As is often the case with good ideas, they tend to pop up at several places at once, fed by trends and circumstance. To me this signals there is fertile ground for the idea, if pursued it can gain real momentum.

So after I wrote my call to arms for the idea of heirloom products, I find this post by Haiyan Zhang, with essentially the same message: we need to create products that last longer.

The obvious next step, at least with electronics, is to build an architecture that will allow new features to be added through software (hello, iPhone),  while the electronics can keep up without replacing the whole device.

As Zhang suggests:

The main complaint I have now is the increasing sluggishness with each new firmware update. Apple’s products all have an inevitable use-by-date as the software outgrows the abilities of the CPU. So it was interesting last week when I read that the Android 2.2 firmware update for the Nexus One will be 450% faster. Is it possible for new software to make your old CPUs perform better? Or possible to create CPUs we haven’t fully exploited the performance potential of at release?

Okay, so nevermind how google have managed this feat, the great potential here is that the lifespan of the mobile gadget, like the lifespan of the species, can be extended by much much longer, reducing the impact on planet sustainability. We will no longer need new stuff for their features, or new stuff for performance, or maybe even new stuff for fashion, because our old stuff would do all that stuff.

So the challenge for product design here is to keep up with the advances in software. How do we create gadgets that don’t need replacing? Is there a value in creating gadgets whose physicality improves with age? Can we swap out the bits that still need improving while keeping the things that don’t?

And she has already found a first try at the concept:

How exactly this is different from swapping lenses on SLRs is not entirely clear to me, but at least this manufacturer is acknowledging the problem and stepping to the plate. Kudos.

But let’s not forget there are more ways to Rome: not all of the answer to this problem will be found in the product only, we should also look for innovative business models that will allow us to give older models a second life, or build ecosystems of repair and refurbishment that are a lot more efficient than the ones currently at work.

I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot of smart things happen in this space the coming years.

As designers we are constantly questioned about our impact on the financial results of a company. Business is interested in our methods but the final two (decisive) questions are always asked at the end:

1.    What does it cost?
2.    How much money will it make me?

And that is the only thing designers couldn’t answer – until recently.

Innovation is a risky journey with an unknown destiny. It is like being Columbus. You might end up somewhere completely different (he was actually pursuing a new route to India) but it can bring you immense success, awareness and wealth.

As a designer I can honestly say I have never been doubtful during an innovation project. There is always a marvelous solution out there, ready to be discovered. In a sense – there is not much we can’t do – we have landed on the moon already 40 years ago…

So I am very sure we can come up with an innovative solution for almost any new consumer problem or need out there. The thing I am interested in is what the final solution will be. And how we will get there. Every journey is different, has different roads, crossroads, set backs and leaps forward. Every idea ends up completely different, with multiple moments of great breakthrough.

However, as an experienced discoverer it is still difficult to persuade the owner of the ship to set sail with you. They want to know where you are going, and when you will get there. And that is exactly what we didn’t know yet, until now.

For the first time in history research shows that design actually boosts the financial results of companies with a mighty 20%.

The success of a new product increases when a lot of attention is paid to design and when designers are involved in the development process from the beginning till the end. More freedom for the designer even leads to a higher success rate. These are the most important findings of major research conducted under a large amount of Dutch product and service centered companies.

In this sense you can say that design helps to minimize the risk of innovation and helps to strengthen your position in the market as a company.

This is a great step forward for the design and innovation industry as it helps companies to give the green light and endorse the investments needed for a ‘risky’ innovation project.

It would have been easy for Columbus to get financed if he would have known his final destination (it took him 8 years to get the investment needed). But in that case Columbus would have never ended up in America but more likely around the corner somewhere in Europe…

For the complete report on ‘effectiviteit van design’ click here (report in Dutch)

“The global economy’s problem isn’t best seen as a lack of demand. But as an oversupply of toxic, industrial age junk.”

Just found a really nice presentation made by Noah Brier with some compelling thoughts on innovation.

There’s very little text in there (a key ingredient for any great presentation) and in the absence of the presenter himself it let’s you think for yourself a bit upon seeing the slides.

If you live in the US, this is going to be old news. If you are in Europe, this may be quite new to you: Siri.

Siri is a company that provides a Virtual Private Assistant – it let’s you say a question into your phone and finds an answer or arranges your request. Much like a real assistant would, only digital, so it’s cheaper, and arguably quicker. The makers would have you use it to make restaurant reservations or find concert tickets, so it’s not a search engine, but more of a ‘do engine’.

Robert Scoble called Siri “the most useful thing I’ve seen so far this year”:

It is the best example of what the web will be.

Let’s go back.

Web 1994 was the “get me a domain and a page” era.
Web 2000 was the “make my page(s) interactive and put people on it” era.
Web 2010 is the “get rid of pages and glue APIs and people together” era.

