The Age of Innovation

by Alan M Webber

When this period we're in right now passes and whatever comes next arrives, we'll look back fondly on this current time and call it, quite rightly The Age of Innovation. Beset as we are by serious and pressing problems, we run the risk of failing to appreciate one of the most incredible periods of creative output in world history. Take a look around you and make your own list of the remarkable stream of innovation that is going on all around us.

It's been almost a decade since "innovation" became a business buzz word. Frankly I thought it was just the flavor of the month; I suspected we'd see companies trumpet their "innovative spirit" and then move on to something else when the marketing message got old.

Instead, innovation has become a sustained business element. It's not a fad, it's a requirement, a new component in every company's way of doing business. It's become an accepted part of "what we do here," in company's around the world in every industry.

Why?

Here's a partial list - feel free to add to it or make your own!

1. Global competition. The heat is on. If you want to compete, you've simply got to innovate. There are too many new entrants, too many rivals popping up all over the world. Years ago Ted Levitt wrote that "you can de-commoditize anything." Global competition has become the powerful prod to drive constant de-commoditization - which is all about innovation.


2. The web. The web does, in fact, change everything. It's part of the global economy, but it's also part of economic transparency. No more secrets - everyone can know what everyone else is doing. When that happens, when we shift to a knowledge economy, then innovation is the only way to stay ahead of the game. Innovate or die. Even for slow companies, that's an easy choice.


3. Technology. Computing power makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to test out new ideas. The mantra of "fail faster to succeed sooner" is all about the speed with which new ideas can be tried and tried again, before being brought to market. Modeling, sampling, revising--all are staples of the innovation economy.


4. Science. Think of all the innovations that are a direct product of science - from new construction techniques to food, health care, clothing, medicine, furniture, you name it. Materials science, chemistry, biology, earth sciences are only some of the categories where new discoveries are driving new innovations. Science is undergoing its own innovative revolution; new fields are being created at the intersections of what used to be compartmentalized categories. Out of those new fields we're seeing brilliant new insights leading to amazing new innovations.


5. Business model innovation. The mandate to compete is driving companies to go beyond product and service innovation to meta-innovation - competing on new business models. If you want to challenge your rivals, you don't simply out-produce them, you out-think them with a business model that undercuts their whole way of doing business. Innovation has gone meta.


6. Education. The spread of learning makes innovation a global phenomenon; at the same time, young, bright, technologically-savvy students are able to test their ideas and creativity without waiting for traditional jobs in traditional companies to give them permission to innovate. Education not only makes people smarter; it makes them eager to use what they've learned to do new things.


7. Design thinking. We've got new tools and new disciplines that are teaching us how to apply all those right-brain notions. Design gives shape to instinct; technology makes it possible to model design; the need for differentiation in the market provides big rewards for outstanding design. It's a system that works, producing design-driven innovation, differentiated products and services, and competitive rewards.


8. Natural imperatives. We're waking up to the idea that if we don't make major changes in how we produce, what we produce, and how we consume what we produce, we may not have the luxury to keep doing all this stuff. Sustainability is a powerful driver for innovation; the need for companies to do a better job of greening their operations is more than a temporary marketing ploy. Economics are changing, requirements are changing, and process and product innovations are resulting.


9. Social innovation. A lot of our social habits, structures, and behaviors are reaching the end of their shelf lives; people all over the world who've been overlooked are demanding new practices that take their needs into account. As we try to balance the needs and rights of a global population, social innovation is becoming the most rapidly evolving field for new ideas, business models, practices, and developments.

Take a look around you.

What are the shapes, forms, and practices that tell you we're living through the Age of Innovation?

What are you doing to be part of it?

One thing's sure: You don't want to miss it - you don't want to fail to appreciate it or fail to participate. Years from now we'll look back and think, for innovators and for innovation, this was the golden age.


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Alan M. Webber is author of "Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self"; he co-founded Fast Company magazine and previously was the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.

Mapping Customer Experience Excellence

10 Steps to Customer Journey Mapping

by Arne van Oosterom

When the nice people at MyCustomer.com asked me to write an article about customer journey mapping, I knew right where to begin.

