Archive for category design
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.
LikeDesigning 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)
What Art Curation Can Teach Us About Innovation
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy on 21 February 2010
We often think of art as being innovative by its nature – but what about curating art? A couple of weeks ago Nancy and I went to a talk Amanda Pagliarino, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Head of Conservation. She was discussing some the challenges that her team faced in getting all the exhibits ready for the Asia Pacific Triennial 6 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (the ABC did a nice review of the show last week on the Artscape show).
The talk was fascinating. Pagliarino talked about some of the issues involved in mounting five of the larger pieces of art in the show. Here is a picture of part of the process of installing Line of Control by Subodh Gupta (with more here):
This was apparently one of the heaviest things they’ve ever exibited – so they had to figure out how to have the crane inside the gallery for a full day, how to set it up so that the diesel fumes wouldn’t have an impact on other pieces in the gallery, where to place the piece so that the floor would support it for the length of the show, and several other obstacles.
The issues with Mushroom Mantra by Charwei Tsai were completely different:
For this, they tested a number of different types of mushrooms to see which were easiest to write on, which would decay most effectively (and without creating too much of a smell!), and what kinds of dirt would work best.
Each of the five pieces that Pagliarino discussed had issues that her team had to address. All of them were different, all of them were completely new to the staff at GoMA, and several of them were problems that no gallery curator in the world had encountered previously. So there was a lot of innovation involved in putting this show together. Several of the problem solutions were ingenius. All in all, it was a terrific talk, and I learned a lot.
I think that there are several innovation lessons here as well:
- It takes a unique skill set to innovate in a situation where nearly every problem is unique. Many jobs encounter difficulties that can be addressed through some form of troubleshooting. In the case of art curation, there is more of an emphasis on creatively attacking ideas, rather than running through a process. One thing that I found very interesting is that the QAG team often used experimentation – they tried multiple small experiments (as they did with Mushroom Mantra), and they failed quickly, cheaply and privately. Once they settled on a solution through experimentation, they were ready to install the pieces in public. However, in some cases, time was so tight that they just had to use their best judgement.
- That said, over time the problems can be divided into classes. One of the unique features of GoMA as a gallery is that it has a couple of absolutely gigantic walls. They have taken advantage of these spaces to mount some unusually large pieces. After the talk I asked Amanda if she thought that they had developed a unique competence in installing really big pieces of art, and she said that she thought they have. Mayo Martin has an interesting perspective on some of the issues surrounding bigness in this exhibition, which are also worth reading (though I disagree with him about Chen Qiulin’s house from the Three Gorges region).
- This leads to the third point – that art curation appears to be very strongly collaborative. When they encounter problems that are new to them, they use the international network of curators to find out of anyone else has dealt with the problem before. It sounds like nearly all of the knowledge in the network is tacit, which suggests that the most effective curators will be skilled at working the network.
- Finally, I think there are some significant parallels between art curation and managing. Both frequently encounter unique problems that require you to think on your feet and come up with something new. Most of the jobs can be done by routine, but it is how you deal with these situations that determine how successful you you really are. This is something that I think we need to keep in mind when we’re training managers – MBA students often want to learn things that they can apply. These are the things that are good for routine problems, but they don’t help with unique ones. We need to get better at training people to deal with these.
One last example from APT 6 – one of the pieces had been commissioned by QAG specifically for the show. They sent the dimensions of the wall that would house the piece to the artists making it in North Korea, who when put together a mosaic. When it arrived, the dimensions of the piece matched those of the elevator, which are about one meter higher and one meter longer than the wall on which it was meant to hang. After trying everything they could think of, the curators eventually concluded that they only way o exhibit the piece was by cutting a meter off the top and off the sides. I would have thought that one of the first rules of art curation would be “don’t cut up the art”, but in this case, it was all they could do. “Don’t cut up the art” actually probably is the first rule of art curation – but sometimes, you just have to get the job done. When you’re curating an art exhibit, and when you’re managing innovation, sometimes the rule book has to go out the window.
Innovations That Last
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy, time on 2 February 2010
Here’s another video:
Innovations that Last from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.
