innovation playground Idris Mootee

Innovating Within Or Outside the Core? Let's Start With What Is The Core?

One interesting dilemma about strategy and innovation is how far we move away from our core and more importantly how do you define the core? What are the core competencies of Gap? Netflix? LVMH? BMW? Hermes? Canon? Nike? Marc Jacob? Blackberry? Samsung? HP? Target? Starbucks? Do they even have anything in common?

Do you see core capabilities as distinct capabilities or deeply embedded values? Or special access to buyers or assets? There are hard core competencies and soft core competencies and people need to understand the difference and that they are not mutual exclusive. Core competencies are double-edged sword. How do you define ‘core competence?’ It is currently seen as a unique capability/know-how that provides some type of competitive advantage for an organization and it is not easy for other to replicate. It is not one thing; it corresponds to organization design, and involves underlying skills, systems, technologies and knowledge in specific industries or markets.

A simple test to see if something is a core competence, ask yourself, "Does this 'thing' give the company a unique advantage over its competitors and create value through a differentiated offer or extreme cost advantage or both?"

When my staff comes to me for career advice, I always ask them about their core. Who are you and what are you really good at? I advise them to find out what they like to do and what they’re good at, and if you combine skill, passion and strength, you are going to excel. You need to understand and align all those three. Likewise, companies gravitate towards their core competencies, capability and values.

Successful organizations adopt a rigorous approach to identifying and defining their core competencies and then single-mindedly pursue them. When market shifts and suddenly their core competencies and strategic assets all become strategic liabilities. It happens fast these days. The most important thing is to put innovation at the core and use design thinking to drive continuous renewal and reinvention. There is only one game – new game.

Auto makers have for years restricting themselves to a few tasks they do best -- designing and assembling automobiles -- offloading all other value chain activities to others. A web of suppliers produces the components that go into the car and a web of dealers sell, deliver and service the cars bought by consumers. By limiting their focus, auto makers are able to perform the tasks they undertake extremely efficient using Six Sigma. Apple is doing just the opposite.

Luxury goods companies for years restricting themselves to a few tasks they do best – designing collections, fashion shows production and retail management – offloading other value chain activities to others. The question is what seems to be a very creative (won’t use the word innovative) industries are mostly very old fashion companies that have done very little to transform the category, the industry and the economics. There are a very few notable exceptions. The reality is innovation and design thinking rarely happens in the fashion and luxury goods world. They need to break out of their current creative mode and start innovating. The new affluent luxury goods consumers are less interested in traditional status symbols and more interested in ‘content-rich socially-validated self-identity creation experiences.’” It is more than the logo, price and exclusivity. Many will wake up to this shift and realize this is not the customers they used to know for many years.

Today, organizations must confront the dilemmas of how to manage their core competencies and capabilities. These are systems, assets and skills that need to be continuously monitor, evaluate and ensuring they are up-to-date aligning to the company’s innovation agenda. This has been becoming increasing complex especially with so many uncertainties. When you start thinking about putting ‘design thinking’ as your core competencies, suddenly the idea of core competencies give new meanings.

We are going beyond the narrow definition of core competencies and you can think of ‘design thinking’ as your cultural capital: an organizational wide appreciation and practice of design thinking skills that can be leverage across solving channel problems; produce development, marketing and operation challenges. It is time to rethink the core definition of ‘core competencies.’

Do You Practice Intuition? If So, Do You Know Where It Comes From? Do You Keep It Secret?

Do you trust your intuition? And if so why? Intuition is most practiced and least understood. And why some people are betting at it and some not? Can intuition be rational and strategic? Is there something called ‘strategic intuition?’ What makes your intuition strategic and mine not?

Most see an interesting connection between innovation, imagination and intuition. Often intuition may even exert a paranormal or even magical influence on everything new and unknown. What do we mean by intuition. In Educating Intuition Robin Hogarth describes various ways we can improve our intuition. He points out two notable impediments to the education of intuition. One is the presence of confusing or “wicked” environments where feedback is unreliable. The other is the limited scope or “domain specific” nature of intuition. Intuition can therefore inhibit innovation because such obstacles exist.

