Design_at_the_edge

The consumer connection

  The Consumer 
  Originally uploaded by Tub Gurnard

I spent 15 years having fun with packaging design and packaging design processes so when I read about B_E_E - a cool green household cleaning products company in New Zealand I was intrigued. The world is dominated by 3 or 4 global players- Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Colgate Palmolive or Reckitt Benckiser who have exerted enormous influence on the consumer for generations delivering tried and tested brands to generations of families.
After having some interesting stints in various organisations, Brigid Hardy wanted to find some sort  

of union between her hard-earned business savvy and her idealism. “I knew that I wanted to work in an area that had a bit of purpose and soul,” she says. “Business has all this efficiency, all these systems. I thought if you brought that together with passion and beliefs and goodwill you’d really have something…”  Perhaps not surprisingly the eco-friendly cleaning products idea was not Hardy’s. It came from Stephen Tindall, who she’d met through her work at McKinsey. But once Hardy had given it some thought and managed to spark up her imagination, cleaning products had their most principled and passionate advocator in history. Brigid Hardy doesn’t puddle around. “It’s businesses that change the world and we really want to change the world with this,” she says.

Research confirmed that, despite their growing concerns for the environment, consumers would ultimately choose cleaning products from Unilever, Colgate Palmolive or Reckitt Benckiser – trusted household names with pocket-friendly prices. To succeed, B_E_E’s new products had to achieve real stand-out, with hardcore performance, eco-ethics and enormous shelf-appeal. The strategy was to sex-up the products, making them an irresistible purchase, despite their premium pricing. Design was crucial to the success of the strategy and Designworks Enterprise IG was appointed as partners right at the beginning of the process, involved in every stage. Design had to be at the very core of the range, which launched with three products: a washing-up liquid, a surface cleaner and a wash for delicate fabrics.

To cut a long story short....

You have to cut through the dull fog that descends on the soul of the average shopper as they wheel their trolley down the supermarket’s least inspiring isle. Not only do your labels have to be wittier and your bottles more easily recycled, but your products must be more bio-degradable, they must work better, smell nicer, leave your hands softer…

The product range is very different from the big players's offerings and in Design Space the B_E_E team resolved Design Space issues in a way that did not compromise their green credentials... but could not be solved in more conventional, industy standard ways.

We can see other initiatives in Europe (Ecover- launched 1980) and the USA (Method-launched 2001)which attempt the same to be more environmentally responsible in their own markets:

 

Looking at each company my feeling is that Ecover is a conventional cleaning products company but with strong environmental goals; Method is attempting to improve the American way and makes compromises (e.g. refill packs that are not necessarily as environmentally friendly as we imagine). Also the aesthetics of packaging are not necessarily what I believe are the right balance between aesthetics, geometry and structur . B_E_E (launched in 2005) is a without compromise company with strong ethics to drive its environmental point-of-view.. and is fun too! Not handled their packaging but looks acceptable....?
I connect emotionally with its story and products. Like I do with Innocent Smoothies...


Picture uploaded by Daniel Morris. Used with thanks under CC- link.

To be capable of moving into areas like this means taking a holistic, collaborative approach which I call Design@The_Edge.
 

 

After party... but whose party?

  After party 
  Originally uploaded by Fimb

Following on from this post... One of the cheap-quick-dirty tests that Marty Neumeier refers to in Brand Gap is the HAND TEST which is a proof for a distinctive voice
"If you can’t tell who’s talking when the trademark is covered, then the brand’s voice is not distinctive."
I guess Innocent are guilty for this piece of quirky communication!

Why Design@The_Edge?

  204732267_758c1b4ed8_b 
  Originally uploaded by IC Pod

Design can be thought as disciplined creativity; creativity is just connecting things so the greater variety of things to connect with increases the odds of  a new design being truly innovative and facilitating a memorable experience for the customer/consumer/user. Preliminary design can be thought of as disciplined imagination that explores a wider territory to discover insights that lead to more radical products and services and therefore more memorable experiences.
The origins of Design@The_Edge go back to the 1960's when I began to train as an aero-engine designer and came to fruition in the late '90's when I was managing a design process and technology group in a global fast moving consumer goods organisation.
About ten years ago I got really frustrated that so many new product development projects were failing to make it through the funnel; one design house we worked with had been commissioned to work on 21 projects, only one of which made it to market and most of them failing well into the capability phase. In the period 1962-67, at college we were introduced to Burns and Stalker's now classic work on the management of design, very soon after they were published. I was training to be an engineering designer. and so their work was directly relevant to me. Over the next decade or so I met the theories of Maslow, Herzberg, Pugh, Morley, Csikszentmihalyi (chicks-send-me-high), etc., which combined with my experiences of design working across a variety of organisations influenced my thinking and behaviour.