Siri is the best example. First, it’s not a website. It’s an application you put on your phone (today iPhone, soon others like Android and Blackberry). Second, it isn’t a search engine, those are so 1998. It’s a system that assists you in your life.

Siri is based on research from SRI and has been in development as a company since 2007. The cool thing is that it’s not so much a website (like twitter, facebook, etc.) but a system that ties other systems together, and interfaces it with a (arguably very complex) voice-interpretation system that makes using it super easy, semantic so that it’s more human than your average search engine.

It’s really ‘high tech shit’ that’s used to make something quite complex very easy. An innovation if you will.

Scoble also recently reported that Apple has bought the company, arguably to strengthen their position in the web space that’s not about media, advertising, or entertainment. And of course because this would also make a great app for Android based smartphones ;-)

Here’s a video from the company to explain to you how it works:

Obviously this is not in Europe yet, as usual we’ll be the last to get something great like this; since the system requires quite a bit of an ecosystem of partners to work I would think that rolling out in new markets will be a considerable effort. And now that Apple owns it, who know’s what they’ll do with it. And the business model isn’t entirely clear (also because the company uses a technology license from SRI) but you’ll agree with me that this is the kind of thinking that will make internet a truly useful place.

Here’s another vid, taken at AllthingsD, where the CEO does a demo and shows how much easier this works than keyword based searches:

Coca Cola has been innovative and trendsetting for years. But I guess they missed the whole ‘green‘ concept. The last few years we saw different brands and products getting greener. Even cars are gettin ‘climat neutral’. Don’t ask me how, but they do.

As I mentioned, I guess Coke missed the green statement. A design student, Andrew Kim, offered them a helping hand. Look at these awesome bottles he designed. The next generation Coca Cola. My message to the Coca Cola Company, pay him a visit!!!!

More info about this project and the talented Andrew Kim, check out his blog or Flickr.

There is often a thin line between a real innovation and a lot of advertising talk.

Case in point?

iPad.

As a certified Apple fanboy I, like the rest of the world, expected an iSlate or whatever to be announced. There were two options: a big iphone with a killer business model behind it, or a next-gen game changer device.

When I saw the keynote and the product video, I was very much underwhelmed. My initial thought was, “yup, that really is just a big iPhone.” Dave Winer explains it all really well in his prognostication piece and follow-up: “Ridiculous product. Absolutely completely ridiculous.”

Ouch.

So, not exactly ‘magical’, cf. “when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it somehow becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.”

I can easily make the exact same case for your average €250 Dell laptop. Or canned soup. Most of us don’t know how it got to be or how it works, but that don’t make it magical. That’s just spin.

Why is this important?

Well, to come back to my initial point: it is hard to discern between the two. Because what you say means one thing to this person and another to someone else. iPad is no big deal for the geeks, but it just might be the best possible computer for your mother.

So it really isn’t the question “what’s an innovation”, it’s “who are you talking to?”

Think about this next time you stand to make a pitch for a new product or idea. (This post was actually inspired by my spending some time writing copy for some new products.)

While the 20th century seemed to focus solely on the enterprise as an economic unit, the 21st century shows a shift in this focus. A shift towards a more customer-focused approach, where design is not the shiny layer around a crappy product, but  a new way of thinking. This is my take how I look upon the role of design in innovation.

Design thinking: It just sounds so simple. Just figure out what people want and give it to them. But if it’s so easy, why don’t we see more success stories like the iPod, MTV and eBay?

Why is it so difficult to spot a need and design a response?

We’re not doing it the right way! In the traditional approach to market research, we would ask statistically average people to respond to a survey that asks them what they want. But Henry Ford already noticed that consumers are not able to express themselves properly when he remarked “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”.

That’s why these techniques rarely come up with any important insights and are only useful for pointing towards incremental innovation. They will never come up with those ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting, game-changing breakthroughs that make us think ‘why didn’t anyone think of that before?’

So how do we come up with those breakthroughs?

First we need to put the customer at the heart of the organisation. Our sole purpose is to add value to his or her life. Secondly we should get out of the office and talk to real customers. And thirdly, we should find ways to truly understand their behaviour, because behaviour is never right or wrong, they are always meaningful experiences. Capturing these experiences allow you to gain a deep understanding of their needs and motivations.

If you take a look at the different levels of knowledge, you see that traditional market research focuses on the things customers say or think; explicit knowledge. But to gain a deeper understanding, you should observe your customers behavior. Then you find that there are so many more things they are not able to express, simply because they are not aware they are doing things that were not intended that way. When was the last time you chained your bicycle to a fence or hung your jacket on a doorknob? Do you think that the doorknob was designed for that?

And there are techniques to gain an even deeper understanding of customer behavior. Generative techniques help people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have. Tools like contextmapping, deep psychological research, cultural probes and maketools, enable customers to reflect on their own experience in order to become aware of their experiences.

