Design_at_the_edge

Design Space

  Designspace-0pps-cons 
  Originally uploaded by IC Pod

Born out of a pressing need to help innovation project teams work together as an everyday collaborative rather than as an every meeting group. I explored the creation of Design Space here: A tool to help create winning products,and services (the explanation below is aimed at products). Design Space enables the exploration and development of ideas, defining what makes a great concept and driving the project towards launch. it will underpin existing innovation frameworks helping to generate information required for gate meetings, sponsors and others on the extended team.

Design Space is one of the four main tools of Design@The Edge; Design Pyramid is a tool that drives the exploration resulting from asking  "What should we be creating?"

Design Space facilitates the search for answers to the questions "How do we deliver it (the What)?" giving help to individuals on the team wrestling with their own personal dilemma... "What questions should I be asking?" ...reminding them that

"There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions." - Saul Steinberg,

also...

“If you understand something only one way, then you don’t understand it at all.” - Marvin Minsky.

Initially, questioning should be focused on developing a better understanding of the complexity of the project, and identifying the relationship between all the different elements, along with finding out whether there are any areas that have yet to be explored. For example we might explore these questions:

What must the product do- what makes a good idea?
What are the information gaps that could prevent us from achieving success- what would we like to know?
What are the associated risks for the project - what could go wrong?
What actions need to take place - what do we need to do know?

We then need to ask

Where do I look for the opportunities and constraints?

Identifying opportunities and constraints requires all the team members to share what they know and discover what they don't know. Opportunities reside within the business and its partners, both existing and potential. Through understanding the needs and wants (articulated or not) of the person who is buying and using the product we can find 'enabling' areas that we might work on.

Opportunity areas are:-

Consumer needs
Who will buy the product?
Why will they buy it?
What do they need/want?
Brand
What must the product bring to the brand?
What can it borrow from the brand?
How can this product help deliver the brand strategy?
Technology
What opportunities and constraints does technology bring?
Business and strategic fit
what are the financial goals?
What level of risk is acceptable?

Constraints are the factors that can narrow our opportunity search, if we are too focused on the conflicting areas as we produce and get our product in front of potential buyers.

"It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all." Edward do Bono.

It is exploring the tensions between the opportunities and constraints that brings the team together, turning individual knowledge into team knowledge, and leading to great ideas.

Constraint areas are:-

Customers/channels/countries
How does the product get to market?
Competitors
What are the strengths and weaknesses of competing brands and products?
What challenges could they make to our claims?
What patents do they own?
Supply Chain
How flexible is existing equipment?
What are the opportunities/constraints of new equipment?
what role do suppliers and partners play?
Environmental, external and regulatory
What social, economic and political trends might impact this product?
What legislation is relevant?
What are the environmental consequences?

The beauty of playing (seriously) in Design Space is that it unleashes the creative potential of the players, and if we take Steve Jobs contention that

" Creativity is just connecting things. You ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

"That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.

"Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people haven't had very diverse experiences, so they don't have enough dots to connect and they wind up with very linear solutions."

By getting 'everybody' in the same place at the same time we are assembling diverse experiences in the space and using appropriate tools and techniques making sure we have plenty of dots to connect.

 

Underarm balling

Flaming Pits
Originally uploaded by nickehret

About ten years ago the roller ball underarm deodorant underwent a revolution with the introduction of the "big ball". Which turned out to be a step forward in ease of use for the consumer (better fit to armpit). In order to get the last dregs out of the container we consumers needed to balance the container on its cap.. which is pretty challenging when there is a domed top. As the pack design evolved to improve usability the asymmetrical design made it impossible to balance the domed cap.... a flat on the top of the cap enabled this to be done more easily. As the cost of oil-based plastics  has escalated the challenge of a brand innovation team is to contain that packaging cost as well as meeting or exceeding consumer wants. The new design has made the pack usable from start to finish. Also the cap weight has reduced from approx 13 gm to 7 gm... and the pack has a lower weight too. So the What has remained the same or improved (think Design Pyramid and Design Experience)... and the How has enabled the improvement for stakeholders (think Design Space). Are there moments of doubt? well yes. The unscrewing of the cap takes half a turn versus the original 1.5 turns... there is an affective difference in the feel and kinaesthetics which may have a negative appeal.. or it may not matter as it is in the so-what category.
And the development story... could be true but is my interpretation!

