Archive for category design
Listening to customers…. really listening.
Posted by John in business models, design, innovation, innovation strategy on 11 August 2010
One of the consistent messages from innovation surveys is that customers are a major source of innovation. Sometimes customers with more extreme uses for products will adapt products to suit their purpose and then the manufacturers find out what is happening and take these adaptations on board. If you’ve seen the videos of big wave surfing, many of the board modifications were made by the surfers and then adopted by the makers.
On other occasions, a customer might give an idea back to the producer but often they won’t give the feedback unless it is asked for. Getting to know your customer better is a good way to improve your innovation performance.
One of the featured companies in the Brisbane Innovation Scorecard was Aluminum Boats Ltd. This company is in a tough industry where costs are rising and the strong Australian dollar makes competitiveness a real challenge in export markets. Nonetheless they have managed to grow the business and continue to win contracts. For this company, the customer is central to the innovation process and the strategy of the company. To get the type of innovation they need, the company forms long-standing relationships with key partners. As stated by the managing director of the company, Roy Whitewood,
We set out to be different from the beginning. Most boat builders in our class tend to work on one-off projects.
Four years ago we chose a different direction for Aluminum Boats. We selected big clients and work with them to solve problems. We innovate openly with our clients in design and process. In this way we also manage all aspects of our boat building with the highest quality materials and latest construction techniques.
On receiving the award for product innovation at the launch of the Brisbane Innovation Scorecard, Stuart Pascoe, Aluminium’s GM, talked about the commuter ferries that were the focus of the prize. He talked about not only listening to the customer, but also the customer’s customer. So not only did they work with the ferry operator to design the right boat for the job but they also talked to the commuters who used the ferry. When they asked commuters about what is was like to live on an island in the bay and commute to Brisbane, it seems that many didn’t like the slow travel times. One of the reasons for the slow commute was the problem of hitting dugongs. These are protected animals. The result was a dugong-friendly fast ferry and as Stuart puts it in an interview, a hit might give the dugong a headache but it won’t kill it.
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After the launch of the scorecard, I took a taxi back to the university to catch up on work. I was set to make a few phone calls on the way when I realized that the taxi driver was a very talkative fellow, so I put the phone away. One thing about Australian taxi drivers is that they are very likely to ask you everything about your life, without any sense of this being inappropriate. This driver wanted to know what I had been doing in the city, so I told him about the launch of the Innovation Scorecard and the companies that had been recognized for their leadership in innovation. When I mentioned Aluminium Boats he turned to me and said that he knew the company well and thought they were an excellent business.
It turned out that my driver was a volunteer coast guard and was a part-timer skipper of one of their boats. He said that they had a few boats but the one designed by Aluminium was by far the best. When I asked him why, he said that the company had spent a lot of time talking to everyone who worked on these boats. They really wanted to know what it was like to be searching for people in the water at night and what it was like to spend a long time on the boats during an emergency. My driver had told them about vision problems in low light conditions and the need to have a special set up in the cockpit with night-vision. This need was incorporated into the final design. Tim writes about empathy-driven innovation and Aluminium Boats is a very good example of what he is talking about.
The thing is that Aluminium is organized for ‘listening’ and its not just something that is part of their marketing. Having 90% permanent staff in an industry where subcontracting is common, fewer customers where long-term relationships can be formed and sticking with design and construct jobs are all strategic choices that help them to listen better.
As Stuart Pascoe, GM says
We don’t bash the problem over the head with a hammer. We go out, meet the agencies and find a way around it.
Innovating Meaning
Posted by Tim in book riffs, design, innovation strategy on 15 July 2010
Often when we someone asks us to describe a product or a service, we tell them about features. What does it do? How does it do it?
This is a mistake. Products and services are not about features – they are about meaning, and they are about getting jobs done.
Here’s an example – listen to Dan Ariely talk about the Toyota Prius:
Ariely is not describing the Prius as a set of features – he is describing what it means to drive a Prius. The features may influence this meaning, but the innovation in the Prius is not really in what it does – the innovation is in what it means to people.