A product or service is merely a means to an end. The real deeper value lies in the story attached. I don't want to own a coffee maker - I need to wake up early with a little help from a cup of coffee. I don't want to use a train - I want to get home to my wife and children. I don't want to go to a store and buy a stereo set - I just want to listen to my favorite rock music when I'm home, it makes me unwind after work.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not capable of listening to stories. And this is why the gap between "inside and outside" has grown too wide. To stay competitive and survive the changes organizations are presently facing, they need to reassess the way they are structured, function and build relationships with customers. Closing the "reality gap" between organizations and people (employees and customers alike) should be the number one priority. And for this we need a new set of skills, methods and tools.

People-centered approaches like Design Thinking, Social Design and Service Design have emerged because it provides us with useful methods and tools to bridge the gap. One of the tools is customer journey mapping. And in this article I'll explain what customer journey mapping is, and how it is used to improve quality and foster a culture of innovation. But first I'll explain why tools like customer journey mapping emerged and are needed.

I like the description given to it in an article by Kable:


"CJM maps the route people take as they interact with services, taking quantitative measures such as number of contacts made and the time taken to access a service. What distinguishes it from data that might be gleaned from customer relationship management systems is its equal focus on emotional insights about the citizen's experience. The goal is to mix quantitative approaches with qualitative, experiential data, providing a dispassionate analysis of the issues."


Change Causes Friction

Thinking in journeys can be very helpful. Change is a constant. And thinking in journeys takes this into account and puts more emphasis on quality of the whole experience. Dwight Eisenhower said it like this: "planning is everything, the plan is nothing."

Only those who are adaptable survive. That's just one of those inconvenient evolutionary things. But generally speaking, companies and governmental organizations are not designed for adaptability. They are organized in static, pyramid shaped, top-down-broadcasting models and not organized to receive feedback from the outside or the bottom of the pyramid or to use this information for change and continuous improvement. Most organizations are incapable of having real and meaningful (two-way-street) conversations with their customers.

And it's exactly in this area where the biggest business opportunities lie. We need to design and implement systems that will allow our organizations to have meaningful and ongoing conversations with our customers, using the insight we gain to improve and innovate in an ongoing iteration. And this all starts by taking a good look at the organization from the outside. There are no magic tricks. But it's just common sense to start with the people you work with and your customers.

Customer journey mapping builds a mirror and enables us to question why we do the things we do. It makes things visible, which might have been right in front of us, but were so familiar we did not notice them or question them. It never occurred to us we could change them. It brings knowledge, already embedded in the organization, to the surface and makes explicit what is implicitly already there.

It allows us to take a step back from where we are, away from our internal targets and agendas and lets us be open-minded and put our creative energy to good use. And the beauty of it: there is no lengthy report, which no one actually reads. Customer journey mapping is a creative tool and works with visualizations. It is meant to inspire, energize and kick-start good conversations and ideation. And it's the conversation that matters - and the opinions and ideas it brings to the surface.


Building a Culture of Trust

Customer journey mapping is primarily used as a tool to investigate, analyze and improve customer experiences. However there is another more profound use of the customer journey. DesignThinkers, for instance, has developed a system called the Customer Journey LAB.

The Customer Journey LAB is used to facilitate an ongoing conversation within the organization and build or strengthen a culture of mutual trust. The LAB is embedded into the internal workings of an organization. It's a "short iterative feedback loop" and allows for top-down and bottom-up conversations. It's facilitated by an online LAB and offline media and events.

The Customer Journey LAB is an iterative method to build a culture of trust and adaptability, which is the most important step into building a relationship with your customer and maintain a strong, long term, almost irreplaceable competitive edge.


A quick guide to customer journey mapping

This allows us to step into the customer shoes. It shows us the customer's perceptions and the larger context in which we play a part. It lets us be emerged in their world, their reality. Get a deeper insight into customer needs, perception, experience and motivation. It will answer questions like: What are people really trying to achieve? How are they trying to achieve this? What do they use and in what order? Why do they make a choice? What are they experiencing, feeling, while trying to reach the desired outcome?

A customer journey map is built up layer by layer. We start 'above water', with the customer and slowly dive deeper and deeper into the organizational structures and context. The tool can be used with customers or management, employees and other stakeholder or, even better, in a mix.

A customer journey map (e.g. used by front-office employees) in its simplest form will contain the following:

1. Context or stakeholder map. We list all stakeholders and we order the hierarchy in circles of influences around the centre, where you are. When working with customers you'll have the customer in the centre. Describe all relationships on the map by answering the question: what do we do for them; what do they do for us? This map shows you the landscape or force field you are dealing with. And you can discuss how this influences the quality of your work and how a customer benefits or suffers from it.