3 generations of deodorant pack design.

Asymmetry creeps in!

Flat cap to the rescue!

Well rounded caps don't work when you invert the pack.

Total design thinking addresses many aspects of the pack along the value chain.

Reducing pack size by eliminating the threaded collar and moving it to the roller ball housing.

The pack height reduces due to elimination of a duplicate ring of plastic....

and also by reducing diameter we get two wins for plastic use.. which helps reduce environmental burden as well as cost reduction.

What pack designs have you weighed up today?

Happiness versus rich lists

  ekuverikamakee, gadha fadha baareh 
  Originally uploaded by notsogoodphotography

The Sunday Times rich list is published today (27-04-08); The Independent on Sunday has its own The Happy List which is divided into 10 classifications  philanthropy, charity, mental well-being, physical health, pleasure (i.e. those in the media and culture who make us feel better), environment, innovation, volunteers and time-givers,   community activity, and entertainment..

I thought I would extract the text for the "Happy "Innovators here:

Trevor Baylis; Inventor of the wind-up radio

His inventions are born from a desire to help the disabled and the  dispossessed. Orange Aids promote function in those with lost motor skills, his electric shoes can charge a mobile phone battery for those without an electricity supply, and his wind-up radio, integral to the spread of Aids awareness in Africa, has saved innumerable lives.

Tim Berners-Lee; Inventor of worldwide web

Sir Tim's invention 19 years ago has revolutionised the way people communicate. The British scientist, who was working at a particle physics institute in Geneva at the time, originally conceived of his new hypertext program as a tool to aid scientific research. There are now thought to be more than 100 billion websites.

James Dyson; Inventor, Dyson cleaner

One of the UK's most successful inventors, who stumbled across the idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner while renovating his house. The first model went on sale in 2003 and became the fastest-selling vacuum cleaner in this country. He has since become an active champion of design that puts function ahead of appearance.

Polly Gowers; Co-founder of Everyclick

The chief executive of Everyclick is a web expert with a difference. Every click on search engine everyclick.com raises money for charity. Revenue is generated by advertising on the site, and half of monthly revenue goes to charity. If everyone who used Google swapped over to everyclick.com, the   charity world would be transformed.

Alec Jeffries; Inventor of DNA testing

Justice and personal security rank above luxury and convenience, according to an "Innovation by the Nation" poll. Sir Alec, for his creation of the first DNA fingerprint, came out as top Briton in the poll, which asked people to name the most important innovation in the past 50 years. Sir Alec is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester.

Neil Papworth; Inventor of texting

In 1992 he was a young engineer eager to help improve the way businesses and institutions communicate. A short message service between cellphones seemed like it might be useful. In December of that year, he sent the first text  message to the director of Vodafone. It read "Merry Christmas"; 15  years on, billions of txt msg r snt.

Dave Pitchford; Creator, IntelligentGiving.com

The former high-flying e-business consultant packed it all in to channel his expertise into improving the way we give. Conscious that many potential donors were put off by the bewildering number of charities, his website is a guide to aspiring benefactors and provides interactive advice as to which   charities they are most suited.

John Shepherd-Barron; Inventor of the ATM

Mr Shepherd-Barron may not see himself as the founder of a 24-hour global party culture (and his latest device, which plays whale noises, is yet to take off), but the 83-year-old's most famous invention, the ATM – Automated Teller Machine – marked the birth of the night-time economy and plastic money.

Francis Stott; Founder of 'Hear-Abouts'

Harrow resident who launched an acclaimed talking magazine for the visually impaired in 1995. 'Hear-Abouts', the winner of national awards, combines   interviews, poetry, stories and local notices, and is sent out free. Mr Stott, a 77-year-old former sound engineer for EMI, spent his younger years   producing classical albums at Abbey Road.

Tom Steinberg; Promoting democracy

A former think-tank wonk who created MySociety.org, Mr Steinberg is   responsible for a range of politely subversive websites: TheyWorkForYou lays bare every MP's parliamentary productivity, FixMyStreet enables residents to report and discuss local problems easily, and e-petitions has seen 2.5m names sent directly to Downing Street.

