I’ve had it. I’ve had it with unsubstantiated hyperbole. I’ve had it with hackneyed metaphors. I’ve had it with shallow sound bites. I crave meaty insights, not the intellectual twinkies served up in lieu of.

This means no more Bruce Nussbaum. No more Tom Peters. No more anything related to IDEO. And certainly no more Apple examples.

For instance, here’s a fresh bite from Bruce: “Innovation, creativity, design — whatever you want to call it — is the new Six Sigma.”

Claiming something is the new something else is about as insightful as claiming something is dead. What exactly does this really mean? Does this mean that innovation is all about consistent manufacturing quality? Does this mean that creativity is the new management fad? Does it mean that design is now table-stakes? Does this mean that innovation, creativity, design are no long enough to maintain a competitive advantage?

Why not just say what you mean? Perhaps because you don’t mean anything. Perhaps because you don’t know what you mean. Or perhaps because what you mean is neither interesting nor insightful nor even true. As a result you hide behind the obfuscation of a clumsy yet common metaphor–sort of like hiding the taste of rotting meat with even hotter curry.

Check out some of the folks on my blogroll, folks like Niti Bahn, Presentation Zen, Black Sheep and Bubblegeneration, folks who shun the twinkies.

Part 1: Definitions (10/23)
Part 2: iNPD model (11/06)
Part 3: Innovation Matrix – Categories of Innovation (11/24)
Part 4: Innovation Matrix – Areas of Innovation
Part 5: Innovation Matrix – Overall
Part 6: Process

I see 9 distinct areas companies can innovate in. These 9 areas organize into 2 broad groups I call Customer Experience and Organization Capacity (please forgive the current crudeness of my descriptions).

Customer Experience

Area	Description
Product	The product, service and/or experience that the company sells and that the customer and/or user values. This can also include peripheral, complementary or accessory products.
Marcomm	All the messages and materials used to raise awareness, consolidate demand, and bring customers and products together.
Sales	The transaction experience; everything that facilitates the exchange between customers and company over the product.
Fulfillment	The mechanisms to fulfill the sales transaction, including distribution delivery.
Support	The post-transaction activities that the company provides related to the customer’s ownership of the product—in some cases the support is the product, or a significant portion of the product.

Operational Capacity

Area	Description
Finance	How the company pays for its continuance and delivery of customer experiences.
Process	The ways in which the company does things and makes decisions.
Strategy	The goals and directions a company sets for itself, the market position it takes, and the trade-offs it is willing to make. Of course Strategy occurs at many different levels, from company-wide down to product development.
Organization	The coherent and integrated collection or resources as well as the methods of integration and marshalling of these resource, that keep the company running and delivering customer experiences.

It should be clear that the Customer Experience areas are all external facing and impact direct interaction with customers and users; while the Operational Capacity areas are all internal facing and impact the company’s capacity for delivering customer experiences.

It is important to note that each of these areas can have any number of incremental, sustaining, breakthrough or disruptive innovations.

These distinctions are important because each represents unique subject matters requiring unique mixtures of appropriate expertise, as well as providing guidelines for appropriate expectations and contributions. For example, design likely does not have the financial subject matter expertise to drive financial innovations, and would therefore likely not be expected to do so. Likewise engineering often lacks the mass communications expertise to drive marcomm innovations, and would therefore likely not be expected to do so.

This relates to some of the current discussion of design and innovation, and how many people conflate the two. A quick look at these areas of innovation should reveal the limits of where design and innovation currently intersect where they should intersect more, and perhaps where they should not intersect.

Design has an established history of product and marcomm innovation, and many designers are trying to establish design as a component of strategic innovation area (though mostly from a product strategy approach). However what can design contribute to distribution or support innovations? And is it even appropriate for design to be involved in finance innovations? Visually mapping these areas of innovation makes such questions easy to ask.

I recently noticed Geoffrey Moore’s new book has just been released. It delves into the topic of distinguishing between kinds of innovation and how these distinctions should guide companies’ decisions.

Further Questions

• Do the areas I have identified adequately reflect reality, without getting mired in too fine a detail?
• Are the processes for innovation different across these areas? or is it only the subject matter that differs
• Is the importance of subject matter expertise consistent across these areas?
• Can there even be an overall innovation discipline, or would such a discipline necessarily have to exist within each area?

Like quotes, I normally don’t like to just link to other blog posting–but this is a particularly interesting posting from a particularly interesting blog (admitedly a lot of it often goes over my head, but I like that).