Here’s the brief summary:
Today I wore to work a shirt that I bought in 1994. I’ve worn it a whole lot in the time since I bought it. It was made by Timberland, and it’s a well-made shirt that is still in pretty good shape. Since I bought it, Timberland has become more interested in making shirts that give the appearance of ruggedness rather than providing actual ruggedness. So there are no 16 year shirts for sale from Timberland now.
The shirt contrasts with two pretty cool gadgets I’ve got on my key ring – one is a little pocket knife that folds up and looks like a key, the other is a usb stick that looks like a key. Both are pretty flashy, and it is very convenient to have with me all the time with my keys. However, both have fatal flaws – every time I use the bottle opener on the knife, I cut my fingers, and the usb stick comes with a cap that covers the contacts, which just will not stay on the stick. Now the cap is lost, and if I don’t do something, the contacts will get scraped, and the stick will become unusable.
The shirts and boots that Timberland is making now, and the knife and the usb stick are all examples of poor strategy for the 21st century. They look flashy and they seem innovative, but they’re not built to meet real needs, and they’re not built to last.
I think that we have to focus our innovation efforts on ideas that are more durable. We have to come up with products and services that are sustainable. We have to make shirts that will last 20 years – I know we have the technology for it! We have to make usb sticks that are convenient, but which don’t come with built-in features that will trash them in a short period of time.
In other words, we have to make sure that our innovations take time into account. Whether we know it or not, all innovations have a life span – the way to make them live a long time is to make sure they meet real needs sustainably.
Networks for Design Driven Innovation
Posted by Tim in business models, design, evolving economic entities, networks on 3 January 2010
How do we come up with substantially new products, services and ways of doing things? When we are able to do this well, innovation provides our organisations with difficult to replicate competitive advantages. Yesterday, I talked about some of Roberto Verganti’s ideas in this regard in his book Design-Driven Innovation. One of the key points in the book is that breakthrough innovations come from creating a new meaning for your product or service. I interpret this as a form of business model innovation. So how do we create new meanings?
One of Verganti’s ideas that I find very appealing is that doing this combines cultural and technological ideas. He says that one of the ways to do this is to find interpreters – people that are experts in fields (often cultural) outside of your industry. You build alliances with interpreters so that you can collaboratively form new meanings for your products or services. He illustrates this concept like this:
And here is why he says that this creates unique advantages:
Managers tend to be attracted to codified approaches to innovation. They love tools, step-by-step processes, applications, instruments. They implicitly assume that innovatino systems can be bought and replicated at once. Indeed, one reason for the acclaim for user-centered innovation… is that it has been codified and packaged in a form that is digestible to executives. Highly codified approaches, however, have a downside: competitors can easily replicate them.
The relational assets that back design-driven innovation are of a completely different nature. They are embedded not in tools but in relationships among people. Relational assets rest on how one or more people in your organization know the intrpreter… This relational knowledge cannot be codified in address books but rather is tacitly preserved and nurtured by people. Like any form of social capital, it cannot be bought immediately but must be built over time. Such knowledge requires cumulative investments, punctuated by attempts, failures, and successes.
I think that this is correct, and it raises several important points:
- First, it emphasises the critical interplay between culture and technology. We know that innovations are technologies – even new processes can be thought of as technologies according to Brian Arthur. Nevertheless, technologies don’t become innovations until we know what they are for – and this meaning is always cultural. For example, SMS messaging has quite different meanings in Japan, Australia, and South Africa, even though the actual technology is the same in all three cases. Thinking seriously about culture can only make us better innovators.
- Second, the uniqueness and complexity of our collaborative networks is a significant source of competitive advantage. We already know that we can’t build competitive advantage on codified knowledge. Verganti argues that three are relatively small numbers of exceptional interpreters in each of the areas included in his network schematic – so relationships with these interpreters tend to be unique and impossible to replicate. The way that we use our network to construct unique know-how is a great example of tacit knowledge, which we can use to build a competitive advantage.
