Why Innovation is Important

“Innovate or Die” is one of the most famous ways successful business leaders warned the community on the vital importance of innovation in nowadays world. In such a fast changing environment, Innovation is not an option; it is a requirement.

Companies need to be open to change, but most of all they must understand innovation and so do the people as companies’ pulsing heart.

I want to leave you with a very short video about the importance of innovation. 

I hope you enjoyed these three posts and you will take them as a starting point to shift your professional life towards innovation.

Design's Role in Innovation

In the previous post we analyzed the three different sources of innovation and we briefly saw why the design-driven approach is the most powerful. Now, I have the honor and privilege to report you a unique Q&A session with 4 major experts about design.

They will address a very important and fascinating topic: the role of design in innovation.

Jonathan Salem-Baskin

Global Brand Strategist

 

Q: “How would you define Design?”

A: “Design is the order and sense that we impart on otherwise chaotic existence. Design is the structure that we as humans impose over what is... it’s the meaning we give to experience that in and of itself that might not have any meaning. Design is structure and purpose where maybe none exists naturally.”

Roberto Verganti

Professor of Management of Innovation

Q: “What is the function of design?”

A: “Design has a very important connection to the innovation of product services and business models, and the way design can innovate things is by changing the meaning or making things more meaningful. It’s not about the style, it’s not about the technology, and it’s not about the functionalities. Design is about the innovation of the meaning.”

Paul Bennett


IDEO




Q: “What is the relationship between business and design?”

A: “Design is business and business is design. I think that businesses that don’t understand fundamentally that design is not just about the decoration of something but it’s about the solution and it’s about the way to design forward and it is strategic, I don’t think that those are the businesses that are going to survive.”

Bonnie Dean

Senior Advisor, Quantum Property Partnership

Q: “How do companies react to ‘design revolutions’?”

A: “I think most companies, if you interviewed them after they had been through a design intervention would say that it brought a lot of intangible things that are harder to measure. And for many, it’s helped change their culture and it’s made it a more open culture, it’s made it more adventurous, and it’s made them understand how to assess risk differently in ways that the risks they choose to take, they have more chance of being commercially successful with those risks.”

Paul Bennett

Q: “What is the role of design thinking in innovation?”

A: “I personally think we are at a really interesting moment in time. I think we are at a time, there’s a great phrase, an Inuit proverb, which is ‘the storm is the time to fish’. I think the economic storm is still swirling over all of our heads. If you take the metaphor to its logical conclusion, the fishes are under the surface and there are a lot of really great ideas there to fish for. So to me, what I think we need in a time like this is action. So, there’s a lot of discussion about design thinking, which is fantastic, but I think we need to overlap design thinking with design doing, and this is about making stuff happen.”

-Michele Bellini-

Note: This post is part of a college class and it is a fictional recreation of Q&A session, which in reality never happened. The words of these eminent experts are taken from the video “Design’s Role in Innovation” published by Design Council UK. 

Three Different Types of Innovation

Historically two sources of innovation distinguished companies’ strategies: technology push and market-pull innovation.

In the last decades the world experienced significant changes, seeing postmodern consumers buying meanings rather than products. From this scenario, a third approach was born: design driven innovation.

Technology Push: Blackberry 

Mike Lazaridis

BlackBerry is a great example of techno push innovation, which is mainly related to functionality and efficiency. BlackBerry’s Founder and Vice Chairman Mike Lazaridis donated  $45.8 million to University of Waterloo for Quantum mechanics research, a technology on which most cell phone devices are based on today. BlackBerry was a technology push innovation because new inventions were pushed onto the market, starting from R&D, but without proper consideration of whether or not they satisfy market needs.

Today, the companies that play a major role in this ground are those that have huge and long-term investments in R&D more oriented towards techno-scientific fields such as telecommunication and healthcare firms.

  

Market Pull: Newspapers and Magazines

If the technology push represents a proactive approach, the market pull is a reaction to the market and its specific needs. The newspapers and magazine industry is a perfect example because in this field the demand is the gravitational center. The focus is completely on the present trends, extensive analysis of time series, and historical case studies. Magazines and Newspapers consider the customer’s expressed needs as the critical key for sales and success.

Companies in the industry apply an approach that is very analytical and sees surveys, customer specifications, and focus groups as main tools to detect the trends of the market and satisfy them with the highest standards.

Design-Driven: Metamorfosi, the Human Light

Design-Driven Innovation compared to the others

“A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs  ― BusinessWeek, May 25^th 1998

This sentence represents the essence of Design-Driven Innovation and its huge advantage on the other two types in the generation of new meanings, and Metamorfosi, the “human light” is a perfect example of it.

Metamorfosi

Metamorfosi, the “human light”, created a completely new meaning: a light that does not illuminate, but answer some human biological, psychological, and cultural needs.

They applied a process that started from the customers’ experience and through ethnography they proposed this new concept of light.

For those of you who do not know what Ethnography is, it is the “description and study of human culture” (Light Minds, 2005), and is a fundamental tool in this type of innovation because it helps understand the aspirations, values, desires and behaviors of existing or potential customers in their normal environment.

Ethnography

In this way the company was able to predict data and show people something they desired even before their awareness. Predicting the future is the most powerful source of competitive advantage. This is the very tremendous advantage of the Design-Driven approach and the secret of Metamorfosi’s success.

-Michele Bellini-

Note: This post was specifically developed for a college class and its purposes are only academic.