Some thoughts come to mind: It would be logical to drop some people in other classifications into 'innovation', but that would make for an unbalanced result. It also shows there are exemplars that are the antithesis of Sir George  Cox's " 

"Can’t Innovate. Don’t Innovate. Go Nowhere!" mantra

 

How do you measure 'happy'?

Picture uploaded by sparklefish. Used with thanks under CC.

Sparklefish writes:

"Happiness happens when expectation meets or exceeds reality.
Sustained happiness happens when you have the degree of choice you need to support your values.
Just a thought.... "

Also I noticed that I was thinking "Yes, but...for happiness - shouldn't reality exceed expectation?"

Looking at the list I could also see potential downsides to some of the innovations... which brought to mind Kranzberg’s First Law:

“Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.”

...My interpretation is that we should not reject a tool or technology on the basis of what it is but we need to consider what it may become. It is fascinating to track the enabling technologies leading to each innovative outcome, and the way that knowledge is acquired.
So the invention of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee to solve a problem enabled Polly Gowers and David Pitchford to solve their problems, and spread some happiness on their journey....like Trevor Baylis did with his wind-up radio, which was produced in South Africa...  happiness for the workers and the users? Then there is the impact of DNA fingerprinting and txtg.. acting as platforms/inspirations for other activities ... Twitter, Family Trees, etc. But there is one thing in common... there is an Insight about the consumer/customer/end-user that energises these people to imagine a different, better future and find ways to deliver it.

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]

James Dyson — inventor? inovator?

  James Dyson — inventor 
  Originally uploaded by Bob Naylor

You know the feeling when some everyday product lets you down. ‘I could have designed this better myself’, you think. But how many of us turn our thoughts into actions? James Dyson does. He is a man who likes to make things work better. With his research team he has developed products that have achieved sales of over £3 billion worldwide. Whilst at the Royal College of Art (1970) he designed the Sea Truck for Rotork.

This was intended to be the equivalent of a Land Rover, able to move equipment, stores and livestock between islands, etc.

The buyers/users of the Sea Truck tended to abuse the boat thinking its 6-inch draft made it indestructible... ( extracted from Against the Odds) "As a result they tended to ram it into rocks more often than was strictly good or wholesome.

As designers we knew that we could enhance the product by making it unpuncturable. And the best way to do that was to take our lead from those large plastic water pipes which will not even break if you hit them with a hammer..... the pipes would be bunged with what looked like plastic footballs,..

We bought a farmhouse.. in the Cotswolds. With drystone walls to be built.... I found myself spending a lot of time in the company of a wheel barrow... I discovered what a crummy piece of equipment it [ a navvy barrow] really was.

...It was off to France to test the Tube Boat - ....- where we needed to bung the polyethylene pipes, and where I learned how to mould unpuncturable low-density polyethylene into a sphere. And as I turned my first plasic sphere, I knew waht was happening and I said to myself "This is it matey. This is the answer to all my problems."  A revolutionary wheel.

And the Ball Barrow was born

The frames of the Ball Barrow were sprayed with an epoxy powder which was then baked on. Much of the spray ended up on the conveyor and would be sucked onto a screen. Every hour the line stopped as the blocked screen was cleared. Our suppliers told us that big users had a cyclone installed to centrifuge the powder and collected at the bottom of a conical section.. but it was 30 feet high! And £75,000!

On the way home one night Dyson sketched the Cyclone on the roof of the local sawmill, climbed all over it to see how it worked,and used this knowledge  to construct one of his own. As Against all Odds describes.. it worked! And this also was the inspired solution for the vacuum cleaner problem.. The Dyson cleaner that was the end result of Dyson observing observing how quickly existing bag vacuums lost their suction when he was using one at home.

It is this technology that has proved to be the platform for the Dyson successful growth.

But it is intriguing how each nugget of knowledge has been re-used on other user problems. It is just making the connections that is a necessary start. As to whether we should call James Dyson Inventive  or Innovative....:

 

Inventive Merit... Relieves or avoids the constraints of existing ways of doing things
Innovative Merit... Changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things.
Conclusion.. both terms apply!
 