Clay Shirky has another example in his new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age:
When McDonald’s wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, it hired researchers to figure out what characteristics its customers cared about. Should the shakes be thicker? Sweeter? Colder? Almost all of the researchers focused on the product. But one of them, Gerald Berstell, chose to ignore the shakes themselves and study the customers instead. He sat in a McDonald’s for eighteen hours one day, observing who bought milkshakes and at what time. One surprising discovery was that many milkshakes were purchased early in the day – odd, as consuming a shake at eight A.M. plainly doesn’t fit the bacon-and-eggs model of breakfast. Berstall also garnered three other behavioral clues from the morning milkshake crowd: the buyers were always alone, they rarely bought anything besides a shake, and the never consumed the shakes in the store.
The key to understanding what was going was to stop viewing the product in isolation and to give up traditional notions of the morning meal. Berstell instead focused on a single, simple question: “What job is a customer hiring that milkshake to do at eight A.M.?”
If you want to eat while driving, you need something you can eat with one hand. It shouldn’t be too hot, too messy, or too greasy. It should also be moderately tasty, and take a while to finish. Not one conventional breakfast item fits that bill, and so without regard for the sacred traditions of the morning meal, those customers were hiring the milkshake to do the job they needed done.
All the researchers except Berstell missed this fact, because they made two kinds of mistakes… The first was to concentrate mainly on the product and assume that everything important about it was somehow implicit in its attributes, without regard to what role the customers wanted it to play – the job they were hiring the milkshake for.
The second mistake was to adopt a narrow view of the type of food people have always eaten in the morning, as if all habits were deeply rooted traditions instead of accumulated accidents.
The innovation in both cases is in what the product means. None of the features of the milkshake changed to turn it into a breakfast meal – the innovation was driven by customers, who invented a new use (and a new meaning) for milkshakes. The change that Ariely talks about with the Prius is not feature-driven either – he is arguing that the Prius has been successful because it means something different.
This is exactly what Roberto Verganti is talking about in Design-Driven Innovation – the role of design in innovation is to create new meanings for things. This is a huge innovation opportunity.
The lesson here is this: don’t get hung up on features, or on what things do. Instead, think about what they mean. One good way to approach innovation in meaning is to focus on the job to be done. If you can innovate meaning you have a chance to create a significant competitive advantage.
(you can see the academic article from Berstell and colleagues discussing jobs to be done here – via Graham Hill).
An Innovation Paradox
Posted by Tim in book riffs, design, innovation strategy on 12 July 2010
David Lazer included a really interesting demo in one of his talks at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. He was in a session talking about using the internet as a research resource, and there were about 100 people in the room. Lazer asked how many people there were under 30 years old – about 40% of the people raised their hands. Then he asked how many of those people had a landline – and not one of them did. He repeated the exercise with people over 45, and about 2/3 of us still have a landline.
The point that he was making is that a lot of the people making pronouncements about the internet are over 45 – and our experiences of the internet and technology is likely to be very different from those of the majority of people using the net these days.
The thing that struck me about this is that I was surprised by the fact that none of the under-30s had a landline. I had read about this, and I know a fair number of people in that age group, and it’s true that everyone that I know only has a mobile. But it still hadn’t really sunk in to me that that’s the way things are done now.
The innovation lesson here is that when we’re coming up with great ideas, we need to know a lot about the people that we want to use them. And one of the huge pitfalls here is to assume that they are just like us. We need to have some mechanism in place to help us figure out what people really need.
However, John C. Bogle points out some of the problems with this in his book Enough. He is one of the people that helped invent mutual funds, but he is critical of much financial innovation. Part of the problem that he identifies is an over-reliance on process. He includes this quote from Daniel Yankelovich to illustrate the danger in relying on metrics and process:
The first step is to measure what can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured really is not very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what cannot be measured does not really exist. This is suicide.
Bogle counters this with an aphorism that he freely shares within his firm, Vanguard, which says:
For God’s sake, let’s always keep Vanguard a place where judgment has at least a fighting chance to triumph over process.
In other words, sometimes we have to rely on our own belief concerning the correct course of action to follow.