2. Persona. We need a rich customer profile or persona. Describe his/her personal and business situation now (present situation) and in the future (ambitions).


3. Outcomes. A description of his/ her desired outcome - what is he/she trying to achieve?


4. Customer journey. We list all actions (as far as possible) the customer has to take to reach the outcome (placed in a horizontal line). Don't start listing actions when the customer uses your service the first time. Start before the moment he/she decided to use your product or service. This way we visualise behavioural patterns.


5. Touchpoints. Underneath every action we list all channels and touchpoints services the customer encounter. Not just yours! This way you'll discover the landscape you are in form the customer's perception.


6. Moments of truth. Then we identify the moments the customer encounters your touchpoints and channels. We start focus on those (you can move them down a bit). Identify the most important 'moments of truth'.


7. Service delivery. Underneath every touch point, we write down who delivers the service. Who is directly responsible for it (e.g. front office personal)?


8. Emotional journey. Then give every vertical line a grade for the experience (Actions -> touch point -> who delivers the service -> grade). Don't grade the functionality, grade the work. For the emotion, how do you think the customer felt at that moment? Use a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the better the experience. This can be visualised (e.g. by a line going up and down), and is very effective as a conversation starter. It can often be a real eye-opener.


9. Blueprint. Now, to make a long story a bit shorter, we can go on listing the organisation underneath, writing down who supports the people delivering the service (backoffice), and in turn who influences the back office (we link back to the stakeholders map), until we have a complete organisational blueprint, a complete picture of the working of an organisation and emotional journey, from the outside in.


10. Improve and innovate. Use creative, brainstorming and any other ideation techniques for the service opportunities you identified (low grades) and/or design complete new and ideal journeys or services. This usually is the moment people have the most fun. I have been surprised many times by the talent and eagerness of people to engage in this creative process. People are usual a lot more creative than you think. We just need to put them in the right situation and mood.

Don't wait until the end to collect ideas. Write down all ideas and insights during the building of the customer journeys. These insights will be a rich source for improvements and innovative ideas. And all you need to start are some large sheets of paper, markers and a lot of sticky-notes.

We will shortly be publishing all the materials for building your own Customer Journey LAB and all the material will be downloadable with a guidebook from the DesignThinkers website.


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Arne van Oosterom is lecturer at various International institutions, owner at DesignThinkers Amsterdam, founder of WENOVSKI and Chairman of the Service Design Network Netherlands.

The Dangers of Design Research

by Idris Mootee

What is design research? It is generally referred to as the upfront contextual inquiry work that designers perform before they start ideation. Sometimes it involves some light ethnographic work and some interviews, but it is often not structured, comprehensive, or rigorous. Design research emerged only in the late 1960s with the goal of improving how we see consumers use the product and look for ways to improve the effectiveness of a product. It is pretty much a human factor investigation and is now widely practiced, but is now facing a few serious challenges.

Design research is more than just a design tool, and the truth is that 80% of the time, they are not designed and conducted properly.

The emergence of transdisciplinary design is changing what skills are needed by those who undertake research design. These required skills go beyond improving a physical product and now include knowing how to build the voice of customer into the design research process, either directly or indirectly. The ability to collect data is not the critical activity, but instead it is the ability to decode visual and non-visual data and translate emergent issues into concrete, actionable insights.

The effectiveness of design research is determined by the research team's ability to translate identified functional and emotional characteristics into unique innovation drivers. Ineffective design research activities are often characterized by the presence of assumptive decision-making, lack of immersion into the consumer's world and undifferentiated innovation drivers. Design research is lesser known than traditional market research among marketers, and they often misuse it as a market research tool instead of applying it as a product development or innovation tool.

Many organizations are only beginning to use an receive the full benefits of design research. Many see it as an unnecessary cost because the people who performed it in the past did not do it justice. Improperly done, many of the presented outputs are useless and unactionable. There are many reasons for this. First, most designers are trained to observe the insights for the purpose of applying them directly to their work, but are poorly trained to codify these insights, while also lacking the writing and analytical skills to make sense of what they see. Second, observation research and individual contact is very consuming, particularly when you need to see them performing non-daily routines. Feeding useful data input into the creative process is a critical skill, one that is an "intuitive learning process." During this process ideas 'evolve' or 'mature' and lead to the improvement of the previous idea.