The main insight I gained during this period is that process is important; changing process as new technologies become available is incredibly important and can free up considerable resource to create more competitive products and services. It is the fact that processes are not similar to procedures but are dynamic sources of enabling energy that can continually morph into new forms that gives them the potential to change the world. That is where I directed my curiosity and energies, fortuitously coinciding with the tangible manifestation of Moore's law. Or to put it another way.. by the time we had figurred out what we wanted to do the power to do it was within our grasp.

Recently I discovered Steiner's model (book here) that encapsulated my experience in the formulation that the actual productivity of a group equals its potential productivity minus losses due to faulty process.

Picture uploaded  by Neil Rickards. Used with thanks under CC.

In Steiner's opinion:

"How well a group can perform a task depends upon the adequacy with which member's resources meet task demands. How well the group actually performs depends, in addition, upon the willingness of members to contribute their resources to the collective effort, and upon the success with which members coordinate their individual activities. Actual productivity equals potential productivity when their are no losses due to non-optimal motivation or coordination."

Picture uploaded   by mallox. Used with thanks under CC.

With this rich soup of tacit and explicit knowledge I worked with a couple of collaborators to develop tools for the new millennium (I can say that now, but originally it was to address our dis-functional team working and the low hit rate of new projects).

Over a period of 6-7 months of working with various project teams we came up with the 4 tools of Design@The_Edge

Design Space enabled team leaders to ensure the right people were in the room at the right time to discuss and generate the right knowledge.. the amount of new knowledge created being some measure of the innovativeness of the new product or service.

Design Pyramid enabled the team to understand the needs of their consumer and to analyse how well they were doing at meeting or exceeding those needs. It enabled teams to identify an ideal (at that moment) consumer experience and identify gaps between the actual and ideal delivery.

Design Diamond helped teams to answer the question "What sort of project are we tackling?" helping the team and its leader to adapt their behaviour to the task at hand.

Design Journey is an acknowledgement that teams have to go on a journey of discovery; what is the vision of the outcome of the project? Where do we all fit in? How are we going to achieve the best outcome? How far have we travelled toward that goal?

Since that period of activity we have also added Design Fast Action which enables the team to rapidly create tangible (digital or physical) artefacts (prototypes) that ask questions to discover and validate the most promising routes to solve the problem and then ensure viability of the solution itself.

[draft]

Design Pyramid

  SF07Looney05 
  Originally uploaded by Thor Cat

About ten years ago I got really frustrated that so many new product development projects were failing to make it through the funnel; one design house we worked with had been commissioned to work on 21 projects, only one of which made it to market and most of them failing well into the capability phase.

To utilise a rich soup of tacit and explicit knowledge I worked with a couple of collaborators to develop tools for the new millennium (I can say that now, but originally it was to address our dis-functional team working and the low hit rate of successful new projects).

The Design Pyramid evolved from a discussion about satisfying consumer needs and how Maslow had researched an put forward the hypothesis of a hierarchy of needs. We consulted his work and came up with this:

We realised we could translate the levels into understanding the consumer experience of the total product by answering a simple question: "What are they looking for?":

Starting at the lowest level we can express "What are they looking for?" in terms of the consumer's experiences and demands, for instance:

I want it when and where I need it       [function]

I want to be able to rely on it              [reliability]

I want it to be simple and easy to use   [engagement]

I want to like it and relate to it            [personality]

I want it to say something about me       [icon]

… and I want to love it!

We can begin to develop a deeper understanding of how our total product/service is satisfying or exceeding consumer expectations by looking at each level of the experience and the contribution made by the technology, packaging system and  communication.

We may unearth some really interesting consumer insights tand begin to map them onto the Consumer Experience face.

We can then look at how the consumer experience is constrained or enabled by the other faces.

As we discover the possibilities of new and different technologies we can look at the enablers and constraints that they may offer. We can look at how we wrap the technology in a useful and pleasing form or packaging system.

Also we can look at the affect of existing or new communication channels and the way we exploit them, with the affordances of the other pyramid faces, etc.

We can also ask ourselves "What is an excellent product?" which enables us to explore the mapping of excellence versus what is available now, identifying the gaps between them.

