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
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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
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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 25th 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.
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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.
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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.