Finally, Julien Bleecker summarises nicely in his review of the book:
It is not about following trends, but exploring alternative scenarios and materializing designed contexts that are proposals to users — points of entry to quite new experiences, with new meanings
If this is correct, then design-driven innovation is an excellent method for dealing with environmental uncertainty. By assessing a range of unique scenarios, organisations have an opportunity to shape the future, at least a little bit. Which is about all we can ask for, these days. I know that there are some issues with how well research based on Northern Italian firms generalises to the rest of the world – the business ecosystem there is unique. Still, Verganti’s book rings true to me – I think that it is a method that is well worth further exploration.
Design Driven Disruption
Posted by Tim in book riffs, business models, design, innovation strategy on 2 January 2010
This morning I thought of yet another way to talk about the incremental-radical innovation spectrum. Incremental innovations help you do things better, while radical innovations help you do things differently. If you follow the prescriptions in most business books, even when talk about having a radical message, you will end up doing things better. Actually, in some cases, if you follow the prescriptions in business books, you’ll end up doing things worse – which is why you need to be a bit careful when you’re reading them. However, I’m currently reading Design Driven Innovation by Roberto Verganti - and if you follow the prescriptions in this book, you’ll end up doing things differently.
Verganti’s book is unusually deep. There are an unusually large number of concepts in this book that are worth considering and acting upon, and I’ll discuss several of them over the next few days. Here is John Caddell’s description of the book:
Verganti, a favorite of this blog, attacks one of the central mysteries of innovation–how can a company successfully create a product that is a radical break from the past, and which shows the way to a new future?
We’ve seen these products at work. The mobile phone is one. The personal computer is another. We know that you can’t survey users to determine what these products will look like or what they should do. So how to create them?
Verganti’s primary point is that to do this, you have to create new meanings with your innovations. When he talks about ‘design’, that is what he means – the creation of new meanings, not simply making things that look elegant and beautiful. In fact, he contends that the latter is now a baseline skill that all firms must have to stay in the game, rather than a source of competitive advantage:
Look at a product that is sitting near you at this moment. Do you find it cool, sleek, and stylish? If so, you are acknowleding the ability of its manufacturer to interpret the trendiest standards of beauty in the market. Do you have the clear feeling that a designer has devised its shape, or that a manufacturer asked a design firm to create the product’s user interface or style? That is a clear sign that deisngers have completed their exercise – that the product is stylish, in line with the dominant language of the market – but that they have also been very conservative. This is simultaneously both the success and the failure of design as styling.
If all companies invest in incremental design and if all do it the same way using the same languages, design loses its power to differentiate one firm from another. Like total quality management, this type of approach to design is mandatory – nothing more.
The difference between [firms pursuing radical innovation of meaning] and their competitors is not in whether they pursue incremental innovaiton but in whether they invest in radical innovation: these firms periodically search for dramatically new meanings, but their competitors do not. The radical innovators know that meanings in the market alternate between periods of incremental change and periods of rapid and disruptive transition. They aim to ensure that they will lead these transitions and let their competitors suffer the consequences.
Yesterday Graham Horton said that disruptive innovation is a fashion that is misunderstood and misused by most who talk about it. In general, I think that he is right, but I also think that Verganti is talking about disruptive innovation in a useful way.
Anders Sundelin recently wrote an interesting post about disruptive innovation too. It included this talk by Scott Anthony:
There is one point in that with which I strongly agree, but also one big hole in the argument. I fully agree that:
Disruptive innovation will result in major changes but they don’t often rely on technical innovation, in fact many times the technology is quite trivial, it’s the business model, the way a company organizes and acts that drives disruption.
I think that is unquestionably true. This is one of the things that Anthony talks about a lot, and he is absolutely correct. It’s a point that needs to be more broadly understood. However, I am less convinced by his presription for developing disruptive innovations. I think that starting with focus groups to identify unmet needs is probably not the best way to approach this.
This diagram is from Design Driven Innovation, and I would argue that Anthony is talking about the top left quadrant here – innovations that are technologically radical, but which maintain the same meaning. If you start your innovation process with focus groups, it’s impossible to radically innovate the meaning of your innovation.
Interestingly, both Anthony and Verganti discuss Nintendo’s Wii gamestation as a radical innovation. This reminds me a bit of the competing explanations of Honda’s success in America. The Boston Consulting Group studied the Honda case and concluded that it was an excellent example of well-executed strategy formulation and execution. Richard Pascale then revisited the case a few years later. Based on extensive interviews with the Honda executives involved, he concluded that the strategy was emergent, fairly random, and fortunate to have succeeded. To me, Anthony’s discussion of the Wii is like BCG’s explanation of Honda, while Verganti’s is more like Pascale’s.