These two views form an innovation paradox – we have to understand that not everyone is like us, and we need some kind of process for learning how they differ and what they need. So we have to get outside of our own head. On the other hand, we also have to be willing at times to ditch our processes and rely on our own good judgment. So we have to ignore what everyone else says and stick with what we know ourselves.
How can we do both?
There are a couple of steps to take to resolve this paradox. One is to develop the wisdom to realise when we need to follow one path, and when the other is most appropriate. This comes from experience, and it also comes from realising that there is not only one correct way to do things.
Developing the flexibility to act both ways is the second step- we need to be able to be able to get out of our own heads to understand the needs of others, while also sometimes being willing to ignore what everyone else says and use our judgment.
Managing innovation is filled with paradoxes like this – where we are simultaneously pulled in opposite directions. We need to be comfortable with the ambiguity that this imposes on us. And we need to be wise enough to figure out which way is best in each particular circumstance. Both of these are hard skills to develop – and even harder to quantify. But it’s soft skills like this that are essential to managing innovation. And to managing.
Constraints Make Us More Creative
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy on 27 May 2010
For a couple of years I was the manager in charge of a self-managing marketing team (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that actually meant!). My first year with them, we ran the most successful campaign in the history of the organisation. There were many factors that came into play that led to that success, but I am convinced that the biggest one was this: for the first time ever, we didn’t come up with a completely new theme for the campaign – we built on the one that we had been using for the past year.
The biggest argument that I had with the team was over what it meant to be creative. They were convinced that coming up with a completely new campaign theme every year was being creative. My view was that it took a lot more creativity to take a theme that we had been using and give it new life. It’s actually easy to be ‘creative’ if there are no constraints, but without constraints, it’s hard to be strategically creative.
We have to have constraints to channel our creativity.
I was reminded of this when I saw this video that came via Bob Sutton’s post called the Creative Process Gone Wrong:
Sutton is one of the best management thinkers around these days, so I encourage you to read his post to see the conclusions that he drew from this. One of his points is critical:
The process in the video, where a good idea isn’t shown to users or customers, but each internal voice adds more and more, and forgets the big picture in the process, also reminds me of the stage gate process at its worst, where it each stage, the product or service is made worse as it travels along.
We need to use iterative processes to test our innovations, so that back-and-forth process in the video is sound in principle. The fatal error is that the results are never tested. We need to take an experimental approach as we go through iterations. Make a prototype, test it, learn from the test, make it better, repeat. Without the test part, the process fails.
Idris Mootee gets at the same point in his post Enough Overtheorizing of Design Thinking. Let’s Go Back to Design Thinking 101:
The third [design idea to use] is rapid prototyping. This is particularly important to improve speed to market and for markets that are rapidly evolving. The benefit of rapid prototyping includes: 1/ Quickly determine how it is supposed to work 2/ Determine what customers really want 3/ Use abstractions and sometimes math models to improve a concept quantitatively or qualitatively test a prototype to improve concept and to predict behavior 4/Determine whether customer value and business value are aligned (business sense) and if not what’s the gap.
Again, we have to somehow have a market test for our new ideas. This doesn’t necessarily mean focus groups or asking people, but one way or another we need to develop an understanding of what people need, and test our prototypes against this standard. Empathy is one good tool to use here.
The video also shows the problem with having no constraints. To be genuinely creative, we need to have constraints. Here is how Jeffrey Phillips puts it in his post Innovation Paradox: Liberated by Constraints:
Generally speaking, most teams believe that constraints limit their thinking, and their ability to be creative. What’s interesting is that most people who “do” creativity for a living crave constraints. Without constraints, every task starts from a blank sheet of paper, a very long and broad sheet of paper, with no clear starting point. David Ogilvy is quoted as having thanked his clients for a “tight brief” – not underwear, but a clearly defined and tightly controlled set of criteria to achieve.
This is the issue I ran into with my marketers – they thought they wanted a blank sheet of paper. At the end of our campaign, after I had convinced them that it would be better to work within the existing theme and they had done so very successfully, they agreed with me that working within constraints had spurred them to do the most creative work they’d ever done.
