Studio 69 Tech Blog

You Can’t Innovate If You Ignore Your Real Problems

admin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:21:09 +0000

Struggling companies often look to momentary design solutions, but, Ziba’s Sohrab Vossoughi warns, they won’t succeed unless they embrace internal change. In 2008, my design consultancy, Ziba, was invited to conduct a five-day workshop with the executives of one of the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers. The CEO told us the company wanted to use design thinking to be more innovative. After decades of competing on cost and efficiency, a growing legion of competitors had forced it into a commodity role. Despite a large internal design group, their brand had little to differentiate it for consumers.
A team of our designers and strategists put its heart and soul into this workshop, digging deep into the details of innovation strategy and consumer research, and giving example after example of how to create a meaningful user experience. After a week of intense exploration and discussion, the executives thanked us heartily. They then went back to doing business precisely as they had before.
Clients often expect instant innovation, without changing anything else.
This outcome is depressingly common, not just for Ziba but for any organization that seeks to build innovation capacity in businesses. The clients in this example are masters of efficient production, making incremental improvements to their product line every year as they steadily lose market share. But they expected a seminar to give them the sudden capability to innovate, without changing any other part of their business practice. It doesn’t work like that. An innovation consultancy cannot turn you into an innovative company.
Innovation requires three things: identifying what to do, figuring out how to do it, and assigning the task to the right people.
A sound innovation strategy achieves the first of these, but the other two are matters of corporate culture — the management structures, reward systems, and development processes that make a company what it is on the inside. Designers almost never get to touch that. There are consultancies that do, but they’re something else entirely: management consultants, institutional change agents — the people you go to when you’re at the end of your rope. Under these circumstances, a company may agree to rethink its core assumptions, but this is a very different expectation from the one we’re met with as designers.
In light of this reality, often the best thing a consultancy can do is make sure the strategy it’s proposing is as appropriate to the client as possible. It’s a research-and-insight problem but focused on the company rather than the consumer. When we begin a new relationship, clients are often surprised to learn that we want to investigate them just as intensely as their users. Many suggest dropping this step from the process. But while nearly everyone agrees that it’s crucial for a company to know its customers, we’ve found through long experience that it’s just as important for it to know itself. A design solution that’s inappropriate to the company’s culture and capabilities is as doomed as one that doesn’t accommodate the user.
Fortunately, the tools used to form insights about these two groups are quite similar. Interviews, group brainstorms, observation, and secondary research all play a part and are used on both client and consumer with equal intensity. In many cases, this two-headed research process reveals insights that overlap beautifully, allowing us to develop a strategy that’s both meaningful to the consumer and executable by the company.
When root problems aren’t solved, you only get momentary innovation.

But in many cases, researching the client produces a more painful insight: That this is a company with structural obstacles to the innovation they’re looking for and little interest in removing them. When we encounter this situation — and it happens often — it poses a difficult problem. On the one hand, we’ve been hired to deliver an innovation strategy, something that we’re capable of doing. On the other hand, experience tells us that the solution, no matter how finely tailored to our client’s capabilities and culture, is in real danger of failure.
What usually results is a momentary innovation. Like Motorola’s Razr or Dell’s Adamo laptops, this is a brief departure for a company not normally known for user-centered innovation. It enjoys a period of heightened sales and media attention, then fades away as the company returns to its familiar efficiency-driven state. Though temporarily successful, this is not the fundamental shift in innovation capacity that our clients are asking for.
There can be an unexpected long-term benefit, though. As with people, constructive self-transformation of a company begins with self-knowledge, and it’s hard to gather this from the inside. The majority of our work comes from repeat clients, because we put enormous effort into understanding what makes each of them unique and communicating it to them.
Many of our most innovative clients didn’t begin that way, nor can we take credit for changing them. What we can take credit for is painting them an accurate picture of who they are so that when they decide to create the shift themselves, they have a clear picture of where they’re starting from and the effort it will take to transform. You might call this outcome the “accidental innovation effort”: an innovation-enabling awareness that wasn’t sought out by the client but in many cases is exactly what they needed.