I find Verganti’s explanation of the Wii more compelling. Rather than it being a triumph of analysis, he describes it as:
The Wii offered a radical change in meaning compared with its competitors. It was a physical experience to be played no with thumbs but with the entire body, using natural movements common to sports and vigorous games…. The Wii transformed what a console meant: from an immersion in a virtual world approachable only by niche experts into an active workout, in the real world, for everyone.
The Wii was technologically inferior to the current Playstation and XBox consoles in terms of what were considered to be the key metrics – processor speed, and display resolution. However, by combining existing technologies (MEMS accelerometers and gaming consoles, both already in wide use in different industries) in a novel way, Nintendo created a radical innovation in meaning.
Design Driven Innovation is a terrific book. I recommend it to anyone interested in managing innovation. There are aspects of it that will challenge your core beliefs, I think (there are parts that challenge mine, at least) – but that’s one of the things that I value in a book. And like I said, if you follow Verganti’s advice, you’ll end up doing things differently – and that’s what makes things interesting, right?
navigating innovation
Posted by Tim in business models, design, evolving economic entities on 9 November 2009
I got a new mobile phone this week, and I’ve spent a fair bit of the time since then playing around with different programs and applications that are available for it. The killer app in smart phones for me is gps tracking. Using google maps, getting turn-by-turn directions and geotagging photos and notes are all incredibly useful features to have. Furthermore, it is the gps feature that will drive the augmented reality apps that are going to be the really cool things to have on our smart phones in a couple of years.
All of this got me thinking about something – Magellan introduced the first consumer gps tracking unit in 1989. Why didn’t a gps manufacturer ever introduce an app store? Many of the things that we’re doing now on smart phones could have been done on a handheld gps unit. So why didn’t Magellan or Garmin or someone think about making an open platform that anyone could program for?
I thought of this question while visiting some friends this weekend and one of them, a very good programmer, said that maybe they didn’t think to do it because they didn’t think it was their core business. That’s probably correct. On the other hand, if one of them had thought of it, maybe now they wouldn’t be quite so worried that everyone is asking ‘why do I need a gps when I have a phone?’
So here’s a few more questions – what product right now is like a gps in 1989? What non-core part of your current industry has the potential to expand rapidly? Finally, can you adapt your business model to take advantage of the answers to these questions?
data visualisation innovation
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 20 October 2009
Here’s a really nice piece of data visualisation from Dave McCandless:
It’s interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s an innovative and very good approach to data visualisation. Second, Gardasil is the poster child here at UQ for the successful commercialisation of academic research – it is often used as an example in classes here since most people know at least a bit of the story. Third, it points out the downside to innovation – in this case, some people die from the vaccine for HPV. The graphic shows very clearly the risk of this relative to the risk of the disease it cures is vanishingly small. Still, it is a very real, very bad outcome for the families of people that are affected. This shouldn’t drive our innovation efforts, but it is still something that we should at least think about when we’re executing new ideas.
The entire site is well worth looking at – McCandless’ visualisations are spectacular.
cargo cults
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 7 September 2009
Jeff Veen paraphrases Picasso with ‘Good designers copy, great designers steal’.
Since innovation is in large part finding new combinations, I think that Veen’s point applies to innovation as well as design. He expands the Picasso quote to include a similar statement from TS Eliot, saying a great poet that steals ‘welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.’ Copying an iPhone doesn’t add anything new to the economy, and is unlikely to do you much good. Stealing the fundamental ideas that make it work, and combining those with something else, actually does create something new – that’s innovation.
(originally from boing boing)
systems thinking
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 3 September 2009
Recently I’ve been running into a bunch of things that say what I want to say so clearly themselves that I don’t really need to add much. The most recent is this essay by Don Norman on systems thinking in product/service design, which includes:
No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service – from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That’s systems thinking.