It’s counter-intuitive but true – Constraints make us more creative.
Innovation Lessons from Collapsing Bridges
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 9 May 2010
Whenever someone comes up with a new type of bridge, there is no way of knowing if the bridge will work or not. The stakes are pretty high too – no one wants to build a bridge that ends up like the The Tacoma Narrows Bridge:
Leon Moiseff, the man who designed this bridge, was no hack. Previously, he had also designed the Golden Gate Bridge, among others. Here is how he described the Tacoma Narrows Bridge:
“The most beautiful in the world.” That’s how engineer-designer Leon Moisseiff described his 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The statement represents much more than one engineer’s opinion about his own work. Moisseiff’s words reflect important architectural design trends and artistic tastes of the 1930s, as well as three decades of suspension bridge design.
Moisseiff cared deeply about bridge aesthetics. Bridge designs, he said, needed to be “safe, convenient, economical in cost and maintenance and at the same time satisfy the sense of beauty of the average man of our time.” Moisseiff believed that engineers should try “to develop the beauty of their structures” by emphasizing “the essential, to interrupt rhythmically the monotonous and to indicate the minor importance of the auxiliary . . . and attain the pleasure of good form.” Bridge designers, he said, should “search for the graceful and elegant.”
Why do we need new bridge designs? The main reason is not aesthetic – the primary driver is that new methods of building bridges allow us to cross spans that previous designs couldn’t cross. That is why we see new forms of bridges being designed and built – each advance allows us to get across longer stretches, or to get across gaps that have unique physical problems.
New bridge designs let us do new things – but the risk is that we don’t know that they’ll work until we build them. This is true of many innovations – it is often very hard to know in advance if they will be successful once they are at full scale. How can we deal with this? We can learn a bit from bridge designers.
The first thing that they do is they figure out small-scale experiments that allow them to test possible new designs. Here is how Henry Petroski describes preparation for building the Britannia Tubular Bridge (shown above) in the 1840s, in his chapter in Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson:
The experimentalist-engineer William Fairburn… was responsible for conducting scale-model strength tests to establish the preferred shape and detailed design of the wrought-iron tubes. He began with small-scale models to compare the relative strengths of different shapes and arrived at the conclusion that the rectangular cross-section was the best. The model tubes were tested by handing from their centre weights that represented the load of a heavy locomotive. Weights were added until the tube failed, which revealed the weakness of the structure and thereby provided guidance for how to modify it in the next model. By progressively increasing the scale of his models, Fairburn was able to establish trends of behaviour, and from the experimental data the theorist Eaton Hodgkinson established an empirical formula by means of which he could extrapolate to the requirements for the full-sized tube.
To build a full-scale model and test it to destruction would have been essentially to build the bridge itself. So, as is typical in the engineering of large structures to this day, there comes a point when judgment dictats that the model testing must end and the real thing begin.
Small-scale testing is one method for experimenting to support bridge design innovation. However, there are often things that we can’t anticipate, and consequently can’t test. The problems with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge were caused by the huge amount of wind that whips through the Narrows. This is what generated the huge torsion which tore the bridge apart. The design had been thoroughly tested for strength, but not for wind.
Of course, now we can use things like computer simulation to test even for factors such as wind – simulation is part of a class of tools that can help us with this kind of innovation. This allows for even more extensive experimentation than can be undertaken through physical methods. Still, we can only model things that we know about. The Millennium Bridge in London was simulated extensively before it was built, and yet it still had problems with excessive swaying.
It turns out that this swaying was caused by lateral movement induced by synchronised walking. Once this was discovered, possible changes were simulated, until a method for passively damping the movement was designed and installed. Subsequently, the bridge has been stable.
There are three key innovation lessons in all of this:
- Test out your big ideas by devising a small-scale experiment first. It is often difficult to figure out how our innovations will work at full scale. But a good first step is to figure out a way to experiment with trying them on a smaller scale first. This is what Hindustan Unilever did when introducing their Shakti Program in India – this is a radical new sales-distribution model. They tested it first with just seventeen women to see if it would work, then they scaled up over time. We can learn a great deal from experiments.
