are an equal number of reasons why it still hasn’t caught on in parts of the sector. The increasing competitiveness in certain sectors of the device industry is contributing to added use of human factors in design. As a few companies adopt the philosophy, others are following suit.

Human factors is still outside the dictionary of marketing. Not see what it takes to get marketers to see the importance of that.

The Problem With Stage-Gate Process With Experience Innovation

I have some interesting discussion on stage-gate process here in Chicago and the current paradigm of product design and development. A lot of people mixed product development process with innovation process. It is fundamentally two different things I remember in the early ‘90’s the stage-gate process became the standard framework for product development. This process provides rigor and define the information flow, the decision flow, and the work flow for the requirements management of product development.

Stage-gate implementation involves cross-functional team, concurrent engineering, and periodic business reviews. When apply in as innovation process and that's when it fails. There is already growing recognition that stage-gate, while still an important foundation for product development, does not adequately address the interrelated elements that promote successful innovation. Stage-gate focuses on the management of individual projects, which then have to compete for resources in the pipeline. Because stage-gate does not pay attention to links between technology and business opportunities, projects are often little more than extensions of existing products. The corporation’s development effort, lacking a strong connection to strategy, suffers from fragmentation and its resources are dissipated. It is limited by looking at a pre-defined market and is in nature market-driven and not market-driving. There is a need for a new framework that is broader in nature and is about apply design thinking in market exploration. When we use apply our (Idea Couture) innovation methodology we try to avoid any stage-gate approach and only bring them in later in the process.

Stage-gate approach works against innovation and a new framework is needed to bring in new language, processes, and tools for effective product nnovation. Another big problem is it does not include the service design component which combined with product innovation becomes experience innovation. The current stage-gate process is too product centric. It needs to be taken back to the drawing board. The question is whose job is it?

What Is A Designer? An Explorer Or A Style Councillor?

What is a designer? Someone who create something this is functional or someone who creates things that are beautiful and desirable?  Is it a designer’s job to create form and function that lasts a long time or is it their job to create something cool and fashionable? Not sure there is a simple answer.(Photo above: Powder Seat by Vittamin, use your snowboard as the seat of the bench. love th idea just £99)

Earlier in my career I've worked with a lot of top designers (both fashion, graphics and industrial) and I understand deeply how they work and how different thinking styles are out there. I often consider myself a designer too.  Fashion and design are sometimes unseparatable. From Mark Jacob to Philippe Starck or Zaha Hadid or Bruce Mao... High style design is like virus once you catch it the flu will spreads. Iconic or signature designers have always been the core of the luxury market and they started serving the industry whether it is fashion, furniture or consumer electronic, now industries are serving the designers instead. Here’s when “design” meets “art “meets and “art” meets “fashion” and now “design” meets “business model” (best example is Steve Jobs), a culture industry starving for new icons and now turbo-powered by Web 2.0 + Design 2.0.

What if design is taken off from the traditional definition that used to distinguish high and low style, luxury and mass market, commercial and art, business and art, theoretical and applied? How would that affect experimental and experiential design thinking? Design's intellectual side is tightly linked to vanities of fashion, icons or trends. It is about time to revive design thinking from a long fashion hangover and to embark on a new career. Good design needs not be fashionable (often they are and that's fine). A designer's job is to decide and design the flow, the info, the structure, the tone and style, the touch and feel, the behavior and even the social relationships. We need to stop thinking about designers as artists who live and work in a different universe of cool aesthetics or only belong to art galleries and boutique hotel, let's start thinking of them as creators who decides what is usable, what goes where, which form elements to use and how everything fits together in a coherent experience in a desirable manner.

Just as Tom Friedman wrote that “the world is flat…then so is design--forget other hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough." Design is a “culture” business that deserves experimental exploration in search of new meanings in our every lives and social interactions. Experimental and experiential design is the way that design comes to find its core and to advance its full potentials. Thanks to big thinkers like Sottsass, design today is a new game for young designers / entrepreneur who can bring new experiencial energy into an expanding array of diverse new views and voices.

For those of you who like to shop at Muji (photo of NYC store above), the person behind it Kenya Hara claims 'Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials, it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.' That idea was reflected throughout every aspect of Muji's 'quiet' product line. The market has adopted a sophisticated aesthetic rhetoric: persuasive arguments for poetic minimalism, or Pop-flash, or moral green, or old-school functionalism are demonstrated with masterful execution on a regular basis. Design has matured in its methods, and diversified in its subjects, often to build new markets with aesthetics. This is exciting news.

Coming to the topic of “experience design”, it is a multi-disciplinary domain that rigorously explores the complex social, economic, and psychological problems of modern life . The new MOMA show 'Design and the Elastic Mind' demonstrates the need to provide 'successful translation of disruptive innovation'. It inspires us to take a deeper look at new relationships between emerging technology, social connectivity and users behaviors --interpreting technology into meaning. This is where I get excited and how I see our company is going. Many digital agencies claim that they are experience designers, but they are digital advertising producers at their very core. We’re lucky to attract world class design talents who share our thinking and culture and join us for that reason. Taking about talent, Kengwei just joined Idea Couture as Director of Experience Design. He is one of the 50 smartest people I have on my list to add to our company (sorry, not sharing that list).

Kengwei was born in Taipei, Taiwan where he studies mass media. Then he moved to New York where he attended Pratt Institute for Computer Graphics and Interactive Media and in 1998 he earned scholarship from the Art institute of Chicago. He was recently with CriticalMass. Kengwei's dream is to invite the creative minds of the world to come and play with him and create interactive art. "I love to experience. There are so many ideas there. The question is how big your dreams are and how you can get there".