The article is excellent from start to finish, and well worth your time. All I can really say is that I think he is exactly correct. I do have some thoughts to add, but I’ll develop them over the next few posts. In the meantime, I think it’s sufficient for us to start thinking about our innovations as systems – what do they depend on to work, and what do they actually deliver to people?
(image from an apparently dead link at strategicpathfinder.com)
iterations
Posted by Tim in design, innovation, selection, variety on 28 August 2009
Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried:
Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo.
There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would have been pretty cheap. When I keep talking about failure, people often seem to think that it means that we need to launch products that don’t work, when in fact I mean almost exactly the opposite. We need to do what tap tap tap did, and figure out what doesn’t work before we launch. The second big point is that the big change that makes the whole thing actually work well doesn’t come until about 75% of the way through all of their tinkering (at about 1:10 in the video). This shows again that the big changes often don’t come until you start using things.
(Hat tip to Endless Innovation…)
the myth of innovative progress?
Posted by Tim in design, evolving economic entities, innovation on 19 August 2009
That’s me wearing my new iPod headphones. Strangely, I caught a fair bit of stick for wearing them today – including a relatively sarcastic ‘nice retro look’. I thought this was particularly interesting in light of a nice post I read this morning called The Myth of Evolutionary Ascent (found via John Wilkins’ blog). The post makes a few key points – that in evolutionary biology, there is no inevitable march towards increasing complexity (contra Kevin Kelly!); “The evolutionary ‘ladder’ may be a valid model for one thing: the history of a single lineage, with height representing nothing more than simply the time axis. Complexity has nothing to do with it”; and that a lot of evolutionary complexity is non-adaptive in that it is discovered as organisms experiment within the design space available to them.
After seeing links to about 10,000 words of blog posts, you may well be ready to ask me what does this have to do with headphones and innovation? And it’s this: even though a lot of technology becomes intentionally more complex, this isn’t necessarily always progress, nor does all the increased complexity always lead to increased functionality. For the second point, just think of word processing software – how many of the extra features that have been added over the past 15+ years do you actually use? There’s a lot of extra complexity there, but the vast majority of us still just type…
So….. headphones. A lot of the recent advances in mobile headphones have been pretty good. The quality of sound in even fairly cheap ones now is pretty good. But not all of the changes are progress – a lot of them are just explorations across all of the available headphone design space. So even though we can get smaller, good-sounding headphones now, they are not ‘higher’ up the headphone hierarchy. They’re just a different design. And even though I can see the appeal of wearing white headphones to signal to everyone that I’ve got a genuine Apple product in my pocket – wait, no, actually I can’t see the appeal to that. The other problem with those headphones is that they won’t stay in my ears – which, for me at least, is one of the key features that I’m looking for in headphones. I don’t hear very much when my slick new iPod headphones are constantly sliding out of my ears. So I’ve travelled across the design space to older-looking headphones, which actually stay on. And I end up listening to my iPod a lot more that way.
So the main point today is that new and more complex products are not always better, nor do they necessarily show progress. The only thing we know for sure is that they are new, and more complex. There are plenty of older designs that may be just as good, if not better. Innovation is important, but new is not by definition better. We judge that by how well the new things meet our needs.
embrace constraints
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 11 August 2009
Garr Reynolds has a nice post today on his Presentation Zen blog called 10 Tips on How to Think Like a Designer. He includes a bunch of good ideas to incorporate into making good presentations. The one that resonates the most with me is the first one on the list:
Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations are wonderful allies and lead to enhanced creativity and ingenious solutions that without constrains never would have been discovered or created. In the words of T.S. Eliot, “Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” There’s no point complaining about constraints such as time, money, tools, etc. Your problem is what it is. How can you solve it given the resources and time that you have?
I think that this is critically important advice – mainly because we generally tend to view constraints as obstacles. They’re not. Constraints give us an opportunity to innovate. This is true whether we’re making a presentation, writing a paper, creating art, or coming up with new business ideas. It’s true when new environmental regulations are put in place – a very robust empirical finding is that doing so unleashes a flood of new ideas. Constraints are not problems – they give us a chance to do something differently.
(image source: flickr/viZZZual.com)
biomimicry, part 2
Posted by Tim in design, innovation on 7 August 2009
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the design category.