- We don’t always have to do live experiments – there are now many innovation technologies available that will enable us to conduct experiments through methods such as rapid prototyping and simulation. Arup Engineering used simulation extensively in the initial design of the Millennium Bridge, and just as extensively in the retrofitting of the motion damping system. With these technologies, we are able to experiment even more extensively than previously.
- Finally, we can’t test everything before we launch – at some point we have to use our judgment about whether or not things will work. Sometimes, there will be problems from sources that we never could have anticipated. This may cause failure – as in the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The key lesson here though it that when we discover a new way to fail, we must ensure that we learn as much as possible from it. After the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed, subsequent bridges using that type of design included stabilisers that prevented the twisting motion. Consequently, no other bridges have collapsed from that particular problem.
Experimenting is a key tool in innovation. We can use it to discover problems and test solutions before we have a massive failure in public. Experimentation can reduce the risk of innovation. So think like an engineer, and figure out ways to test out your ideas before you fully implement them.
Design and Innovation
Which of these two things is better designed?
The Robert Graves Tea Kettle by Alessi?
Or the little plastic thing that goes in the pizza box to keep the cheese from sticking to the box?
And which of the two is more innovative?
Does the Graves tea kettle heat water more effectively than other tea kettles on the market? For that matter, is the one manufactured by Alessi any better than the nearly identical one, also designed by Graves, sold at Target for about half the price?
I’m not so convinced that the answer to either of those questions is yes.
How about the pizza tripod? It does its job superbly. Is there anything better at what it does? Not really. Prior to the pizza tripod, we didn’t really have anything other than cheese stuck to our cardboard. It is a fantastic piece of design, and a great innovation.
We often mistake design for making things look pretty, or cool. Great design can be aesthetically pleasing, like the Graves tea kettles, but it doesn’t have to be. The pizza tripods aren’t the kind of thing that you can display in your house as art, but they sure get the job done. And they were completely new to the world when they showed up.
Great design isn’t just making stuff look great. Innovations aren’t just flashy technical gadgets. Great innovation and design should make our lives better. There are plenty of ways to do that, and many of them are as simple as keeping our pizzas intact.
My challenge to you today is to go out and think of a way to make things better. Your idea doesn’t have to be a thing. It can be a new way of doing things – a better way. But think of something, and do it. That’s innovation.
Empathy-Driven Innovation
Three things came together to make me think of this post:
- I regularly get feedback from my research interviews that people really enjoy them. That’s interesting, because I’m a lousy interviewer. After the last round, we got some feedback from our contact at the firm who said that he had received thank-you emails for setting up the interviews. My colleague was a bit taken aback by this, and said to me “but we didn’t say anything”. True, I said, but we listened to them.
And it occured to me how infrequent that is in a lot of workplaces. It’s sad, really. I was reflecting on this on the walk in to my office this morning, and decided that in a lot of businesses, having genuine empathy could be a source of competitive advantage. This is built on scarcity, since genuine empathy is rare. Something to think about I guess…
- Then when I got to my office, I ran across several excellent articles tweeted by Elizabeth Sosnow (they were so good that I’ve almost gotten over her saying that she didn’t see why hockey was exciting). One of them was a post called Empathy is a Presentation Skill by Sims Wyeth. Among other things, Wyeth says this:
Remember, empathy is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy implies that you feel the same as the other person. Empathy only means that you understand how they think and feel.
By using your powers of empathy, you are more able to get and hold their attention by making your ideas more relevant to their frame of experience.
So, more evidence that empathy is important.
- Finally, those two things got me thinking about Roberto Verganti’s controversial post called User-Centered Innovation is Not Sustainable. Verganti argues:
It’s time to move beyond user-centered innovation paradigms that have brought us into this unsustainable economy. Are executives and innovators ready to take the lead in establishing a new design-driven process? Are they willing to stop observing the use of existing products and instead propose new scenarios and solutions that are meaningful for people, good for the environment, and profitable for businesses?
Many people interested in customer-centred innovation have reacted strongly against this post, as Verganti discounts the value of all customer feedback. Maybe empathy can get us out of this conflict?