Hydroptere: extreme self-actualisation

  Hydroptere 
  Originally uploaded by egral

The Mail on Sunday included an article We have lift off: The quickest yacht in the world. Extract here:
Is it a boat? is it a plane? No - it's something in between, that also happens to be very, very fast. Ian Stafford goes flying on the quickest yacht in the world
"This is not a boat, nor a plane either. This is a magical flying carpet,2 says Alain Thébault, the man behind the Hydroptère, the world's fastest yacht.
There's magic in the air even as we cast off from the Breton port of La Trinité-sur-Mer, overlooked by the ancient stones of Carnac, France's own Stonehenge.
There's a flurry of strenuous hoisting and winding as the wind balloons the sails. The craft begins to accelerate.
It cuts the waves faster and faster, the nose begins to lift… and then we're flying.
It just keeps on going faster.
The only sound from the sea beneath is the single hydrofoil blade cutting through the waves like a sword.
Its far end shimmers underwater; thunderclouds of spray fill the air in its wake.
Hydroptère throws up more water than a hundred jet-skis, but in total silence – except when the crew whoop for joy.
This extraordinary trimaran is the result of 20 years of research, engineering and design, plus substantial backing from Swiss banker Thierry Lombard.
It's a yacht made from carbon fibre and titanium that rises up on to "wings".
Instead of ploughing through the waves, it glides over them.
Once up to speed, only one of two hydrofoils at the end of each outer keel actually touches the sea. The drag is almost negligible. This is why it has already set two world speed records, over a nautical mile and 500m, and why it'll continue to redefine yachting speeds as we know them this summer. Watch out for the reports.
and the article ends
Hydroptère is a personal obsession, a life's work born of one man's dream – but now that it's on the verge of breaking every record that matters, there are plenty of potential buyers.
Does Thébault know how much the project has cost? "No," he replies.
"With all the adjustments and innovations it's very difficult to say. I'd say many millions of euros."
Would he ever sell? "We have had a few people approach us, but I have not even waited for a price, nor offered one, and discussions never take place."
Why not? Thébault smiles and lets out another whoop of joy as Hydroptère nudges past 40 knots again and the Quiberon peninsula flashes by.
"There are some things in life no amount of money can ever buy," he explains, with a broad grin. "You cannot put a price on living a dream."

If we refer to Maslow we can see that the yacht is all about the satisfaction of Alain Thébault's need for self-actualisation. He is incredibly fortunate to have, since 2006, sponsorship from Swiss banker Thierry Lombard. As the official site puts it

Born in 1962, under the sign of Virgo, half-mad or half-wise depending on the tides, Alain Thébault once had a dream: creating a flying boat. In the sailing world, there are many Ulysses. Sailors are cunning people who know how to make it through the tempest and to use a bit of cunning with the technical and human elements in order to survive. But Alain Thébault is the only living Icarus among the oceanic skippers. He possesses a fever for invention, a scorn for danger and the need to burn himself under every sun. The skipper of l’Hydroptère, the “flying boat”, is a misunderstood person who likes nothing better than rile the crowds who doubt him. He is also a determined man who would fall 10 times and get back up 100 times. Finally, he is an agitator who has burnt his wings many times by provoking the anger in the political and business spheres.
Pilote d’un rêve (Piloting a Dream), Alain Thébault,
Flammarion  March 2005, Libération

Maslow can play out at two extremes- 

a utilitarian view:

“If the only tool we have is a hammer then we tend to see every problem as a nail.”

Or a symbolic one:

“Excellence is the result of

caring more than others think is wise;

risking more than others think is safe;

dreaming more than others think is feasible and expecting more than other people think is possible.”

[draft]

Don't wait, select your blocks and build!

  Waiting for a Lego revolution 
  Originally uploaded by _Dusk_

The beauty of Lego is that it is a collection of various shaped blocks that can be assembled into objects the shape and function being limited only by the imagination of the creators and their skills in utilising the function of the blocks and the ability to acquire other blocks that are emerging of different shape and function... of course we can add Mindstorms to the mix and really open-up even more possibilities Those creative and executive skills enable our organisations to envisage ways to delight the user/consumer and using technologies (building blocks) familiar to us, and other technologies understood by collaborators, By assembling those technologies and then packaging them in ways that delight the consumer we can deliver a winning experience. In the 90's, as a design technology and process exploitation group we spent a great deal of time working on delighting our clients... the project teams that we were invited to partner. This book

"Design-Inspired Innovation" helps articulate what we were up to as collaborators with multi-functional teams. A reviewer of the book writes:

"This book defines design-inspired innovation in terms of three different, equally important aspects. Two of these, technology and needs (i.e., satisfaction), are well known in current practice. The third, however, summed up as language, is either disregarded or neglected. Language in this instance refers to the meaning of the product in the sociocultural milieu in which it is perceived and used: It is the product's emotional and symbolic value. An aim of design-inspired innovation is to achieve success through a high level of sociocultural fit.