Design research at Idea Couture is not just an observation exercise; it is often a participatory exercise. I can't talk more to our proprietary methodologies, but they are a lot more than just sending in two designers to learn about how a consumer uses a product. It is not productive to do that. Cross-disciplinary teams perform design research at Idea Couture and consider issues from multiple perspectives - from anthropological to human factors and brand influences. Design research for us is the starting point of reflective collaboration, getting D-School and B-School collaborating to solve wicked problems. It is fun. Designers often like the idea of involving users early and generally hate focus groups. Unfocus groups on the other hand are hard to manage and often discussions get side-tracked. Involving users is always a good idea, particularly when you need to gain a deeper understanding of cultural issues - such as lifestyles and wider issues beyond functional details. This is why you need anthropologists.

It is interesting to see that the contextual inquiry hype has been migrating toward the participatory/designer-led corner of the design research space the last few years as design-led methods such as visioning and storyboarding have been added to contextual inquiries. Finally, a lot of designers have difficulties moderating an unfocus group evaluation for a product idea that they designed, as the personal aspects involved often cause some uncomfortable situations. You can see why design research projects are so difficult to design and conduct properly.


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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Olympic Innovation

by Tim Kastelle


"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


That's the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book "Innovation: The Missing Dimension." The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout the book are interpretation and analysis. They argue that both are necessary components of innovation, but that they require completely different skills and mindsets to manage. Here is how they describe the issue:


"In new product development, interpretation and analysis exist in perpetual tension. This tension is inevitable and unavoidable, and we believe it is the central management problem that innovative businesses must confront. The tension... springs from many sources. Interpretation proceeds through conversations over time - within and among the various communities that contribute to new product development and between the designers and the customers who use those new products and incorporate them into their lives. Analysis, on the other hand, takes place 'outside of time' - at the point when a product must be optimized according to well-defined and articulated objectives."


This line of thinking is very similar to the argument that Roberto Verganti puts forward in "Design-Driven Innovation" - and I'll talk about those links later this week. Today, however, I want to use this dichotomy to talk about another perpetual question that arises every four years:



Here's an idea: sports where there is an unequivocal winner, like skiing and ice hockey, are primarily analytical, while the judged sports are primarily interpretive. As a consequence, they have different forms of innovation, and it explains in part why they seem so different to us.

In the analytical sports, who wins is reasonably straightforward. If you get down the mountain fastest, or skate the fastest, or score the most goals, you win. In these sports, the problems are well-defined, and most of the innovations are primarily equipment-based. The well-defined problems lead to engineering-style solutions. So you have innovations like this:



The innovation there is the clapskate - a blade where the back detaches at the end of the stride. This allows the full blade to be in contact for a longer period of time, which transfers more power from the skater's legs to the ice. So you go faster.

In the analytical sports, these type of innovations lead to continually faster speeds, or longer jumps, but in the main, the sport still looks the same. Interestingly, most of the innovations don't come from the athletes.

It's a different story in the interpetive events. In these sports, the athletes themselves are coming up with the innovations. As they do this, they remake the sport. Dominic Basulto has a great post about the nature of innovation in snowboarding - where the judges often don't understand the difficulty of new moves.

He includes this quote from a WSJ article called "When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges" - it explains why Shaun White showed off all his new jumps in events leading up to the Olympics:


"The emphasis on innovation this season has snowboarders grappling with whether they can trust the judges to score their new moves fairly at first sight. Many top riders, including Mr. White, are haunted by the prospect of becoming the next Jonny Moseley, the free-spirited American mogul-skiing champion who failed to medal at Salt Lake City in 2002 despite his debut of a revolutionary trick he dubbed the 'Dinner Roll'. Though he executed it perfectly and the move has since elicited higher marks for difficulty, he received lower scores for his jumps at the time than his competitors got for their tried-and-true twists."

"Tricks can be deceiving," Mr. Moseley says. "I worked twice as hard to be able to perform that in the Olympics than anyone else." Mr. White says he could have saved his surprise moves for Vancouver to increase the 'wow' factor and prevent copycats from stealing his thunder, but he decided it was more important "to educate the judges."