Verganti’s two examples of non-user-centred innovation are the Toyota Prius and the innovator Ezio Manzini, founder of the Sustainable Everyday Project. The Prius and Manzini’s various initiatives are described as visionary, and they certainly are. But the Prius didn’t evolve in a vacuum. It’s true that while it was in development, the overall market trend was running towards gigantic SUVs with ever-dwindling fuel economy. And yet, at the same time there were a significant number of people that desperately wanted a more fuel-efficient car. Toyota clearly designed the Prius with them in mind. The Prius is user-centred, but not majority-centred.
Another classic example of non-user-centred design is Apple’s decision to cut the 3.5″ floppy drive from the iMac (or their current decision to drop Flash from the iPad). This was done without extensive user consultation – after all, who in a focus group would say ‘yes, I think it would be great if you dropped a feature’? But the decision was made based on an excellent understanding of what users were doing – at the time they were switching over to USB drives in great numbers. It’s not exactly rocket science to decide that users might prefer USB drives with a 50 mb capacity to a floppy disk with 1.44 mbs. So this decision was also driven by an understanding of customers.
My view of Verganti’s approach is that he’s overselling vision. Even in his book, his examples of design-driven innovation (which are great) all include a deep understanding of what customers are trying to get done. I think that what the examples really show are the dangers of letting the majority of customers drive innovation. That just gets you the ‘faster horses‘ solution.
I think that Verganti’s examples show innovation from leaders with vision, and a deep understanding of customer objectives. When you combine this with empathy, you are able to figure out which of the customers at the fringe are the ones that will lead to the next mainstream. Design-driven innovation can’t just be based on intuition alone. It has to be anchored in empathetic understanding of the people that will respond to your proposals.
The key to good design-driven innovation is vision combined with empathy.
(Matt Perez has written a good response to this post)
You Have to Break Connections to Get Your Ideas to Spread
Posted by Tim in design, evolving economic entities, networks on 19 March 2010
Next time you get in a car to drive somewhere, take a minute to think about how many parts of the economy are connected to your trip. There are a whole lot. There all of the people and firms involved in building your car. They have taken ideas and designs that have evolved for over a hundred years, added some new ideas, and come up with the design for your car. And if you drive a Toyota, it’s not just people in Toyota that have done that – there are hundreds of other firms that have designed particular parts – brakes, stereos, and windshield wipers.
Then another bunch of people and firms built the actual car. For the vast majority of cars, this didn’t happen in the city or town that you live in – so yet another bunch of people and firms were involved in getting the car to your particular location so that you could buy it or lease it. This includes shipping companies, trucking firms, and dealerships.
So that’s a lot of people involved with just getting the car to you in the first place. Now you turn it on – petrol ignites (if you’re driving a hybrid it takes a while longer to get to this point, but it still happens). How did that get to your car? Another chain of research, design, production and distribution. Thousands more people and firms.
Then you start driving. On what? Roads. How did they get there? Same story, although in this case a government almost certainly had something to do with it.
Every single thing in the economy is embedded deeply into these economic networks. Design, production, distribution – no matter what we’re talking about, nothing stands alone.
When you come up with a great new idea, you need to think about this economic network in two ways. The first is: how can I connect to all of the complementary parts of the economy that are needed to get my idea to work? The second is: if I’m going to get my idea to spread, which of these existing connections need to be broken?
We’ve talked before about the importance of making new connections to get your idea embedded within the economy. But breaking connections is also important.
Ford wants to get me to break my connection with Toyota and forge a new one with them. If they are successful, the overall economic network impact is relatively small. Many of the same firms are involved in making parts for both Ford and Toyota. Many of the same shipping and trucking firms move vehicles for both. I’ll drive my new Ford on the same roads, and I’ll probably buy petrol from the same stations. So the impact of that change is small.