So using Design Space ensures the team, in a clear and practical manner, understands, evaluates and optimises the relationship between the Consumer Experience, Technology, Packaging System and Communication in order to define a portfolio of opportunities for closing the gap between the current product and an excellent product. Services can be approached in a similar manner.

Although Maslow originally asserted that people satisfied their lower level needs, starting at the lowest level, before moving up, it has become apparent that individuals actually make quite complex trade-offs across levels.

If we deconstruct the hierarchy and think of it as three sets or spheres of needs:

then we get a better perspective of the consumers trade-offs going on between the material and social needs and the needs of personal growth. We reach a decision by consciously or unconsciously  making trade-offs  between our various needs and wants, so we can regard our needs - material, social and personal growth - as overlapping and interacting:

Hence the in spite of reviews that heap praise on product Y for having more features and performance than product X (more than meets people's material expectations)... droves of consumers actually buy X because it more than meets their social and personal expectations. This also makes it pretty difficult for the producer of Y to change direction and put together an offer that the consumer finds attractive and authentic and more particularly do it again and again - think RAZR. (NOTE: the producer needs to change as well as the product stream!)

Using Design Pyramid helps uncover the gap between what the experience the consumer may want and need compared with what we actually offer; and then allows us to look for gap-closing ideas, concepts, prototypes, stories, etc., using Design Space to ensure we are exploring the maximum amount of territory to optimise our solutions.

[draft]

Entrepreneur of the Year... after year?

  Entrepreneur of the Year 
  Originally uploaded by jurvetson

The Independent has an article "The Car that changed our world" celebrating the centenary of the Model T Ford. In the article Sean O'Grady notes....

The truth is that what Ford and his little troupe of engineers came up were   two remarkable machines, dependent on one another, and both still with us,   in a way.

The first machine, the Model T Ford, was a sturdy, comfortable, reliable   method for humans to get around and, yes, have some fun. The second machine   was the modern manufacturing corporation,
and later....
Persuading punters to choose a car over a horse may seem a bit of a no-brainer   nowadays, but then it obviously required a talented ad copywriter, another   trade that, largely unacknowledged, the Model T and its peers did much to   create.

and...
Ask yourself why we complacently expect the price of the new technological and   electronic wonders of our time to continually fall until such point that   they become virtually disposable? Why does a £10 DVD player – that would   have cost 20 times that a decade ago – fail to amaze us? Because that's what   the Model T led us to expect, as a right.

....mmmm

We also have Andrew Hargadon talking to Spotlight about Menlo Park and Edison and his lighting system.
Here's the final Q&A:

Spotlight: Why do previously innovative firms, i.e. those that 'led the previous revolution', frequently fail to embrace later breakthrough technologies?

Andrew Hargadon: This is an intriguing problem. Take, for example, Edison, who produced the electric light. He was known worldwide as 'the wizard of Menlo Park Lab.' He was wildly innovative. But then, just a few years after he produced the electric light, he fought a mighty battle with Westinghouse over the standard of AC electricity and not only did he lose (because AC was a better technology for distributing electricity), but his image was irrevocably tarnished in the public eye. Henry Ford suffered a similar fate. Some ten years after Ford became famous for perfecting mass production, General Motors won the market with its offering of a range of different automobile models.

Technology brokering is not just about moving between multiple 'worlds' and recognizing connections. Ultimately, when you identify a good combination, that's when the hard work starts. That's when you need to be able to devote the years it may take to building an industry, building a market.

The problem is that when faced with a challenge, the people who are really good at moving between 'worlds' become easily bored and tend to want to move on to something else, to learn something new. There is a real risk that they won't hang around long enough to find a solution. The very focus needed to turn an innovative combination into a reality, a breakthrough product, while keeping the market going until it grows, poses a challenge. The only way the people who led the previous revolution were capable of leading it was by this completely blinkered belief that theirs was the right way. Ultimately their way is no longer the best, and something else comes along. Their belief in themselves and the old ideas make it impossible for them to see the value of the new ones.

.......mmmmm

Then we have the iPod and iPhone from Apple...
Umair Haque has written a great deal about the Apple phenomenon including this:
What's Apple's larger strategy behind the iPhone? Is there even one, or is the iPhone just a pretty face?

Since - to my surprise - it's not transparent, let me try and offer my perspective.