• A person who has a giant database of ideas and insights and supported by fast access to those information as the brain processes these knowledge in a non-linear way and as a result the person is more likely to guess correctly in a more educated than others who do not posses the data points and fast access. In another word, a large database, faster access like a SSD drive and better classification of data.
• A person who has a strong theoretical or philosophical understanding of why things happen through life experiences or as a scholar and therefore can quickly draw on those theories and associated metaphor and as a result can look at these very complex problems and not overwhelmed by its complexity. Getting right to the core and a possible decision pops out disguised as intuition. They perceive wholes and compress much into a flash. Philosophers and prophets are often intuitive. It is wisdom secretly disguised as intuition.
• A person who has a strong logical and deductive reasoning capabilities and it to eliminate the impossibilities and therefore left with the more realistic options and by probability the person is in a better position to conclude. This can be dangerous as the person can be very wrong if the answers lie outside conventional logic. But in 90% of the time, the guess is correct due to the narrow nature of the problems. It is fast logic disguised as intuition.

Intuition is a very general word, it is not taught in school (may be art school) and we don’t know what prompt some rely more on it more and some completely ignore it.  The value of intuition is not celebrated in the world of scientific management but commonly practice in the world of design thinking. Many CEOs made important decisions based on it but won't admit it. In the world of data-dominance, it is not easy to find a place for intuition, you can still use it discreetly. Or just call it innovation or sense-making.

Great M/I/S/C Launch Party Last Night! Post Party Radom Thoughts On Innovation, Organization Design And Design Thinking Cuture.

Great party last night for my magazine M/I/S/C lunch party held at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. And Karin Wall (editor-in-chief) from Innovation Management joined us all the way from Sweden to co-launch their hard copy of Innovation Management with M/I/S/C. Cool people and great venue and not to mention good food. Exhausted after talking to 200+ people and there were about 20 people whom I last talked to was 7 years ago and actually never met in person and then there were some friends whom I have not seen for years. Oh what a night! And the girs at the office did a great job. I am thinking we should add 'party planning' to our innovation offerings. Anyhow, I have a lot of treat feedback on the magazine. Onto the next one!

I was watching the film ‘Inception’ on a long flight last week and I remembered one interesting dialogue from the film “How do you translate business strategy into emotion?”. I was not really watching as I was editing the next issue of M/I/S/C magazine, but the line caught my attention. I rewound it back and tried to make sure if I’ve heard it right. Yes. Translate business strategy into emotion!

That’s a great question and I am not sure people realize how important that question is. We’re human beings. And it is our emotion that makes us human. In business, we’re taught in business school about rational decision-making and fact-based decision making etc. etc. When it comes to design thinking and innovation, we realized how little we could apply these decision-making models. It is about the organizational culture as much as it is about process, framework and creativity.

The concept of organizational culture has drawn attention to the long-neglected, pretty subjective or the ‘soft’ side of organizational design. And many aspects of organizational culture, emotion and its relationship with design thinking have not received enough attention. Instead, emphasis has been placed primarily on the cultural and symbolic aspects that are relevant in an instrumental/pragmatic context. Organization culture is treated as a management tool and a instrument designed by management to shape employees' behavior. The idea of emotion is largely ignored.

The method of identifying organizational culture characteristics that foster innovation through design thinking is an interesting one. The more visible and tangible manifestations of culture are the artifacts. These may be easy to identify and observe but difficult to decipher. Values and state-of-mind tend to remain hidden and may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations. So often design thinking values are hidden deep within an organization and there are those who should design thinking and innovation and there is nothing beyond marketing slogans.