But what if I want to buy a Honda FCX? Then things get a bit more complicated. The FCX is a hydrogen-powered car, and it’s pretty cool. But if I want one, I have to break my connection with Australia, and rebuild the one with California, because that’s the only place they’re being sold. And because they’re only sold through fleet sales, I’d have to get a job that is affiliated with the right car fleet program. So on a personal level, the connections that I would have to break to buy an FCX are much more substantial than the ones that have to be broken if I just switch to a generic Ford. And it’s extremely disruptive.
The changes required by the FCX are pretty disruptive within the economy as a whole as well. We’ve got roads already, so that at least is covered. And some of the parts manufacturers will be the same as those involved with making regular cars – tires, seats and body parts will all be essentially the same. But a lot of new suppliers need to be added to the supply chain for hydrogen-powered cars. There are hydrogen fuel cells, which replace the petrol tank. Hydrogen requires a different ignition method, so the engines have to be completely different. In connecting to manufacturers in these new areas, Honda is breaking connections with suppliers that have gone back many years.
Many connections need to be broken outside of Honda as well. Where do we get hydrogen for our hydrogen-powered cars? Currently there’s no infrastructure for this. We need new plants to make fuel-quality hydrogen, new methods of transporting this hydrogen once it’s produced, and new places to get the hydrogen. These will actually replace oil refineries, oil pipelines and petrol stations. That is a lot of disconnecting.
Everything is embedded within the economic network. So when we have a great new idea, we need to get people to connect to it to get it to spread. As Umair Haque says, we do this by making it awesome. However, we also have to be aware of the connections that need to be broken to get our ideas to spread. This can get pretty complicated. It’s not just Toyota and Ford that don’t want me to connect up with a Honda FCX. It’s Shell and BP, and all the companies that make petrol-driven engines, and all the petrol station owners, and many more. A lot of these firms will actively fight to prevent having the connections broken.
This is why having a great idea, and even executing it really well, aren’t necessarily enough. The critical third part is to get your idea to spread. This isn’t meant to be discouraging. I’m simply saying that for our innovations to be successful, we need to think about where they fit within the economic network. A lot of these connections are relatively in obvious in the case of cars, but even if you’re introducing a simple new way of doing things, you have to get people to disconnect from the old ways too. By thinking of the economy as a network, we’ll get better at getting our ideas to spread. But to get people to connect with our new ideas, we have to getting them to disconnect first. Yesterday I said that making connections is the fundamental creative act in innovation. This is definitely true when we are generating great ideas. When we are getting them to spread, connecting our ideas to people is important, but so is getting them disconnected from other ideas. That’s the key challenge in innovation diffusion.
Designing Espresso Innovation
Posted by Tim in business models, design, innovation strategy on 26 February 2010
Here are some thoughts on ‘design-driven innovation’ versus ‘design as making things look cool’:
Design-Driven Innovation – Nespresso from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.
And here are some related points:
- We often think of design as making stuff look cool, but when we talk about design-driven innovation, we’re actually talking about creating new categories of goods and services based on a deep understanding of what our customers are trying to do.
- With many design-driven innovations, market testing is very difficult because it is extremely hard for people to envision how the innovation will work. However, this does not mean that mean that customers are unimportant in the innovation process. It simply means that they can’t tell us in advance what they want. So design-driven innovation faces higher levels of uncertainty than innovation processes trying to solve a known problem.
- The Nespresso case is apparently very popular in Europe, where the system was first launched (a full description of the way the system works can be found here). It is a great example of business model innovation (here is an excellent discussion of this). I talk about the importance of working from the espresso-making process out to the machinery instead of vice-versa – many of the innovations in the business model follow from this choice. By setting up the Nespresso Club to sell the coffee, they essentially built an iPod/iTunes style system – this model was just as innovative in coffee as it was in mp3 players.
- This is another great example of the difference between invention and innovation. The patent for the espresso capsule was granted in 1976, but the first Nespresso machine was not on the market until 1991. This is not at all unusual.
Nespresso is a pretty interesting case study. It shows some of the benefits of design-driven innovation, and the benefits of business-model innovation as well. It’s pretty good coffee too.