So customers can be a very rich source of information, as long as you look further than the traditional ways of doing research. And of course, if you use these techniques right and come up with all kinds of fascinating insights, you have to translate these into products and services that will improve your customers lives. The design process is perfectly fitted for this task.

Of course it is a creative process of which the outcomes are unsure, but there are numerous ways to find inspiration and structure the process to get the most of it. In general it is an iterative process with different stages, which can be described roughly as insights – ideation - conceptualization - implementation. But in every stage you have to make choices and learn from them. If something doesn’t work, go back a stage and try again. Build prototypes early on, fail and go back again. Learn. Involve customers, marketers, engineers and managers in the process, they enable you to find problems early on and allow you to benefit from different types of knowledge.

So yes, design thinking can be a great way to achieve customer centered innovation and enable companies to really start adding value. Discover your customers tacit and latent needs and turn them into demand!

Image: Tim Brown, Change by Design

I’ve been riffing for a few years now that creative firms should adopt a different business model. I don’t think billing by the hour is a very good way of sharing risk/reward. And I don’t think that splitting up innovation between engineers, designers and marketers is likely to get the best results. And, most companies are geared towards operation, rather than innovation. So many do need the help of outside firms to help them with the process.

One company I’m a big fan of, Fahrenheit 212, is doing just that. They run entire innovation projects, and deliver everything from a working proto to the marketing strategy and business model. Their compensations depends on the success of the venture, and they are even willing to co-invest. Here’s a recent article in Fortune magazine that profiles their way of working, and some examples of their work.

One of the F212 partners, Pete Maulik, sent me an article he recently published in Chief Executive magazine, aiming to help CEOs run successful innovations in their company. The full article is here, but I’ll give you one of Pete’s most interesting pointers as a teaser:

Step One: Break out of business as usual

Whenever you’re setting out to change the game, define the outcome you want to achieve and then assess what must be true to get there. Working backwards ensures you stay focused on the big goal and becomes a useful filter as you’re defining the challenges and key success factors that actually matter. A great example of this came from NASA in 1961. When President Kennedy proclaimed that the US would be on the moon by the end of the decade, the lead scientist at NASA said something along the lines of “We know where the moon is, we know where the earth is, everything else is just details.” Genius.

Incidentally, the McKinsey Quarterly just published ‘the path to successful new products‘ about–you guessed it–how to innovate well. Their suggestions:

1. Keep it focused – Whenever project requirements were clearly defined and communicated to teams before kickoff, the project had a greater chance of success.
2. Nurture a product culture – [when] the device maker gave senior team leaders ownership of projects from beginning to end, as well as authority over staffing, personnel reviews and, in some cases, profit-and-loss responsibility, the new structure encouraged leaders to make better decisions, resolve conflicts quickly and reduce delays.
3. Talk to the customer – More than 80 percent of the top performers said they periodically tested and validated customer preferences during the development process, compared with just 43 percent of bottom performers. They were also twice as likely as the laggards to research what, exactly, customers wanted. That made them better able to identify and fix design concerns early on, minimizing project delays.

What’s most interesting to learn from all this is that it’s not so much who’s doing the innovation or how they’re doing it (although it matters), it’s mostly the atmosphere they’re doing it in that defines the quality of the outcome. Having a project oriented culture, a workspace that promotes free flowing ideas and also welcomes a critical look, and having people of various disciplines work together rather than in succession seem to be the key to great innovations. Innovating is not a capacity to be acquired overnight.

Another great point made by mr. Maulik: “…many CEOs don’t have the people hard-wired to come up with game changing ideas. And even if they could, the very nature of “game-changing” is incredibly dangerous because it could quite literally change the game.”

And so it’s clear that not every company is going to be good at innovating, just as most innovators won’t be as good at keeping business-as-usual running super efficiently. Which brings me back to the opening statement: as innovation firms begin to take a more fundamental role in the business landscape, I think the typical consultants’ business model of billing by the hour is the first thing that needs some reinventing. We need models that share the risk at the beginning, but also the potential future upside of a successful project.

I ran into Verterra, a company started by Michael Dwork after he was inspired in a very interesting way:

VerTerra was born from the most simple and unexpected encounter.

As his car bumped its way down a dirt road in rural India, Michael Dwork saw a woman soaking leaves in water, then pressing them in a crude waffle iron. She pulled out what looked like a plate and served food on it.

Though he can’t remember what he ate, that simple organic plate started Michael on a journey to refine what he saw that day into a stylish, durable and truly environmentally-friendly line of single-use dinnerware.

From that simple observation, the idea for the company was born. And it has all the makings of a huge success: it uses a free and abundant resource (in fact it’s waste) and turns it into something that people are willing to pay for because it helps their conscious and appeals to their sense of aesthetics. Now you can have a fancy party and disposable dinnerware.

I love this kind of thing.