Can you pick a piece of documentation from an organization somewhere that can elicit some tacit aspects of design thinking and innovation culture? The idea is to provide a stimulus back to the organization so that they can reflect on an interpretation that is based on their cultural framework rather than on the corporate ethnography? What stimulus is required for the corporate ethnographer to get the dialogue flowing and what is need to provide a specific context but leave enough latitude for interpretation. This was achieved by asking the team members to discuss the concrete examples of successful and less successful application of design thinking in the context of their everyday work.

Starting with data gathering and analysis, the idea is to gather data for any example of design thinking applications experienced by the team and allow the team members to talk about their experiences of application. The interviews were semi-structured and cognitive mapping techniques were used to capture the views of each participant.

The individual cognitive maps were individually validated and conflated into a single map to represent the company’s collective cognition. The single map was further validated and refined. In a parallel process each of the transcripts was analyzed and codes were produced from transcript content analysis that represented the aspects of organizational culture that influenced radical product innovation. This resulted in the clustering of codes into aggregate themes (higher level codes) that represented aspects of the design thinking culture that were collectively considered to be positively associated with the facilitation of innovative outcomes.

This type of work is still in an early stage but I believe it will be extremely useful for organization to understand how design thinking (and to what extend) is embedding in an organizational culture. Without this understands, they are talking about more design and prettier things, not more design thinking.

Design Thinking And Value Creation. Two Things That Every School Must Teach.

I believe design thinking is less about design and more about creative ways to create value. It should not reside in any particular type of schools. Any schools should be training people to recognize value when they see it or creative means to create them. Business schools may have an advantage of teaching people to capture value. We didn't teach students enough about what creating value means.

Idea Couture is now becoming more and more like a school, we’re training (or retraining) our people from wrong practices everyday. We’re also helping clients to look for hidden value and show them how to unlock them. We’re also starting external programs on design thinking so people can learn what it is beyond that yellow stickies and fancy buzz words.

I see Idea Couture as a place of design thinking projects, everything is a project and some shorter and some longer, always on and always moving, and always something to learn for everyone. There is no office, only project spaces, and workshop spaces. People work long hours sometimes, travel across the world, constantly learning from others and collectively pushing each other. High trust and high pressure. Plenty of fun and plenty of caffeine. Everyone needs to earn his or her credibility here; it doesn’t matter where you came from. Everyone is passionate about insight, design, strategy and innovation.

We will be broadening our partnerships this year with two schools and will be working with other to develop educational programs and events. We are operating in different intersections between design thinking and social thinking; strategic innovation and design innovation; strategic foresights and emerging behaviors. And I am making sure that we always have a few our own projects running all the time parallel to client projects.

Design thinking is part of our day-to-day problem-framing-and solving approach - in another word it is work. It is something that we preach and breathe. It is no buzzword or marketing slogan here, it is real. Design thinking is where D-school meets B-school. Why is design thinking unique?

Design thinking proposes a cross-discipline learning-by-doing experience. It allows us to accommodate varied interests and abilities through project/action learning experiences. The good and bad thing about it is that it is not a subject area you find in a textbook.

Design thinking integrates imagination into the strategy process. It opens up the future and invites us to look at uncertainties and allow us to be comfortable and working with many unknowns. Design thinking expects us to cope with inadequate information and multiple levels of unknowns in order to create a tangible outcome.

Design thinking is a dynamic constructive process in nature. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and correctly apply knowledge to achieve goals that may change as knowledge of the problem; its context is acquired and new behavior unfolds.

Design thinking promotes empathy. It encourage the use of tools to put us in the shoes of customers and allows us to observe and identify any unarticulated and unmet needs. It puts users at the very core of everything. And we can use these insights to develop new knowledge through creative learning and experimentation.

Design thinking can create meanings. Power Point and Excel spreadsheets cannot not create meanings. Creating meaning is the hardest part of the design process; you're not going to get it right the first time. But you can iterate it, again and again. And you need to have something to touch and feel. Design thinking allows you to create things that you can experiment with and see what happens.. and in the process you may be able to find meanings.

I can go on and on. but have a plane to catch.