Olympic Innovation
Posted by Tim in book riffs, design, innovation on 23 February 2010
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
That’s the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book Innovation: The Missing Dimension. The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout the book are interpretation and analysis. They argue that both are necessary components of innovation, but that they require completely different skills and mindsets to manage. Here is how they describe the issue:
In new product development, interpretation and analysis exist in perpetual tension. This tension is inevitable and unavoidable, and we believe it is the central management problem that innovative businesses must confront. The tension… springs from many sources. Interpretation proceeds through conversations over time – within and among the various communities that contribute to new product development and between the designers and the customers who use those new products and incorporate them into their lives. Analysis, on the other hand, takes place “outside of time” – at the point when a product must be optimized according to well-defined and articulated objectives.
This line of thinking is very similar to the argument that Roberto Verganti puts forward in Design-Driven Innovation – and I’ll talk about those links later this week. Today, however, I want to use this dichotomy to talk about another perpetual question that arises every four years:
Here’s an idea: sports where there is an unequivocal winner, like skiing and ice hockey, are primarily analytical, while the judged sports are primarily interpretive. As a consequence, they have different forms of innovation, and it explains in part why they seem so different to us.
In the analytical sports, who wins is reasonably straightforward. If you get down the mountain fastest, or skate the fastest, or score the most goals, you win. In these sports, the problems are well-defined, and most of the innovations are primarily equipment-based. The well-defined problems lead to engineering-style solutions. So you have innovations like this:
The innovation there is the clapskate – a blade where the back detaches at the end of the stride. This allows the full blad to be in contact for a longer period of time, which transfers more power from the skater’s legs to the ice. So you go faster.
In the analytical sports, these type of innovations lead to continually faster speeds, or longer jumps, but in the main, the sport still looks the same. Interestingly, most of the innovations don’t come from the athletes.
It’s a different story in the interpetive events. In these sports, the athletes themselves are coming up with the innovations. As they do this, they remake the sport. Dominic Basulto has a great post about the nature of innovation in snowboarding – where the judges often don’t understand the difficulty of new moves.
He includes this quote from a WSJ article called When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges – it explains why Shaun White showed off all his new jumps in events leading up to the Olympics:
The emphasis on innovation this season has snowboarders grappling with whether they can trust the judges to score their new moves fairly at first sight. Many top riders, including Mr. White, are haunted by the prospect of becoming the next Jonny Moseley, the free-spirited American mogul-skiing champion who failed to medal at Salt Lake City in 2002 despite his debut of a revolutionary trick he dubbed the “Dinner Roll.” Though he executed it perfectly and the move has since elicited higher marks for difficulty, he received lower scores for his jumps at the time than his competitors got for their tried-and-true twists.
“Tricks can be deceiving,” Mr. Moseley says. “I worked twice as hard to be able to perform that in the Olympics than anyone else.” Mr. White says he could have saved his surprise moves for Vancouver to increase the “wow” factor and prevent copycats from stealing his thunder, but he decided it was more important “to educate the judges.
That sounds a lot like the conversations between stakeholders that Lester & Piore describe, doesn’t it? As the athletes in interpretive events innovate, the look and feel of the sport changes dramatically. The last interpretive-style innovation in an analytical-style sport that I can think of is the Fosbury Flop in high jumping. Dick Fosbury actually came up with a completely new way to do the high jump. I can’t think of a similar shift in skiing, or the other more ‘objective’ sports. Verganti and Lester & Piore all conclude that interpretive processes are more likely to create radical innovations. We see the same outcomes in the Olympic sports. The innovation in snowboarding is definitely more radical than the innovations we see in downhill skiing. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when we’re managing innovation within our organisations.
I’m not sure if this resolves the question of whether or not ice dancing is a real sport. But I think we should embrace the Lester & Piore argument – both analysis and interpretation are important, and we need to be comfortable with both to be genuinely innovative. We need to have both skills within our firms to innovate successfully. So maybe we need to embrace both forms of sport, and both forms of sporting innovation in the Olympics as well.
NOTE: This article talks about innovation at the Winter Olympics, and it’s all analytical!
(Speed skating picture from flickr/BWJones, snowboarding picture from flickr/prosto photos, both under Creative Commons Licenses)