That sounds a lot like the conversations between stakeholders that Lester & Piore describe, doesn't it? As the athletes in interpretive events innovate, the look and feel of the sport changes dramatically. The last interpretive-style innovation in an analytical-style sport that I can think of is the Fosbury Flop in high jumping. Dick Fosbury actually came up with a completely new way to do the high jump. I can't think of a similar shift in skiing, or the other more 'objective' sports. Verganti and Lester & Piore all conclude that interpretive processes are more likely to create radical innovations. We see the same outcomes in the Olympic sports. The innovation in snowboarding is definitely more radical than the innovations we see in downhill skiing. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when we're managing innovation within our organisations.

I'm not sure if this resolves the question of whether or not ice dancing is a real sport. But I think we should embrace the Lester & Piore argument - both analysis and interpretation are important, and we need to be comfortable with both to be genuinely innovative. We need to have both skills within our firms to innovate successfully. So maybe we need to embrace both forms of sport, and both forms of sporting innovation in the Olympics as well.


NOTE: This article talks about innovation at the Winter Olympics, and it's all analytical!


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(Speed skating from flickr/BWJones, snowboarding from flickr/prosto photos - Creative Commons)

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Tim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

Innovators Welcome Ambiguity

by Paul Sloane

Brilliant thinkers and innovators are very comfortable with ambiguity - they welcome it. Routine thinkers like clarity and simplicity; they dislike ambiguity. There is a tendency in our society to reduce complex issues down to simple issues with obviously clear solutions. We see evidence of this in the tabloid press. There have been some terrible crimes committed in our cities. A violent offender received what is seen to be a lenient sentence. This shows that judges are out of touch with what is needed and that heavy punishment will stop the crime wave. The brilliant thinker is wary of simple nostrums like these. He or she knows that complex issues usually involve many causes and these may need many different and even conflicting solutions.

Routine thinkers are often dogmatic. They see a clear route forward and they want to follow it. The advantage of this is that they can make decisive and effective executives - up to a point. If the simple route happens to be a good one then they get on with the journey. The downside is that they will likely follow the most obvious idea and not consider creative, complex or controversial choices. The exceptional thinker can see many possibilities and relishes reviewing both sides of any argument. They are happy to discuss and explore multiple possibilities and are keen to challenge conventional wisdom. People around them and subordinates can sometimes consider this approach to be frustrating and indecisive.

Albert Einstein was able to conceive his theory of relativity because he thought that time and space might not be immutable. Neils Bohr made breakthroughs in physics because he was able to think of light as both a stream of particles and as a wave. Picasso could paint classical portraits and yet conceive cubist representations of people.

How can you welcome ambiguity? First by admitting that there are few absolute truths and that for most common beliefs the opposite view might also be true. If the general view is that you can either get high quality or low price the brilliant thinker will ask, 'Why can't we get both? How can we deliver great quality at really affordable prices?'

Cognitive dissonance is the concept of holding two very different ideas in your mind at the same time. This is something all the great composers do when they think of two melodic themes and how they can intertwine, adapt and combine them. We would find it very difficult to whistle one tune while thinking of an entirely different one but that is the sort of thing that Beethoven or Mozart would consider trifling.

When we mull over the interaction of two opposing ideas in our minds then the creative possibilities are legion. A wind-up clock and an electrically operated radio are two very different concepts but by imagining their combination Trevor Bayliss was able to conceive of the clockwork radio. Most of us would dismiss such an idea out of hand. It seems incongruous to have a large mechanical winding device inside a small radio. And we can immediately see the drawback that the programme we were listening to would stop when the winder ran down so that we would have to get up and wind the thing again. That appears a very tedious operation.

But Bayliss saw beyond these limitations and considered the needs of people in the developing world who did not have access to reliable mains electricity and who could not afford batteries. For them winding up a radio is a minor inconvenience. The clockwork radio has transformed their lives.

If we want creative solutions and real innovations then we should welcome ambiguity. We should explore the possibilities of two different things interacting together. We should let opposites play.