I asked him about his design philosophy, mottos or things that he believes in?

“I believe in simplicity, form follows function. I tend to forget everything I learn and transfer my leanings into my beliefs so it become intuitive. Although I think I am a right brain person, I do design based on the needs of flow of logics derived from the learnings from every observation of objects. I also don't want to be a smart guy so that I can view the world more closer to the grassroots level.”

I asked him about his D-school experience and what were thelessons learned that he thinks are useful in life?

“Ask 5w and 1h. Be a true believer in self and be humble and always ask what if’. These have helped me grow from one place to another. My motto is "’Design so that we make the world a better place."

I asked him what he considers are the best designs in the world (anything)?

“Apple (itself, exclude iPhone, Mac....). I can't image how well the Apple Inc. has been designed so well that they create admirable things. So I think if we can see Apple, the company, as a product, it is truly the best design ever from every perspective, design, business, brand, solutions, platform..... Others:  Helvetica font, iPhone, Internet, Wireless (I wish someday the power could be transmitted wirelessly too), paper (For 5000 years before the computer edge was matured), and the world, if the God is a designer.”

We are very happy to have him joined us. One name off my list :-). Need to get back to finish some work as I am taking an early flight to Chicago tomorrow.

Tailored Therapeutics - The Next Big Thing in Health Revolution

Back to health 2.0, I was planning to write a piece on personalized medicine while waiting for my flight. The idea of sequencing of the human genome is a new tools to help physicians tailor treatments to individuals and their disease. I think this new capability, called personalized medicine, holds great potential to improve our health. There are significant hurdles must still be overcome for its full potential to be realized. Today's science has begun to give physicians understanding of individual patient or disease differences at the molecular or genetic level, enabling them to tailor treatment even more effectively. For example, knowledge of genetic variations can now help physicians optimize breast cancer therapy or better manage dosing of blood thinning drugs.

Then I came across this article from Knowledge Wharton which is really worth reading. Sidney Taurel, chairman and CEO of Eli Lilly, Taurel presented a keynote at the 2008 Wharton Health Care Business Conference" and predicted that significant changes at all levels of the health care industry will affect doctors, payers and patients alike. "I believe that the years ahead will amount to revolution much more than evolution,"

He went on to say that the new business model for companies like Eli Lilly will likely move away from production of such "blockbuster" drugs and instead will focus on highly individualized solutions for patients.  It will emphasize therapies that work more often than not, as well as therapies that have a very clear benefit, thereby creating a more integrated system with greater economic and medical value. While some have dubbed the changes in health care "personalized medicine, heprefers the term "tailored therapeutics." Revolutions occur due to necessity and opportunity, or "push and pull," he said. "The push is a set of conditions that make change necessary, and the pull is the revolutionaries who seize the opportunity to create a different order, one that is an improvement over the old one." Taurel's talk of a revolution is timely, given that the pharmaceutical industry has seen the rate of drug approvals slow during the first half of this decade, even as it continues to face the challenges of rising costs, expiring patents and competition from generics. "The ultimate promise of tailored therapeutics is about "the individual patient, and we are prepared to stake our business on realizing that promise," according to Taurel. The Upside-down Pyramid Health care costs are growing at an unsustainable rate, with an aging population as the driving force, according to Taurel. "Already, there are more people in Europe who are over 40 than under 40," while the median age in Europe is predicted to reach 50 by the year 2040. Meanwhile, lower birth rates in the developed world have caused an inversion of the age pyramid, with too few younger, working people to help pay for the medical services being used by a growing older population. As the median age rises, so does the price of health care. "Indeed, turning the pyramid upside down wrecks the traditional model of health care payment," Taurel said, adding that Medicare faces an unfunded liability of $30 trillion over the next few decades. Another cause for concern: The value of health care products is coming into question, Taurel added, citing recent survey results showing that only 22% of consumers believe branded prescription drugs present a good value compared with more than 60% of consumers who think generic drugs are a good value. The practice of medicine remains too much of a trial-and-error process that has not maximized the efficacy of prescription therapies, which work about half the time for the most common diseases, he said. "When our industry is better able to target our products to the patients who will really benefit, then our value proposition will surely grow. When medicines are used more optimally to reduce the trial-and-error nature of health care, then fewer resources will be wasted and the cost of health care will be sustainable."

'Tailoring' the Revolution Taurel challenged the widespread notion that the key to the tailored therapeutics revolution is unlocking the secrets of the human genome. "Genomic medicine certainly serves to extend and, hopefully, to accelerate our goals, but the promise of this revolution is actually much broader and much more deeply rooted," Taurel said. He used "biomarkers" -- or biological indicators -- as an example of one of the many modern advantages that will help drive the tailored therapeutics revolution. "Biomarkers are more pervasive and sophisticated than ever before, and they are coming into play in much earlier stages of drug development," Taurel said, noting that Eli Lilly now has biomarker strategies in place for nearly all molecules at the earliest clinical development stage. Important benefits of biomarkers include the ability to weed out unpromising molecules early in the game, compress development times, run smaller and more focused trials and explore secondary indications earlier. "We hope that some of the beneficial effects of widespread biomarker indication will be shorter cycle times and lower costs in drug development," Taurel said. Recognizing the difference between tailored therapeutics and personalized medicine is important, he added. He described tailored therapeutics as a larger concept that encompasses the many different types of personalized approaches to medicine. "A good tailor's abilities go well beyond alteration. The custom-made suit is his ultimate creation."