A recent example described by the authors is the iconic iPod music player by Apple: a product that has revolutionized the way we listen to music. The creation of the iPod was, essentially, the combination of existing technologies in new ways. It was developed for Apple by Portal Player, a firm with design expertise in portable music players. Working with Apple's suppliers of five key off-the-shelf components, Portal Player developed a reference model that, with additional design input by Apple, became the iPod. However, it is not merely a music player in conveniently compact form. It has developed meaning and has become, virtually, an expression of its user's sociocultural fit in the same way that a BMW is not merely a car but is an expression of its owner."

A slide by McKinsey (in German) encapsulated the innovation dilemma. I can't find the source but adapted a few years ago to look like this

Basically this matrix nudges you in the direction of new products (and services) that have the potential to disrupt the market by deploying the building blocks of organisational infrastructure and technology you and your partners are familiar with.

To make this activity (seriously playing) more structured (and more challenging and fun) we created a tool called Design Space, a conceptual, mental, virtual and physical space to ensure that project teams take into account all significant factors in their creative collaborations. It never ceased to amaze me what we uncovered as cultural barriers to "doing the right thing", let alone "doing the right thing right". For instance, in one "Design Space" session we were trying to get a feel for costs of two or three different cap designs... the consumer group had ranked them on visual appeal from digital renders.. and thay were closely ranked.. so we were looking for other differentiators to help in our narrowing down of concepts to work on. The buyer (in charge of procuring this particular class of component) was extremely reluctant to even voice an opinion.. no matter it was time for dinner and then another session tomorrow. Over dinner I was chatting with the buyer and as the drink loosened all our tongues he told me the story of how as a trainee buyer he had costed something at x and it turned out when the actual order was placed it was 1.25x, and his boss had never let him forget his "failure". First thing next morning the team created a 'concept costing' that had no validity outside the meeting and gave relative costs for comparison only. Within an hour we had our 'costs' and it turned out that the concept rated second (just!) was 15% cheaper than number 1. As we were in a cost-sensitive market sector we knew which one to go for. Another time we were doing the same exercise on a less price sensitive sector and we chose concept number 1 as it was only 1.1x the cost of concept 2 but it was significantly preferred by consumers. So 10% was worth investing in. There is also a challenge if it was 100% more than concept 2 which may have meant the trad-off would go the other way... but in the absence of cost information at the initial decision it becomes incredibly difficult to stop the train and switch concepts...confronting the 'tyranny of trade-offs'; that is why the way we build conceptual models plays a key role in determining how we perceive and play with our building blocks..as Michael Schrage says in Serious Play:

 

The value of prototypes resides less in the models themselves than in the interactions - the conversations, arguments, consultations, collaborations -- they invite. Prototypes force individuals and institutions to confront the tyranny of trade-offs. That confrontation, in turn, forces people to play seriously with the difficult choices they must ultimately make. The fundamental question isn't, What kinds of models, prototypes and simulations should we be building? but, What kind of interactions do we want to create? The latter question aims at the heart of strategic introspection. Consequently, the design focus - the value emphasis - must be on the quantity and quality of human interactions that modelling media can support. Who should be working together? What should they be talking about? Who should see the model next?

Because previously there was a lack of a 'concept costing' building block buyers were regarded a cynics because we felt that any deviation from what we already produced to something new and conceptual was always met with reluctance and to misquote Oscar Wilde, buyers had the reputation of knowing

"the price of everything and the value of nothing".

A Design Space conversation changed that view for ever and opened up possibility in the minds of the team members. They knew that their ideas and opinions would be listened to...it would not be treated cynically. In the words of Ovid...

Picture uploaded  by berzowska. used with thanks under CC.