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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Innovation a Prisoner of Inductive and Deductive Logic

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Seattle office of design firm NBBJ yesterday. The event featured Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of "The Design of Business" and "The Opposable Mind." I'd like to share a video interview I did with Roger before the event:

Interview - Roger Martin - Author "The Design of Business" from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

I'd also like to share some of the key insights from Roger's talk at the event:

• People think in ways that form rules in their brains, and they are not always aware of the ways that those rules constrain them


• That which tends to get you more reliability often gets you less validity


• IQ tests have test/re-test reliability, but only 30% of life outcomes are related to IQ, 70% is attributable to other factors
  
• Emotional intelligence measures may be more valid, but not reliable


• If you insist on reliability, you can't prove in advance that your heuristic of a mystery is correct


• Innovation is a prisoner of deductive and inductive logic


• We learn to analyze quantities, but what matters more often are the qualities


• Abductive logicians welcome variance because they want to try and understand the outliers. Our modern education system beats abductive logic out of you. Are you focusing on quantities or qualities?


• We depend too much on quantities - Having more Science Technology & Math (STeM) graduates is not the way to invent the future


• Our businesses run on abstractions to help us understand the world, so new ones can be created and existing ones can be questioned


• Outliers in data can be significant sources for growth and innovation. Take the example of Intuit's QuickBooks - it was created because of the persistent existence of Quicken outliers trying to use the program to run their business instead of their personal finances.


• From the book - "It's not necessarily that some young whippersnapper's going to come up with some better idea than you. They're going to start from a different premise and they're going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.""


• Sometimes you have to marinate on wicked problems. Instead of trying to simplify them, wade in a ways and then take a break and ruminate.


• If you live in a way that sets up your mind to determine whether things are true or false, then you can't invent the future.


• Innovation is more about combining and synthesizing existing conceptualizations and models. There are three main ways to do this:


1. Disaggregation - Target is a good example - In packaged goods, they focus on price, but in soft goods the focus on design.


2. Doubling-Down - To get the buzz of exclusivity that Cannes gets, the Toronto Film Festival pushed so hard on inclusivity that they created the buzz through the People's Choice Awards


3. Mixing - Hidden gems


• "It's not the job of the customer to invent the future."


• Quantitative and qualitative surveys force customers to make something up when they don't know how to answer


• Customers only know themselves and are happy to talk about themselves


• Interesting question - Should we be teaching intuitive thinking to science, technology and math majors? - Yes! - We should focus more energy in science on the intuitive leaps of the mind necessary to come up with interesting hypotheses.


• CEOs should see themselves as the Chief Validity Officer because of the overwhelming reliability-focus of our organizations


• Heuristics are a drug for strategy & design consultants - Often they are so busy with the heuristics that they don't take the time to push heuristics down into algorithms or to explore new mysteries

My book review of "The Design of Business" can be found here.

My previous interview with "The Design of Business" author Roger Martin can be found here.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Rethinking the Design of Kitchen Appliances

by Idris Mootee

My kitchen is overcrowded. There is no end in sight as we continue to invent new kitchen gadgets.

I have always wondered why many small kitchen appliances are so poorly designed both in form and function. Cooking is an art form and the appliances should reflect that. I've spent an hour at John Lewis' basement looking at their kitchen appliances. John Lewis' has better designs than what we see at Sears or Macy's. I guess B&O should start designing toasters.

Last year Electrolux Icon appliances and Interior Design Magazine held a competition with winner Marcello Zuffo's futuristic kitchen that featured movable components that can be reconfigured to adapt to the task at hand and incorporated a contemporary sculptural component contrary to a typically rectangular floor plan.

Designing a kitchen is an art, combining form and function while reflecting on the personality of the owner or designer. The kitchen has now become a place which is as much for cooking as it is a place to entertain guests while preparing a meal. Designer kitchens have been sprouting for decades now. More and more homeowners have been renovating and remodeling their homes to include designer kitchens. In kitchen designs and even appliances, Europe is at the forefront of kitchen design and designer kitchen innovation. In the US, unless you're prepared to throw a lot of money at the problem, you're pretty much stuck with some mass-market solution. And then the question is do you want stainless steel? It that going to go out of fashion soon or it is here to stay? Didn't everyone think black, and then white, were going to be classics?

Anyhow, most of the stuff we see out there in the US is pretty poorly designed. Europe is a little better. But they need to think "system" instead of individual products. James Dyson now wants to compactify our kitchens. And hopefully beautify them in the process. In a US patent application filing, Dyson and his colleagues Peter Gammack and David Campbell describe a smart way to save space on overcrowded kitchen worktops by radically changing the design of the gadgets that typically clutter them.