1) Pick an industry which sucks (ie, imposes significant nuisance costs/menu costs/externalities on consumers)
2) Redress the imbalance by making something consumers love
3) ...Which disrupts the long-standing industry equilibrium, and shifts market power
4) Use said market power to redesign (a hyperefficient) value chain

....mmmm

I also remembered Matt Taylor and Brian Coffman's take on the stages of enterprise and looping and learning

take on quantum mechanics... metaphor for new business behaviour... which seems to confirm the challenge of continuous recognition of the innovative opportunities that innovative 'products' throw up and how difficult it is to stay on top of the situation... maybe openness and complementors are the solution.. or part of it! They certainly have the potential to bring a different perspective.. but are we willing to listen, sense and respond?

 

A peep into the future

A peep into the future
Originally uploaded by timtom.ch

'Virtually any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next five to 10 years has already been around for about 10 years,' Bill Buxton said. So our challenge must be: how do we stumble across them?

The Christmas edition of The Economist in 'Face value' writes about the accidental innovator Evan Williams; extracts below

"AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights.......

"So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious............

So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?

.....All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question......He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious ......

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."

Depending on your point of view we too could have had the idea for Twitter if we blogged a lot and used SMS a great deal and saw that a lot of the traffic is about 'What are you doing?"' Our iPhone could then 'twit' at us.

The Economist September 2003 Technology Quarterly introduction refers to Carl Franklin (Why Innovation Fails) and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky (Creativity in Product Innovation) and writes of how to Expect the unexpected citing the highest innovation success rate as Random event spotting (92.9% successes), whilst referring to several techniques including Evan Williams mental tricks referred to above.

Twitter is interesting as it has proved to be a valid idea (some consumers like it) whilst its overall success is not proven yet as it has not demonstrated viability ( will it make money-directly or indirectly- for its producers?). Winning products and services are a balancing act between validity and viability; risk taking is allowing valid ideas to travel long enough to confirm, or otherwise, the viability of the tangible outcome of that original energising insight or idea. Many established organisations would have killed Twitter by now, but look at the odds of success in Designs on innovation.

The challenge for successful actions energised by the discovery of consumer  insights that become winning innovation is not to look around us but to travel in unfamiliar territory, to look from different points of view, reflect on what we observe and recognise in other words as William Gibson put it

Picture uploaded by david.alliet . Used with thanks under CC.

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

He finds small groups of people doing revolutionary things and then imagines what it would be like if everybody was doing those things.

So our 2008 challenge is going the location of what is unevenly distributed, and on reflection knowing we have been there!

Picture uploaded by Joe Shlabotnik . Used with thanks under CC.

Snowflakes melt in hell!

17:42 13 December 2006 MVC-006X.JPG

At the start of the Christmas party season the Daily Telegraph published in its print edition an article about the Design Council's Summit on business competitiveness that followed on a year after a review of business creativity for the treasury in which Sir George Cox observed how Britain had a window of opportunity of 5 to ten years before developing countries such as China and India had the creative skills to compete with their British counterparts across the board. The article states: Sir George said there had been progress on several fronts but too many businesses remained unaware of the benefits of being more creative. In addition he said that an Arts Council England survey of 1800 business people who put creativity as being "very important for the future of their business yet only 4% saw creativity as the first thing to look for in prospective new employees. Sir George said one problem was that smaller firms in particular did not see talk of good design as being relevant to them.

Design Council research demonstrates a link between design expenditure and economic performance. Our studies demonstrate that for every £100 a design alert business spends on design, turner is increased by £225. (Design Council’s Value of Design Fact finder 2005- 2006). ).

I find this quite intriguing and believe it has something to do with the perception of creatives. I read Richard Florida's work on the "Creative Class" and always it hits me that he includes engineers in that class but most literature in the UK does not seem to include them. The Arts Council's survey highlighted "a jaundiced view of creatives with 20% associating them with dressing unconventionally and taking part in "wacky stunts"."

Janice KirkPatrick wrote in her essay  (from a lecture originally given in Stockholm)
Innovate Or Deteriorate—Design Or Die
©Janice Kirkpatrick, May 2001
The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success

