The Design Management Institute offers an interesting article titled "Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go" written by Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez, two Business Factor Consultants from IDEO.

Design thinking is a crucial business asset—one that can, indeed, move a company forward and improve the bottom line. To optimize this impact, Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez advise thoughtfully structuring the innovation process. They stress working on projects that improve people’s lives, and they present a “ways to grow”model that helps managers direct and assess innovation efforts.

 

The have also included a nice chart detailing their understanding of potential innovation outcomes and the impact on organic growth.

Organic growth can emerge from every quadrant of Ways to Grow. Use this tool to a) identify the type of growth you intend to create, b) to recognize the scope of that challenge and deploy an appropriate innovation process, and c) to assess your portfolio of innovation efforts.

A few more key messages of the article:

You must uncover human needs to design compelling user value propositions.

In order to deliver on the value proposition, will we—or could we—use technologies that are new to our organization or to the people who will use them?

Download the full article.

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Nokia OpenStudio is a project by Nokia Design which is based on the concept of exploratory design research. The Nokia Open Studio took place in three communities in India, Africa and South America where Nokia together with local teams staged an event to gather design ideas for mobile phones that match the lifestyle of people in their environment.

Nokia designed entry forms and provided writing equipment so that local people are able to write down their ideas and participate in the contest. Additionally the teams performed interviews how the design of their mobile phones actually relates to the people’s life.

At the end an award ceremony was organized and the winners were awarded. The most promising  ideas were an intuitive and instant weather forecast, a solution for creating awareness of the environmental problems as well as a four Simcard holder.

This is a good example of how to identify latent user requirements especially when you are dealing with customers that have a totally different cultural and environmental context.

 

Here is the speech from Younghee Jung

 

For more scientific information about this you can read more about sticky information in a paper written by Eric von Hippel titled "Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation.

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FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s Division for Research and Analysis, has published the study “Concept Design – How to solve complex challenges of our time” which focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by public and private sectors.

Companies are shifting from asking themselves how products should be designed, how they should be produced and how they should be marketed to asking more fundamental questions such as what should the company focus on or what problems should the company’s innovations solve. Concept design is the discipline of creating concepts that provide answers to these questions and solutions for the identified problems.

The study provides an analysis of Danish companies offering concept design services as well as an overview of other international concept design firms. Dinesh Godburdhun, Senior Team Lead at Gravity Tank shares his view about this new industry:

“I think that what this new industry has in common is that there are complex problems out there. And clients don’t know who they should call to get them solved. Normally they would call their advertising agency, market researcher, design house or what have you, and today a lot of these people are handed complex problems by clients because it’s not quite clear who should be doing them.”

All in all an interesting study, and if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse into the offices of concept designers, check out the pictures included in the study.

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The major obstacle when putting forward initiatives to improve the Customer Experience around your products and services is very often missing confidence by employees that these initiatives are supported by top management. Employees and managers see themselves stuck in a situation when they try to set-up such initiatives from the bottom-up. So what you can you do about it? From my point of view: not a lot.

The main determinant for successful projects is always top management support. I don’t know how many papers, surveys and interviews I have seen where the final conclusion is that the most important key success factor is top management support. This factor becomes even more important when talking about designing and delivering customer experiences.

Two basic patterns of strategic direction can be present within an organization. It is either inside-out oriented, focusing on their organizational performance (i.e. cost structure, production network) or it is outside-in oriented, focusing on markets and customers and deducing organizational requirements from this. In the field of strategic management this has been discussed in detail with the two concepts of “the resource based view” of an organization and market orientation. The decision what concept is dominant within an organization is naturally given by the direction that is defined within an organizations strategy which is ultimately defined by the CEO.

Convincing the CEO to focus on Customer Experiences or even just on customer focus when he is busy with controlling and production strategies is a difficult thing. The discussion whether leaders are born or made is an old one. What I am asking myself is this: Are customer oriented CEOs born or made? And if you are not customer oriented (enough), can you still change yourself as a CEO? (Or can you become more customer oriented through you employees?).

It is possible to become more customer oriented as a CEO. If people are able to climb Mount Everest or cross the Sahara it is possible for a manager to become costumer focused. What does it need for that? Determination to become a CEO that feels the pulse of the customer.

A few examples?

We have the usual suspects here, Steve Jobs of Apple or Tim Brown of IDEO. Another interesting person is Ron Dennis, the leader of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Here is an article about the McLaren technology center and as they say in the article: “a man’s obsession”. (found via metacool)

Bruce Nussbaum at the Businessweek talks about the challenge that “CEOs must be designers, not just hire them”. Here is one great excerpt from his article:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana.

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Everyone is in a hype about the iPhone Launch - we already see the pictures of people queuing in front of the Apple stores in order to be the first to receive their brand new iPhone. While all the hype is about the phone itself and whether it is good or not I want to take a step back and look at the big picture of this iPhone launch.

Everything started with the iPhone announcement on January 9th 2007 at the Macworld. Everyone remembers the great show that Steve Jobs gave us, and the horrible show we got to see from Cingular CEO Stan Sigman. (A wrap-up about their presentation style can be found at the Presentation Zen)

Check out Steve Jobs’ presentation:

And here is Stan Sigman’s presentation (starts at 4:50):

Then the expected hype set in which resulted in an amazing coverage of the iPhone as can be seen by this analysis from Valleywag. They performed an analysis about mentions of “iPhone” in the news which can be seen in the chart below (iPhone news mentions are shown in Black).

Reasons for this incredible hype are that:

• Everyone was speculating about the iPhone but Apple kept quiet
• The final product has blown away everyone and set expectations tremendously high
• Everyone was speculating whether Apple has set expectations too high with the iPhone
• and of course: because it’s Apple

From looking at this, here comes my….
Lesson 1:

Keep quiet until the latest possible moment then make the best product presentation you can. If someone questions whether your product can live up to its expectations - keep quiet.

PC World summarizes the iPhone Hype and The Washington Post analyzes what might happen if the iPhone can not live up to its expectations. The following picture shows clearly how high Apple has set the expectations with the iPhone. This is a collection of various “user-created” designs what the iPhone might look like. And we know the story: Apple has excelled these expectations with the iPhone’s technology and design.

Nobody knows how closely Apple was following these designs but you can be sure that if Steve Jobs ever saw one of these, he would have said: “Nice, but not enough”.

Which brings me to…

Lesson 2:

Listen to your customers expectations not just to meet their expectations but to exceed their expectations.

In one of my previous posts I was asking the polemic question if Apple is really that innovative and the key insight is that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether innovation comes strictly from within your organization or whether it is the result of “assembling” technology and knowledge to deliver a great product. The article that I was citing in the previous article was from Businessweek: Lessons from Apple.

An article in the International Herald Tribune titled “Who really makes the iPod” nails it why Apple earns $80 on each iPod. “Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.” And you can be sure it is the same story with the iPhone.

Therefore my ….

Lesson 3:

Focus on a few things you are really good at and let others do the rest.

These are the lessons that I take away from looking at the iPhone launch. Did I miss anything? Then go ahead and leave a comment!

If you are interested in learning more about Apple and the concept of open innovation I recommend the following books:

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