Something strikes me about a lot of what Umair writes. It strikes me with a ring of truth the way much of what Negroponte and Kelley wrote in Wired last century struck with with a ring of hype. I don’t know if Umair is right in his theories, but something about them feels right. We shall see.

Many designers define their practice as professional problem solving. I’d like to take that a step further and say that it is decontextualized, generalized, or abstract problem solving. This is because design is not tied to any domain or subject matter.

Ironically though, there is no such thing as a decontextualize, generalized or abstract problem. Problems by defintion must emerge from a particular domain or subject matter. So design is a generalized problem solving endeavor yet there is not such thing as a generalized problem–there are only specific problems.

As a result many design methods intend to gather domain knowledge in order to bridge this gap between the general and the specific. This then begs the question: is it better to have a subject matter expert with some design knowledge or a design expert with some domain knowledge?

This question maps directly to proejct resourcing. With limited resoruces what is the best balance bewteen domain and desgin expertise? And on what does this balancing act depend?

I think many mature designers have an innate (and usually non-selfish) sense of how to manage this balance. However I have not yet seen anything more concrete on the matter outside of my own experience. This becomes a problem when dealing with entreched disciplines like marketing and engineering who tend to have many narrow preconceived notions (well, don’t we all?) about problem solving and are more easily persuaded by more objective information than the designer’s experience.

Oh and merry Christmas. Now I need toget back to playing The Movies (its a video game simulation for those who haven’t heard of it).

Ok so I was getting a little bored with the default wordpress theme and thought I should spend some time to customize a theme of my own. Hope you like it.

Hopefully I’ll have something a little more interesting to read shortly.

I had a list of quotes here but it started taking up too much room so I’ve put the quotes in its own page to clean things up a bit. You will find the permanent link in the side panel under Pages > Quotes.

Not sure this is even worth 2 cents, but… In no particular order, and not written in stone:

• Less is usually more
• Do not make people feel stupid
• Design for probable, no possible
• People just want to accomplish their goals, and being educated is often not their goal
• Design is to help people better accomplish their goals
• The more expert, the less aware a person is of their activities
• Design is about problem finding and problem solving
• Design problems are the problems people experience
• People are generally more motivated by avoiding pain than by increasing pleasure
• Ask all the truth, but ask it slant
• Personas and scenarios are ultimately means to an end.
• Upstream costs and effort saves greater downstream costs and pain
• Functionality should announce its presence

There is so much talk of “design” and its strategic importance floating around these days. However no one, least of all designers, can agree on what exactly design as a professional practice means in any consistent and practical way (just read any DMI report for a taste of the fluff that passes for design scholarship). Unfortunately, the word “design” seems to be about as meaningful as the phrase “family values”.

Perhaps as individual designers some of us can lucidly specify what it is exactly that we do and how it is valuable. Unfortunately we cannot manage to do this as a collective, and certainly not with the consistency and clarity the business world needs in order to understand how design benefits them and how to integrate it into thier activities.

While undoubtedly fertile ground “design” as is it commonly used is far too fluid, too situational, and too mercurial to provide much of a professional foundation. To build a credible profession that offers consistent value and clearly communicates both this value and the methods for collaboration, we need not only fertile ground but stable ground.

This means that we designers will have to give up some fertility to gain some stability. To do this we will have to find the strength to appropriately position design and commit to it. But the design world is terrified of committment. And rather than face this fear, this weakness, the design world through some rather nice double think (Buchanan, page 6) prefers to convince itself that this weakness is actually strength.

However, Michael Porter says the strength to make the committment to do somethings and not other things is the essence of strategy. His logic is as follows. Strategy is all about taking a clear position. Position is all about making tradeoffs. And tradeoffs are deciding what you do do and what you don’t do, and sticking to it. So if you cannot be clear about what you don’t do, you cannot be clear about what you do do, and the whole stratgic house of cards falls apart.

This problem frustrates me because it holds all of us back and has some of its roots in design education. Take Herb Simon’s academically popular definition of design “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” It is expansive to the point of meaninglessness. Our inability to define design or its position hinders the credibility of design as a strategic competency. At some point soon we will have to get over our timidity. If we can’t I’m afraid designers will become irrelevant as other disciplines claim the professional territory we wouldn’t. We are standing on a burning platform folks.

PS
Here’s a recent exmple of the confusion over what design really is….

– Michael Bierut says design is innovation
– Larry Kelly says nonsense, don’t conflate the two
– Mark Hurst suggests simplicity is the new innovation

So design is, or is not, innovation or simplicity depending on who you ask. Well that clears it all up.