Yes, think "system." The team says the trouble with today's kettles, toasters, juicers, food mixers and coffee grinders is that each type of gadget tends to have a different space-hogging design. Kettles tend to be jug or dome-shaped, with a protruding handle and flex on one side, and a spout on the other. Toasters are generally box shaped, with the timing and toast ejection mechanisms protruding from one end. That means users must leave a large "footprint" around each appliance so that their handles and controls can be reached easily. That's a very smart way to start. Kudos to the Dyson team!

In their patent filing, the idea is simple: make all free-standing gadgets like kettles, toasters, juicers and food mixers in the shape of tall cuboids that can easily be pushed together on a worktop, with no wasted space between them. As the controls could be recessed in their flat lids or on the front panels, no space-wasting side access is required. The patent also suggests connecting the appliances together - presumably using a common power supply. Why haven't people thought of that before?


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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Making a Case for Innovation in the Absence of Proof

by Matt Heinz

How do you prove something that hasn't happened yet?

That's the challenge facing innovative ideas inside many companies. Innovation, by definition, is a leap into the unknown. But for organizations that increasingly look to past history/results and data to determine future steps, quantifying the likely success and/or risk with an innovative idea can be tricky.

Or, as Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel put it in their recent Business Week column:


"Innovation is killed with the two deadlies words in business: Prove it."


They continue:


"We use existing information to understand the issue at play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty. So when a CEO demands evidence that an idea will succeed, he is driving innovation away."


Martin and Reil ultimately recommend innovators use pieces of past history, results, research and logic to stitch together a case for innovation based not on direct past evidence, but clues to a likely outcome. They call it abductive logic, the logic of what could be. It's still a leap, but for organizations dedicated to innovation, it's necessary. The full Business Week column is worth a read, but their parting shot is particularly good:


"Asking what could be true - and jumping into the unknown - is critical to innovation. Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part. But once a company clears this hurdle, it can leverage its efforts to produce the proof that leaders depend on to make commitments - and turn the future into fact."


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

What is Design Thinking?

by Venessa Miemis

If you're a businessperson or someone interested in understanding how to facilitate innovation, you've probably heard of "design thinking" by now. Coined by IDEO's David Kelley, the term refers to a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems. I've seen articles lately ranging from those that highlight its potential, [Design Thinking for Social Innovation, How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?] to those that warn of it's impending failure as a practice [Why Design Thinking Won't Save You , The Coming Boom and Bust of Design Thinking]. I've been eager to enter into the conversation, especially because some of the arguments around the topic don't make sense to me and I wanted to know why. Change by Design, written by IDEO's CEO Tim Brown, was on my winter reading list anyway, so I decided to finish it before bringing in my own perspectives.

I just got through the book a few days ago, and feel like I "get it." So I've spent a few days reflecting on it and rereading some innovation articles, and think there is a bigger picture at the essence of design thinking that is being lost on some. I'm going to provide a brief summary of the book (from my interpretation), and tie in some other areas that brought me insights into these ideas.

Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

Though the subtitle of the book is "How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation," what Brown is actually proposing in this book goes far beyond offering advice for keeping your business on the leading edge of innovation. He's talking about a new ethos in how we operate as a society. That concept feels pretty big, so it's packaged as a business innovation book instead in order to overcome the challenge of getting you to open it. Not that you're being tricked - it IS about innovation, but it's extended beyond the scope of designing products and services to encompass the way we design the systems in which we live. After seven chapters of explaining design thinking as it relates to your organization, he gets to the meat and potatoes with chapters titled 'The New Social Contract,' 'Design Activism,' and 'Designing Tomorrow - Today.'

He begins to frame this within the opening pages of the book:


"What we need are new choices - new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that results in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them."


He goes on to identify three key spaces of innovation, which function as overlapping stages of a process: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. You can read a more thorough explanation of these stages in this article, but here's the short version:


Inspiration: the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
[this stage involves sketches, mock-ups, and scenario-building]

Ideation: the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas
[this stage involves building prototypes & exploring the balance between practical functionality and emotional appeal]

Implementation: the path that leads from the project room to the market
[this stage involves clearly communicating the idea and proving/showing that it will work]


It's a simple enough of a framework, one that shares many components with any well-devised design or research process. As he explains the approach, he highlights that innovation must occur within a set of constraints, such as economic viability, and that a traditional business-minded rational/analytic approach must be maintained as well. I mention this because some of the articles I've read that bash design thinking seem to complain that the approach is an abandonment of good 'business thinking.' For instance, here's a quote from an article in Harvard Business Review titled "Why Design Thinking Won't Save You":


"Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing "creatives," "ideating" tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth."


