Design:
A Better Path to Innovation
Nathan Shedroff

California College of the Arts | [e-mail]

 

Three years ago, I got a call from an editor of one of the biggest business magazines in the U.S. (who shall remain nameless, not to preserve his anonymity but simply because I can’t remember which magazine it was). What he said over the phone was this: “We’re planning on writing a book about how businesses can innovate like Apple does, and I was told to talk to you about it.” I’m not sure if he was asking me to write it or just wanted feedback and leads, but my answer stumped him: “You can’t write that book.”

He thought I meant that it would be best written by another organization. I had to explain that, no, the book wasn’t writable. “It would consist of one sentence: Hire Steve Jobs.” I went on to explain that what Apple practiced was “expert design,” a type of design perspective and process that is highly risky, usually disastrous for most companies, and works only when you have a leader with ultimate authority who also happens to have a keen sense of design and amazingly accurate understanding of what customers need and want. Without this person, no organization, no matter how much money they had to spend, was going to be able to pull off the kind of innovation

that Apple has. For proof, just look at Microsoft (and, specifically, at Vista, Zune, MSN, and Ultimate TV).

Microsoft is an interesting case, in fact. It spends millions of dollars a year on exactly the kind of user-centric research regaled in the industry (you know, ethnographic research, customer personas and scenarios, user testing, etc.), and yet it can’t even create workable products, let alone innovative ones (at least, on average). This is because it has no support for customer experience within the company that has any power to affect change in process, products, services, or strategy. This won’t change, by the way, until it either hires someone in place of Steve Ballmer who cares and understands about customer experiences, or hires an experience czar at a senior level in the company with the authority, backed by Ballmer, to kill projects that don’t measure up experience-wise.

 

Why Innovate? With all of the talk in the business press over the past four years about innovation, you would think that it would be clear to businesspeople what it means to innovate and why it’s important. However, while engineers and designers have an innate appreciation for

appropriate and significant innovation, most businesspeople still need to be convinced because of the risks involved and because it’s not an easy thing to do.

What most businesspeople don’t realize is that everyone who goes to business school, plus anyone else who’s simply paying attention to the business press, knows almost exactly what they do. There are only so many paths to stimulate growth, and almost every businessperson on the planet already knows them (and how to implement them):

• Increase operational efficien- cies (including cutting jobs and expenses)

• Sell off assets (such as tech- nologies, IP, or divisions)

• Mergers and acquisitions (which are usually only temporary and often actually result in lower growth once they’re completed)

• IPOs (if the timing is right or your business is the kind to which these markets respond)

• “Rebranding” (again, often temporary)

• Innovation

What most don’t realize is that these paths are now the cost of doing business. Every company does them—or should (though not everyone can implement them successfully)—but there are no mysteries or dif-