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip, and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

I was leafing through my old notebooks and came across this, written in January, 2006 (thought... did I write it or copy it... creative or karaoke?):

"The odds of success of a concept, but on the variety of methods used to investigate and promote the concepts. The rapid discovery and rapid design techniques move concepts along the process faster, but unless we constantly evolve new methods for executing the process we will not reap the benefits. Innovating faster means learning faster; somewhere at the beginning of the project we need an idea for the product or service, driven from an insight about the consumer and a story about how it (the product or service) would work, and what it would do to change the life of of that consumer."


Picture uploaded on by jurvetson. Used with thanks under CC.

So start playing (seriously) and have fun with your (and other people's) building blocks. The story can promise much; and that promise is delivered by the result of serious play.

 

Sinclair C5 and Innovation Nation

  Sinclair C5 
  Originally uploaded by adactio

“The biggest single failing in British innovation businesses is identifying true market need and specifying a product or service which meets that need. That is the biggest glaring gap.”

Martin Rigby, MD ET Capital.

John Denham, Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills launched his White Paper Innovation Nation yesterday, whilst his colleague Alistair Darling increased the tax burden on entrepreneurial companies! As reported in the Independent, He is planning an Innovation initiative for government departments.  Under the plan, all 21 government departments will be required to draw up an "innovation procurement plan" on how they will incorporate new technologies from smaller businesses..... "Some of it won't work. That's the nature of innovation," said Mr Denham. The potential of revolutionary technology far outweighed the certain failures that will also occur. He said: "You can't have the iPod without the Sinclair C5."

Worryingly we always refer to the Sinclair as an example of failure of British Innovation and iPod as a success... but hang on.... isn't the iPod an example of US success?
I also remember this quote from a presentation by Sir George Cox, “If Bill Gates had started in the UK he would now be the biggest software distributor in Guildford.”
I have been lazily keeping an eye on British innovators to replace the iPod bit of the above statement and my heart beat faster as I read about the sale of Bebo in the Independent over breakfast.... they are Brits and making a fortune.. well done.. no hang on, they live in California.

The biggest and best transforming ventures have been simple ideas with simple strategies.
-- John Doerr, Venture Capitalist

Their story is in the Guardian here and Ihave abstracted pieces below: yet again the Insight that drove their creativity was personal  Blog Early, Blog Often was created because, in the words of Michael Birch  "'I wanted it to be a place where I could exchange photos and keep in touch with my family in England,' Michael Birch's original internet plans were aimed at an older age group - thirty-somethings - but he soon learnt that social networking on-line depends on finding a focus based on more than age - a classroom, for instance, or a particular hobby.
'But you can't control who finds websites popular. Teenagers are always the early adopters online because they have more time on their hands and less money - and social networks are free.'

And so Bebo spread entirely by word of mouth in schools and colleges, to the point where his site now has 100 million page views every day. Bebo is just a refinement of Ringo, Birch's previous attempt at a social networking site that he built in 2003 and sold not long after it reached 400,000 members. And that grew out of BirthdayAlarm.com, a successful birthday reminder service using eCards that currently has 40m users. Birch bought the name Bebo from someone else. 'When we planned the site, all the cool, short names were taken,' he says. ' But after we bought it we invented an acronym for it: blog early blog often.'

It could be that Bebo and co have nothing much to do with social networking in the established sense. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, recently told the New Yorker that it had more to do with 'voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people.' That is to say, it's just a basic human instinct.

On a practical level, the real reason Bebo has taken off so fast is because it can be mastered by a 12-year-old. There is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification."

Now what was that killer UK innovation?... and by the way Jonathan Ive is British... does that count?

Picture uploaded  by exfordy. Used with thanks under CC.

Perhaps we should actually be saying :

"Is the iPod the new JCB of the music world. After all the JCB is beautifully designed, available world-wide, changes the lives of people around it; uses the best components from around the world; is iconic and people do great things to music with it."

Picture uploaded  by Indigo Goat  . Used with thanks under CC.

So we need to start with a consumer insight and drive the ideas, concepts, prototypes and implementations from that POV- validity... viability enters the conversation later as we figure out how to make enough money from it to do it again, and again, and... we need to remember that products don't stand alone and may be part of of the armoury of a systems thinker. after all JCB's diesel record breaker is part of their effort of ensuring they have an excellent source of diesel engines... JCB, because Caterpillar, their great rivals, bought out Perkins, the diesel manufacturer to both. So they decided to bring some engine manufacture in-house... which meant developing a diesel of their own. So doing an Apple they looked for partners to enhance their expertise - Construction equipment manufacturer JCB announced plans to develop and manufacture its own 4 and 6 L diesel engines specifically for use in its line of off-highway equipment. The engines, which will comply with future worldwide emissions requirements, are to be developed in close partnership with (link) Ricardo, AVL, Cosworth and Krause.