"Why is it, that while the future looks so tempting, many businesses continue to live in the past rather than embracing the future? Why can’t they recognise that the world has changed? Instead they prefer to rearrange the furniture or stand still and gather dust. They are unable to face the uncertainty of innovation and become paralysed, doing nothing at all?
Perhaps these businesses have inherited a cynicism about new ideas. New ideas are often presented as mere ‘entertaining diversions’ from tried and tested ways of doing things. But the excuse that “we've always done it this way because it works” is no longer an option. What works today may not be good enough to work tomorrow. Digital modelling, rapid prototyping and a host of new tools for accelerating the research and development process mean that new rivals appear from leftfield and make your company obsolete overnight.
Other businesses maintain a superstitious attitude to innovation. They regard creativity as dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’ and creative people as unpredictable ‘artists’; reckless, irresponsible individuals who over-excite employees and ‘rock the boat’ by asking uncomfortable questions with unfamiliar, unsettling answers. It should take comfort from the knowledge that creativity is nothing new, it’s been around since the beginning of civilisation. Even ‘design’ as we know it, first appeared in the 1830s. There’s no excuse for being suspicious of a tried and tested process that's been professionally practised for over 170 years.
In fact, it’s worth remembering where ‘design’ came from because it help us place it in context and see more clearly how we can use it to make sense of all of these new opportunities that are ripe for exploitation. In the first industrial revolution of 1760 the old creative industries broke with their craft traditions and entered the Machine Age. The first of many schools of ‘applied art’ was established 77 years later, inventing the idea of an ‘industrial designer’. The industrial designer was a person trained to exploit technology and ensure that products were both aesthetically pleasing and functional; that products were wilfully designed to stimulate new markets and satisfy customers."

But by the time the designers helped industry to catch up with the increasing pace of progress, a second revolution had arrived and its results were quite literally,  ‘electrifying’.

So design professionals, integrated strategically,  bring a Return on Talent that is worth investing in but, if we look at what a "creative" is we should be thinking of how we reoerientate our actions across all the people involved in new product and service innovation.

So what is a "Creative"? Who are they? Where do I find them?

Picture Uploaded by mini joan. Used with thanks under CC.

If we look at David Perkins Six-trait Snowflake model of creativity we see that there is nothing in the list that disqualifies anybody from being creative- more or less.

Leslie Owen Wilson describes the traits as

1. A strong commitment to a personal aesthetic. Creators have a high tolerance for complexity, disorganization, and asymmetry. They enjoy the challenge of struggling through chaos and struggling toward a resolution and synthesis.

2. The ability to excel in finding problems. Scientists value good questions because they lead to discoveries and creative solutions, to good answers.

3. Mental mobility allows creative people to find new perspectives on and approaches to problems. Creative people have a strong tendency to think in opposites or contraries. They often think in metaphors and analogies and challenge assumptions as a matter of course.

4. A willingness to take risks and the ability to accept failure as part of the creative quest. These people also exhibit the ability to learn from their failures. By working at the edge of their competence, where the possibility of failure lurks, mental risk-takers are more likely to produce creative results.

5. Creative people not only scrutinize and judge their ideas or projects, they also seek criticism. Objectivity involves more than luck or talent; it means putting aside your ego, seeking advice from trusted colleagues, and testing your ideas.

6. The last trait is that of inner motivation. Creators are involved in an enterprise for its own sake, not for school grades or pay cheques. Their catalysts are the enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.

Each snowflake, like people is different. There is nothing in this list that debars mere mortals without black turtlenecks from being creative. The bad or at least interesting news is that the environment (context) in which we work, mental and physical, plays a significant part in our creative expression.

As the two Johns wrote (Hagel and Seeley Brown) in Community 2.0 and explored in From Push to Pull

"push programs treat people as passive consumers even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line. In contrast, pull platforms treat people as networked creators even when they are customers purchasing goods and service.  In this context, virtual communities have the potential to become kernels of massive pull platforms."

The shift from push to consumers to pull from creators (of their own experiences) is a large mindset change and involves leaders to lead and managers to participate in order to release a teams potential.. which depends on creating (that word again) the conditions to avoid "Teams from Hell", melting their snowflakes in the heat of disharmony, but enable "Ordinary Teams" to move into the realm of "Teams from Heaven" who continuously recreate the context in which they perform. (Then OODA loops can deliver!)