-Article by Sohrab Vossoughi

Company Culture at Apple – How they invent

admin — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:08:38 +0000

It’s no secret that Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world today. However, it wasn’t always this way for them. Like everyone else, they had to make mistakes and learn from them. What they learned from their failures in the 90′s, is that in order for them to succeed they had to think different. When Steve Jobs came back to the company, he changed Apple forever. What made Apple go from almost bankrupt, to a 200 billion dollar company was when Steve Jobs instilled a design culture into Apple.

1. Design is everything. Everything!
Traditional companies don’t have a design culture. Sure, they have designers, but design isn’t the #1 priority from the very top of the organization to the very bottom. For Apple, design is everything. Steve Jobs knows and believes this. When you have a leader that knows and believes in the impact of design, it makes it easy for everyone else to follow suit. When an entire company focuses on design, the result is a foundation for breathtaking products.

2. Design reports to the CEO
Apple is probably the only company where design reports directly to the CEO. If design is the most important element of a product, why wouldn’t the CEO want to take part? However, this doesn’t mean that every CEO qualifies to take part. The reason it worked for Apple is because Jobs is a systems thinker and designer. He simplifies complexity. If you have a CEO who doesn’t know how to cut things to its simplest level, but instead does the opposite, then you may not want the CEO to take part in design. Better yet, you might want to change CEOs.

3. A very small team designs their products
Quality trumps quantity when it comes to teams. Apple has a small select group of skilled and talented designers (12 to 20) who design their major products. Compare that with companies who have large teams with groups of people on a project. Not at Apple. You may get more ideas with more people working on a project, but Apple’s focus is on quality not quantity. They want the best ideas from the brightest people at their company, and they manage to do it well with a very small elite team.

4. Designers make the design decisions
Does it make sense to have non-designers make design decisions? Apple knows that non-designers making design decisions is a recipe for disaster. That’s why they hire the best and trust that they’ll make smart decisions. To make sure of this, they have an executive level position that focuses on design. Jonathon Ive is the senior vice president of industrial design and is the principal designer of many Apple products. You can bet that all design decisions go through him.

5. They do pixel-perfect mockups
When Apple launches new products, there’s no surprise to anyone about what the product will look like. This is because they do pixel-perfect mockups that include the real content they will use, not placeholder content. This means that everyone will be critiquing the real thing and won’t see any interpretive changes by designers or engineers after the review. What you see in the mockup stage is what you will get.

6. They have paired design meetings
In order to create great products, engineers and designers have to work together as a team. That’s why every week the engineers and designers at Apple get together for two complementary meetings. The first is a brainstorm meeting where everyone leaves their inhibitions at the door and goes crazy thinking of different ways to tackle different problems. After that comes the production meeting where they nail their ideas down into a plan for execution.

7. They do no market research
There’s no place for market research at Apple. The people at Apple have good taste. They know what’s good, and they’ll stick to their convictions. The responsibility is on them, not the will of the people. It’s a burden to meet the expectations of millions of people. Instead, they know who they are, what they represent and set their own expectations. This is about designing based upon their own philosophy and values, not somebody else’s.

8. If it’s not perfect, it doesn’t go out
Near perfect is not good enough for Apple. They shoot for perfection. Their policy is that if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t go out to the public. However, this doesn’t mean they are perfect. They sometimes make mistakes too. It just means they work hard for perfection, while other companies believe in getting it out there and fixing it later. Apple believes in getting it right the first time. From there, they’ll work to improve their products with newer versions, but they’ll never ship a mediocre product and fix its holes later.

For a company to match or surpass the level of success Apple’s had, they absolutely have to have a design culture permeates through the organization. This starts at the very top, with leadership that places design as their highest priority. They not only have to believe in design, but they have to think and understand it. Steve Jobs is living proof that when you have a leader who has a great passion and enthusiasm for design, you end up creating products that consumers can’t live without.

[Sources: Being Steve Jobs' Boss, You Can't Innovate Like Apple]