So maybe we don't need or Sinclair C5's but will make do with JCB... and Ricardo, Cosworth, etc.

Go create: What from what?.

  Small Worlds... 
  Originally uploaded by Trapac

in the dim and distant, studying the Finite Element Method introduced me to the Dirac Delta Function.  Re-watching an episode of Atom it suddenly hit me that the Paul Dirac whom the presenter, Professor Al-Khalili was describing as the originator of a theory (1928) whose equations predicted the existence of anti-matter was the very same person who derived that delta function, and enabled me, and many others like me, to change the way we designed and developed products in the last quarter of the 20th century. As Churchill and Marshall McLuhan put it

"We shaped the tools and then the tools shaped us."

Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".  Professor Al-Khalili  went on to say that eventually anti-matter was detected  in a cloud chamber by Carl Anderson in 1935. Ultimately the positron that Carl Anderson detected found use in PET scanners incorporated into MRI scanners for hospital use.

The History of the PET device is reproduced here from the wikipedia entry

The concept of emission and transmission tomography was introduced by David Kuhl and Roy Edwards in the late 1950s. Their work later led to the design and construction of several tomographic instruments at the University of Pennsylvania. Tomographic imaging techniques were further developed by Michel Ter-Pogossian, Michael E. Phelps and others at the Washington University School of Medicine ^{[2] [3]}

In the 1970s, Tatsuo Ido at the Brookhaven National Laboratory was the first to describe the synthesis of 18F-FDG, the most commonly used PET scanning isotope carrier. The compound was first administered to two normal human volunteers by Abass Alavi in August 1976 at the University of Pennsylvania. Brain images obtained with an ordinary (non-PET) nuclear scanner demonstrated the concentration of FDG in that organ. Later, the substance was used in dedicated positron tomographic scanners, to yield the modern procedure.

PETNET Solutions introduction states

The first primarily used commercial PET scanner was introduced in 1975. In the 70s and 80s, PET was mainly used for research. During the early 90s, PET expanded into hospitals, diagnostic clinics, mobile systems and physician practices as more and more of the medical community began to realize the utility of PET.

From theory to useful practice has taken around 60 years.

Special Relativity was theoretically predicted by Albert Einstein in 1905 (Nobel laureate in 1921) and is the basis of Giant Magnetoresistance discovered around 1988, which enabled the design of such products as the iPod. France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize "for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance".

So why am I writing this... for two reasons

1. I read a copy of New Scientist for Feb 23rd in our local library... The article on Comment and analysis page caught my eye...

The article, on the Comment and analysis page, by Donald W. Braben ( new book) begins

"ONCE upon a time, economists thought economic growth came from the holy trinity of capital, resources and labour. Then in the 1950s, the American economist Robert Solow proved that this accounted for only around 10 per cent. The remaining 90 per cent he put down to "technical change" - technological progress and growth in knowledge. Science and technology, in other words. In 1987, he won the Nobel prize in economics for his discovery.

Today we seem to have forgotten Solow's insight. The key to scientific and technological productivity is to give creativity full rein...... etc."

Later in the article, he goes on to write of his leadership of  "Venture Research, a BP-sponsored enterprise which I founded in 1980 and ran for ten years, encouraged researchers with radical ideas to apply for funding. We created an interactive environment in which scientists could select from themselves. Almost all researchers chosen in this way had previously been rejected by the peer-review process. Many of them went on to be very successful. BP subsequently withdrew its sponsorship of Venture Research which became an early casualty of the obsession with short-termism."

2. The news that a nearby iconic landmark may be under threat.

Picture uploaded by jamie.lovelock. Used with thanks under CC.