Where Can You Get The Best Design Education These Days? Here's My Ranking. Is There A Good Place That Teaches D-Schools+B-Schools Thinking?

I've spent a good half-day in London at the Royal College of Art this week and lunch with Nick Leon of Design London. We exchange views of design thinking and the world of design and where it is going. Also met with some other faculties and plan to feature some of their work in the upcomming issue of the M/I/S/C magazine. Will write more on this next week.

Design thinking can power up strategic business innovation and change design education, but no one can agree on how to teach its methods. It is not exactly a very good time to be graduating from design schools as thousands of graduates pour into the job market this year and many industries are still in a flux. But the positive side is design is gaining importance in business probably the first time since the early days of the industrial revolution.

There are reasons to be optimistic but also concerns. I’ve interviewed about 30 designers/job applicants the last two weeks and come to the same realization that most of then are not equipped for the real world. Many design schools are struggling to find the balance between craft and thinking and some schools have not idea of what real world skills they would need. Lacking in formal and rigor methodologies is a still a challenge; some still resist the idea of needing a methodology. There are plenty of designers out there, industrial, graphic, architecture, urban planning, interactive (not enough information and service design) and definitely not many design thinkers. It is easy to assume that coming out from a design program one must be a design thinker. Not true at all, it is definitely not the case.

You don’t need to study in design school to be a design thinker, many young designers graduated with aspirations to use design to drive change and realized they are just in the business of communications – a poster (even a really good one) don’t change the world. “Design for Social Change,” sounds exciting, and when I ask them “How?” I usually get 5 minute of dead silence.

Everywhere graduates are emerging from new interdisciplinary graduate programs that integrate art, design, technology, and business. These young men and women are supposed to be trained in "design thinking." but mainly are just new ways of pushing creativity rather than thinking about new ways to solve problem. They are two very different missions.

Some schools simply bring students together from different schools or departments and allow them to do some cross-disciplinary project work. Example would be the exchange program hosted at INSEAD for Art Center students to take MBA courses for 4 months. INSEAD students can study with the design students in the eight-week 'Strategies for Product and Service' elective, offered through the 10-month MBA program. 

To train people in truly D-schools meets B-schools, the Royal College of Art is way ahead of the game in terms of training design thinkers of tomorrow. I would say this is the best graduate level design thinking education you can get today, compare to anywhere in the world. The Master's in Design program from IIT (Chicago) is also worth a mention for those who prefer wind than rain.

The Cox Review: Creativity in Business was commissioned by the UK Treasury to look at enhancing UK business productivity and resulted in the forming of Design London, an international centre for interdisciplinary design led innovation that teaches, researches and delivers radical new practices, tools and processes to transform the way organizations innovate. Design London brings together creativity and expertise in design from the Royal College of Art, engineering from Imperial College's Faculty of Engineering and the business of innovation from Imperial College Business School.

It was the first and still one of the very few schools where design is a core component of every MBA students curriculum, not just an elective course, and where MBA students, postgraduate students of design from the RCA and engineers and scientists from Imperial complete a common program which includes executing challenging innovation projects over several months.

I was excited to hear from Nicolas Neon at the RCA in London what they are doing there and it is almost exactly how we want to train our people at Idea Couture. I think this is the model where other schools should replicate.

Since RCA only offers graduate (Master or Doctorate) programs, if you want to have a good design foundation, here are the lists of best design schools in US and UK for you to consider (there are many good ones outside UK and US and I don't know enough about them):

UK Top Ranking Art and Design Schools 2010 ratings (Source: Guardian Top 10 list)

• No.1  University College London
• No.2  Oxford
• No.3  Brunel

US Top Industrial Design Schools 2010 (Source: The Idris Mootee's ranking) Stanford is considered more of an engineering school rather than industrial design school and that’s why I did not add it to the list, you can add that to the list probably as one of the top three. And then I have two No.3s)

• No.1 Art Center
• No.2 RISD
• No.3 Carnegie Mellon
• No.3 Pratt Institute

"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.