Part 1: Definitions (10/23)
Part 2: iNPD model (11/06)
Part 3: Innovation Matrix – Categories of Innovation
Part 4: Innovation Matrix – Areas of Innovation (01/05)
Part 5: Innovation Matrix – Overall
Part 6: Process

Not all innovations are created equal. And likewise not all innovations should be treated equally. So in order to succeed different kinds of innovations must be handled differently. That is neither novel nor controversial. The sticky part comes when we try to define how innovations differ and map these differences to specific handling strategies.

I have recognized roughly 4 kinds of innovation: sustaining, incremental, breakthrough and disruptive. Some of these categories probably sound familiar, and you likely have some established notions of what they mean. Just for a moment though, suspend your own notions and just try to see innovation according to the following.

	Evolutionary		Revolutionary
	Sustaining	Incremental	Breakthrough	Disruptive
Desc	Performance improvements on features current customers already value	New functionality to satisfy unserved or underserved needs	Redefine product category with new value proposition	Create radical new products markets and biz models, undermining established players
Purpose	Refresh Product	Advance Product	Redefine Product	Define New Value Networks
Variables	Known	Partially Known	Unknown	Unknowable
Goal	Keep share of the pie	Grow share of the pie	Grow the whole pie	A chocolate sundae
Risk	Low	Moderate	High	Extreme
Fuel	Data	Information	Knowledge	Wisdom
Drivers	Sales	Market	Design	Visionaries and Accidents
Activity	Tactical Execution	Strategic Execution	Strategic Planning	Strategic Revolution
Examples	Mustang 95-04 Color iPod Xbox 360	CD-Burner Camera Phone Windows 95	Starbucks Music Videos Walkman	P2P Steel Mini Mills VOIP

* This model is definitely a work in progress, and some of my definitions are the result of playing with free associative analogy.

It is important to note that there is a lot of grey area and overlap between these categories. So try not to think of them as distinct and separate buckets. Rather try to think of them more like different areas of a landscape all blending into one another at the edges.

It is also important to note that this model is not on a scale from dull to sexy, from good to better or from less value to more. No one category is necessarily any better or worse than any other. They are simply different and deserve to be handled as such. This is often ignored for the rhetorically dramatic effect of using the language of disruption to make things sound more important. I’m working on formalizing some objective criteria to help guide categorization to help avoid such hyperbole.

But categorizing innovations correctly isn’t the point. Categorizing innovations appropriately is. Why? Because the categories themselves don’t really matter. What matters is what they mean in terms of guiding development activity. Indeed these categories aren’t just for academic exercise—they are actionable. Each one maps to different evaluative criteria, rules of engagement, and as a whole provides the foundation for a kind of innovation risk portfolio management.

By evaluative criteria I mean the criteria by which teams can rank, prioritize and judge different innovations within the same categories in order to determine which to pursue and which to shelf. By rules of engagement, I mean the rules that guide the expectations and contributions of each discipline in the multidisciplinary iNPD team. And together these categories support innovation risk portfolio management by making explicit how much attention and how many resources the company is devoting to what levels of risk in terms of innovation.

There are serious risks related to inappropriately categorizing innovations. For instance, using inappropriate evaluative criteria would poison go-no-go decisions. And following inappropriate rules of engagement between the iNPD disciplines would put team members’ expectations and contributions at odds with what the innovation naturally demands. The results would be frustration, interpersonal conflict, loss of morale and inadequate diligence.

To complicate things the same innovation could arguably belong to multiple categories depending on perspective. For instance, from the perspective of Apple’s management and investors the iPod was a breakthrough, because it represents the company’s first step away from computing and into the very different consumer electronics world. However, from a consumer’s perspective it’s a purely sustaining device—the same functionality as dozens of other players, but in a much more distinctive and attractive package and hipper brand. So talk of categories should be mindful of whose perspective is driving.

Further Questions:

• If perspective is important to appropriately categorizing innovations, is there a way to standardize a list of common perspectives?
• Other associations for each category?

Recent reports indicate that claiming something is dead is now quite dead. The phrase died of exhaustion, having been overworked by the armies of second-rate intellectual hacks seeking to make names for themselves with the lazy hyperbole and vacuous dramatics of issuing counterfeit death certificates, and the swarms of bubbledheaded zombies always too eager to parrot such trite melodramatic self-promotional blathering.

A certain Mr. Mark Twain had long ago warned that reports of death are often exaggerated–a claim confirmed by Mr. Paul McCartney. This warning has been lavishly ignored in technological and academic circles, and the once vibrant attention-grabbing phrase has finally given up its ghost. Rest in peace.

(I suppose this post makes me a second-rate intellectual hack too. oh well.)