Jodrell Bank is a highly visible artefact representing the UK's commitment to advanced research..

as Manchester University puts it here

"Any long-term threat to Jodrell Bank, with its high public profile, would undermine confidence in Britain's determination to remain at the forefront of science and technology.  The Lovell Telescope is undergoing a major enhancement and plans are well-advanced to upgrade MERLIN in order to provide British astronomers with a unique instrument ready to work with the Hubble Space Telescope and the next generation of telescopes in other parts of the spectrum. Jodrell Bank scientists and engineers can give MERLIN a dramatic boost in performance by making innovative use of optical-fibre technology.  As Jodrell Bank's Director Professor Andrew Lyne says: ``this is just the sort of IT-related development in which Britain should be investing, and was identified as such in PPARC's carefully thought-out Long Term Technology Plan.''

The Director of MERLIN, Dr. Philip Diamond adds: "the sums involved are not large -- 6 million pounds would transform Britain's home-based radio astronomy facility. This is a drop in the ocean compared with the 20 billion pounds the government is receiving for commercial exploitation of the radio spectrum for the next generation of mobile phones."

Any threat to Jodrell Bank would follow the decision to close down the major scientific facility at Daresbury only 20 miles away. If the plan outlined in the Sunday Times was to be carried through it would be another body-blow to science in the North West.  On the other hand the MERLIN optical-fibre development would involve close collaboration with the IT industry in the North West and hence mean new jobs in the area."

As the two example at the beginning of this entry illustrate it takes a long time for the fruits of scientific endeavour to filter through to societal benefits... but they are worth it... ask cancer patients and iPod users (who may be the same people). Unfortunately the politicians that set budgets for scientific research have 5-year horizons..... and commercial research funding may not be much better... a crisis will facilitate bottom-line cuts to maintain profitability as top-line initiatives are slower to filter through to profitability under conventional thinking.

I wrote about the three horizon approach that facilitates/stimulates dialogue about short and long term  innovative behaviours here; this is hard enough to put into practice....  To throw a light on the overall journey from a glimmer to the glare of success.........Do we need more horizons beyond these to cover basic research and technology knowledge acquisition?

Picture uploaded by Montrasio International. Used with thanks under CC.

Remember what Steve Jobs said:

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

 

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

 

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,

disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

 

They invent. They imagine. They heal.

They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

 

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

 

While some see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.

All we need to do is find space for them! They will do the rest! Is that space in the Secret Garden of Frances Hodgson Burnett:

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, and then they hope it can be done, then they see it can be done - then it is done and all the world wonders why it wasn’t done centuries ago.”

Is that four horizons or phases? (see also here for 4 phases- are they also the Secret Garden?)

I could load my iPod= consumer satisfaction

  my first iPod 
  Originally uploaded by velorowdy

Musing on the success of the iPod in its first five years Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies said (in Oct, 2006) "It's so intricately tied to an ease-of-use model for acquiring and accessing content, but also being able to play it and distribute it among other devices." Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies.

Another eighteen months on and Umair writes

"Macbook Air: iPod or Newton?

Remember what the conventional wisdom was regarding the iPod when it launched?

That it was pretty, but was easily outcompeted by other mp3 players offering better features - more memory, bigger screens, etc, etc - and so it was doomed to fail.

The iPod got slammed on it's release - because almost everyone failed to understand that Jobs wasn't playing an orthodox game of feature-based (aka price) competition.

Apple wasn't trying to incrementally improve a failing value proposition - but to blow it up entirely, and open up new strategic trajectories for an almost entirely moribund consumer electronics industry.

I think it would be wise to place the anti-hype surrounding the Macbook Air firmly in that context."

we can see that that is still true for the iPod... but is it equally true for the MacBook Air?

The comments to Haque's post are intriguing... here are extracts:

" ...  yes, but...

"cool" also has a shelf-life, and can cause a whole lot of problems, from labor conditions to landfills..."

and...

"It's not a new product category, and it's not a major strategic shift.

It's just a sign that Mac sales have improved to the point where there's enough volume to support more niche products like the Air. It's a bit like the ipod shuffle vs. the ipod."

It certainly seems that a sustainable innovation strategy must be based on consumer/customer/user insights to drive the search for value creating opportunities (VCO). VCOs that are also sustainable seem to be based on a robust platform that can be reused to build different outputs in the form of products, services, processes and alliances that continually recreate the possibilities for people so that innovation by design conforms to Kevin Roberts definition of innovation:

 

“Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things. That’s innovation” (from Lovemarks)