Design_at_the_edge

Innovation + Design= Robust, Sustainable Growth

DSCN2157
Originally uploaded by BAKOKO.

Last Thursday I was fortunate to attend a Close-Out session of a joint programme of the Design Council and Ceramic Industry Forum at the Design Museum 19th October 2006. I acted as design management thinker in one of the Opportunity Reviews.
The view of the participating companies was that Innovation + Design is a significant engine of growth for building future sustainable business advantage into the future.
Sir George Cox made some penetrating observations:
-The world has changed; I go to a garage for my bread and Tesco for my petrol.
-Innovation is at a premium and plays to our skills, BUT
-we in the UK are poor at exploiting our inventions, insights,ideas; evidence- where are our Googles, Dells, Skypes, Microsofts ( if Bill Gates had been British he would be the biggest distributor of software in Guildford).
-What's our problem? We have potential but don't know it, Lack of aspiration. Every area of the business has to innovate. "Can't innovate. Don't innovate. Go nowhere. " is our mantra.
- we don't understand the relevance of design, suffer from lack of imagination and aren't ambitious enough.
Nuggets from presentations
One sobering report of a presentation early in 2006, by the Chinese Trade and Industry Minister articulated the ambition of that nation:
product pricing is an issue: if a product sells for £100, then
the Chinese get £10
logistics absorbs £10
Wholesalers/distribution take £25
Retailers take £55
It cannot remain so for long.

IN UK terms that translates as " we must defend and extend our position by using design strategically."
Other snippets on the affect of the Design Immersion Programme included:
"It made people think differently" - it helped to close the Columbus gap... Imagine Columbus asking the business angels in the Dragons Den for money to finance his latest venture. "I want to sail round the world." "But the world is flat." "No it isn't its round." "How do you know?" "Well its obvious..." "Everyone accepts the world is flat, so you will fall off the edge and we will see our money go down with you."
"Yes but accepting its flat is not the same as knowing its flat, which it isn't." "Well we are all out on this one, Thanks for coming but Cheerio."

about Design Thinking:
"Design is not important, its critical!"
"We were stumbling round in the dark. At least we now have a torch."
"Answer to our prayers, defendable business, product longevity, route to new distribution and new markets."
"We were not brave enough to talk with top agencies until the programme helped us think more creatively."
"When did you last do someting new? Hm, thirty years ago."
"Made us ask the questions 'Are we giving it to them? Are we giving it to them in the right way?'"
"a different approach evolved ' striving to have the best products, telling people about them,insisting they want them.'"

But one of the concerns expressed by participants in the DIP came through loud and clear:
Embedding Design Thinking takes longer than 12-18 months, so how does one continue to move forward when the programme closes?

M>W>D- slicing innovation times by design

MWD
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

[The Flickr picture created by Jef Poskanzer is used under a Creative Commons licence. Thanks Jeff!].
Bill talks of Buxton's rule: “Innovation in Process + Product trumps innovation in process alone.”
As we come under pressure to improve innovation performance by creative design a common cry is "we haven't got time to explore way out ideas, let's stick to what we know will work !" - usually meaning incremental improvements that only fleetingly gain a competitive advantage.
When my team were faced with such attitudes we realised that if we could make dramatic changes to the decision-taking cycle we would release time that could be used more effectively to change the nature of the proposed product.
We realised that 5% improvements were not dramatic enough to get attention so we created an M>W>D approach. In other words we looked at time taken to do a significant design iteration. If it took a month to do a couple of iterations then we looked at how we could do them in a Week; if it took a week we looked at how to do them in a Day; and so on. Hence the short hand name of M>W>D.
Creating Dramatic change likes this takes a great deal of effort and at first credibility is an issue. Our approach was to:

1. Identify the technology or technique that will enable the change in time.
2. Do a dummy run under wraps to learn how to actually do it, and who it affects outside the group.
3. Create a great story of what benefits will flow from adopting a different approach, but only promise 50% of potential improvement as there are factors external to our group's control that can screw things up
3. Ask a project manager if we could demonstrate that we can make a significant difference to timescales on his/her project, guaranteeing that even if the new approach we will do it in the expected time, i.e. no risk to the project
4. Over deliver, creating a WOW factor and ensuring next time we speak people will listen intently.
5. Do it again.

Over a period of three years we reduced timescales [ from winning idea to production startup] of three years to just under a year, a reduction of 30% per year affecting everybodies work practices: suppliers, contractors, factories, human resources, training, marketing, and many more beside.

But the basic simple driving narrative is:

"How do we do this task that takes a month in a week;

or a week in a day; or....."

But to achieve real and long lasting savings it does mean looking at the overall culure of groups that are involved in achieving the outcome and negotiating through all the ifs, buts and maybes that get heaped on the path of progress.

Business Excellence and a design roadmap

Bus excellence and des roadmap
Originally uploaded by IC Pod.

About a decade ago I was involved in the introduction of Business Excellence in a multinational corporation. We embraced the EFQM methodology and set out on a five year journey to become World-Class... equivalent to winning a coveted Baldridge Award in the USA. I led a design technology group tasked with demonstrating the benefits of design thinking through computer-based tools and techniques. As part of that strategic thrust we decided to map Design as a core business process onto the Business Excellence Roadmap (Direction> Leadership> Consumer/Customer Orientation> Policy and Strategy> People and Process Thinking> Processes and Resources=>Balanced Scorecard of Results).
The result is the diagram at the head of this post.
It is interesting to "drop" the results of various innovation surveys onto the map. It seems to pick up on the key of the major points. Where it doesn't (e.g. competitor activity) it is because this is not really a design issue but a business one... we can map it onto the EFQM model itself. The beauty of the model is the holistic overview of a multi-faceted challenge on one sheet of paper. Doesn't make it easier to embed in the business but does enable story telling to be more straight forward.