Hammers and Nails

iStock_000002348560Small
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

Human beings are successful for many reasons, but being tool users is a critical success factor, adaptability is another. Early on we realised that a nail is good for joining things together and that a rock is a good way to bash it home. Over time we refined the rock to operate more efficiently, and the hammer evolved. Over several thousands of years we have expended considerable effort into special versions to do specific hammering jobs and adapting it for other jobs (e.g. making metal pots) but they all build on the original “bashing” idea. During the industrial revolution the nail developed into a rivet as wood was replaced by metal; this became the most popular way of making steam engines, ships etc. that powered the wealth of nations. We developed better ways of riveting, automating where possible, the rise of the all metal aeroplane relied on many new things but rivets were there to join the wing surfaces to the ribs, etc, forming strong, light and aerodynamic structures called the modern aeroplane. In the meantime war drove shipbuilders to find new ways of efficiently producing Liberty ships… welded together using machinery and less skilled people. Welding is incredibly common in many artefacts that we take for granted; new formulations of adhesive are also used as a welding substitute where heat generated by the process is a problem, the sleek Palm V is an example of a glued case that made the aesthetic practicable. There are some screws there too, but that’s another story.
What’s the point of this: none of these ideas and their subsequent conceptual and physical manifestations sprang from a single idea: the world around us is a result of purposeful experiment and the coming together of ideas. It is rare that a single idea becomes an innovation; usually what we think of as an idea is really an idea fragment or idealet.

Only by finding other relevant idealets can we cluster enough to create the critical mass that goes forward to become a Model T Ford, a DC-3 airliner, a Sony Walkman, a JCB backhoe loader, or an iPod.
So we need some sort of mechanism or process for finding ideas and combining and recombining them to see whether they make any sense, whether a pattern emerges that tells a story that motivates people to do something.

Thanks to Hugh at GapingVoid for the two sketches

So we need a network of people willing to share ideas and play with them to see what emerges. Hugh MacLeod drew the sketches above (gapingvoid.com) that illustrate What needs to happen. The How things happen is the process and protocols that are put in place to enable it if you feel you are lacking ideas that break through barriers and present themselves to decision-makers. By the way this lot is called creativity… and you don’t need “Creatives” to do this, just thinking people  who have been given permission to think!
Why is this important?
Well the headline in The Daily Telegraph of Dec 7th, 2006 read
Be creative or die, warns design chief [Sir George Cox]; Innovation expert fears Britain’s small businesses aren’t yet attuned to the world
He had published the Review of Creativity in Business in Nov 2005 which defines three key concepts
Creativity is the generation of new ideas – either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets.
Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is the process that carries them through to new products, new services, new ways of running the business or even new ways of doing business.

Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.

Sir George once said “If Bill Gates had started in the UK he would now be the biggest software distributor in Guildford.”  I happen to know the person who built the biggest software distributor in Guildford and he was a member of the CID- always out and about looking at new technology, new channels of distribution and new ways of doing business. I wouldn't mind being as successful as him, but being the Bill would be pretty amazing too! So what is the difference... something to do with clients staying in their comfort zone?
The point being that it is C+I+D that yields robust results; miss any one and you do not have a sustainable story for your customers to tell, miss two and you won’t even make it to Guildford! But if you don’t start with plenty of C(reativity) why get out of bed in the morning?

Designing for Excellence

DSC_7756-01
Originally uploaded by jcheng.

I have always believed that "Designing for Excellence" is a better approach than "good enough" new product thinking. I guess learning to be a designer at Rolls-Royce Aeroengines does affect one!
Designing for Excellence does not mean designing for perfection which means nothing gets launched but it does mean Designing for Quality as well as quality. The small q is about fitness.. fit for purpose and fit together, business fit; big Q quality is about affective quality,,, does it look good, feel good and do me good? are we proud to have created it?

Big Q is a Query, little q is a state.
Metacool's two blogs, one on the D-type Jag and one on Designing for Contagion reminded me of a model we created to refine multi-functional innovation team thinking and accelerate the progress of new products and services which is a manifestation of the Design Journey:

INSIGHTS

the penetrating understanding from which many ideas can be generated; usually a consumer benefit could be a technology opportunity.

IDEAS

a possible consumer story or a possible technology/business

solution that could become a concept

CONCEPTS

a plausible consumer story linked to a possible technology/

business solution that could become a product.

PROTOTYPES

a valid consumer story delivered by a

valid and viable technology/business solution.

PRODUCTS/SERVICES

a valid and viable consumer story delivered by a

valid and viable technology/business solution.

When we used this way of thinking combined with Design Pyramid and Design Space we found we could communicate much better with project sponsors as we could make our presentations tell better stories that connected with and evoked faster action. It also meant that when we were out of our own disciplinary comfort zone we could still present in a way that was relevant to the listener.

Of course another critical success factor was 'Design Fast Action' based on the observation that making things tangible early meant faster better quality decision making i.e. using tools for sketching, CAD, modelling- both digital (e.g. Moldflow, FEM) and physical (card, foam RPT) , as early as possible speeds things up.

Q,S,I is much easier with great (relevant) stories.