I'm kind of surprised by the statement, because Brown never makes a statement that sounds like "all you need to do is..." He actually repeats many times throughout the book that there needs to be a combination of the intuitive/emotional with the rational/analytic, a "balance of management's legitmate requirement for stability, efficiency, and predictability with the design thinker's need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation." If anything, he's calling for a holistic interdisciplinary approach to business that breaks down the rigid silos of standard organizational structure that, in its very design, impedes creativity, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and in turn, innovation.

Tools for Design Thinking

The design thinker uses a set tools and skills that inform and facilitate the innovation process, from visual tools like sketches, mind maps and prototypes to mental processes like brainstorming, building on the ideas of others, and creating scenarios. They operate on principles that encourage collective ownership, like "all of us are smarter than any of us," and adhere to 'rules' that promote organizational creativity, like having permission to fail, experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. They rely on their "ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality." But these practices and techniques are not unique to the design thinker.

As I commented on Bruce MacGregor's article "How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?," the principles of design thinkers are also those used by futurists. (A good introductory article to Futures Thinking was written up by Jamais Cascio in Fast Company, found here.) Though the terminology is different, the process is very similar. Again, I mention this because there is some argument around design thinking which seems to be coming down to semantics - "it's really just social science," or "it's just futures thinking repackaged."

So, what is design thinking then?

The strategies and tactics reviewed so far are probably familiar to you if you've read literature on creativity and innovation. You can pull up the innovation sections of the major business management publications, and find that the articles will give you a similar flavor as what's mentioned above. So how does design thinking make this any different?

Whether it's called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of 'metathinking,' from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a "human-centered approach," and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it 'should' look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word "design," we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we'd find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don't understand why it's so special, or architecture that is said to make "a statement" but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking.

When I started my blog, I knew I wanted to write about emerging trends at the intersection of technology, communication, and culture. Many of the posts lately have been focused around social media technologies and how they're allowing for a many-to-many communication structure that's never been possible before in human history, and what the implications of such a thing could be. But really, those explorations are laying a foundation for a bigger question; namely, where do we go from here?

My research brought me to systems theory and complexity theory, and I've been particularly interested in complex adaptive systems theory. It proposes that the world is full of systems; from the ecosystem in which we live, to the social systems we've constructed via civilization, to the online social systems we're creating as we develop a network culture. It broadened my perspective on the way culture works to think of it as a complex series of interactions, full of meaningful patterns that shape our society whether we're aware of them or not. It made me think about the many systems around us that are currently collapsing, from global economic systems, to governments, to educational institutional models, to healthcare.

The talk about massive change is pervasive today, and many suggest we need to undergo a complete paradigm shift in the way we operate if we're to survive in a fashion that's desirable and sustainable. The good news is, that shift can be made with intentionality and choice. We're citizens in an increasingly participatory culture, and I realized that that was the essence of what I wanted to write about - our ability to influence how we shape society. So I titled my blog 'Emergent by Design.'

My posts have evolved to become a kind of storytelling and connecting the dots, and the comments sections have become conversation areas. We are engaging in a process of collectively inventing what we want, how we'd like to interact with it, and what we can do to make it happen. In my mind, this is at the heart of design thinking.

In a previous post, What is Social Media [the 2010 edition], I briefly covered the definition of "media" and illustrated how our entire manmade environment is a collection of media that act as representations of some other thing or idea. From convenient functionality,



to casual ambiance,



to childlike fantasy,



to shared wisdom and personal histories,



to a better ability to meet basic needs.



None of these examples happened by accident - they were done by design. They create a context that affects the reaction of the person experiencing them. So design is not just about the end product or service itself, but also the process of the interaction and the emotional response and intrinsic value that it provides. In that vein, design thinking is about the interaction between feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people), with an emphasis on the people for which the product or service is being designed.

Synthesis

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it's important to remember that it's more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It's more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one's own beliefs about "the way things work," and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people's unspoken and unmet needs.


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Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.