Roger Martin - On Designing the Future

My astute friend from McKinsey, Samvit Kanoria forwards "What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin", in Fast Company, see here.  The article highlights Mr. Martin's focus on creativity in innovation being a combination of science and design aspects of product or service development working together.

For the scientist, he states - "The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers."

Mr. Martin thrashes the large management consulting companies and lays the blame of innovation bottle neck on a corporate structure mired in research and analysis of the past - "But what they analyze is the past.  And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored."

Mr. Martin is asked - "Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?" and he states - "Well, yes."

Interestingly, my tenure at P&G was during the time Roger Martin was advising A.G. Lafley and I was a part of the substantial changes brought within P&G's approach to business.  See information on some my work related to Virtual Shopper here on my friend Franz Dill's blog, who also was one of the founders of the P&G Innovation Centers.

Though Mr. Martin speaks candidly, yet the change he suggests carries pain to the corporate as a whole and the machinery of suppliers supporting it.  Corporate innovation remains more perception than reality, with incremental results seen in their markets from licensing, buyouts, etc.  Breakthrough innovation remains the domain of the entrepreneur, one who can imagine a future unburdened by the past!

Raymond Loewy - Father of 20th Century Design Innovation

If you don't know of Raymond Loewy then he is one of the two or three individuals from the 20th century in America who have made design the impactful reality in products - from maximizing on revenue to the consumer feeling the "need" to "must have" a particular brand.

Wired magazine online profiled Raymond Loewy in November here. Also, I visited an informative exhibition on Raymond Loewy chronicling his design through the decades including family and commercial videos in Bozeman, Montana called "Raymond Loewy:Designs for a Consumer Culture". See details here.

For me there is no getting away from the fact that Raymond Loewy brought together the initial principles of Industrial Design, perhaps not all of them yet the most important ones, including that it begins and ends with the consumer, in delighting the consumer through design and the experience that design imparts for the consumer of the product.

See a photo gallery of Raymond Loewy's designs here on Wired online.

Is it all about Design and Experience?

SCAD

While conducting a seminar on Design Innovation and a Design Charrette at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), I left the students with the question whether in the final analysis it was all about design and experience of any product before they began their Charrettes?

The deep consumer understandings gleaned at places such as the Innovation Centers at Procter & Gamble enable product companies to capture the sale at the point of purchase - First Moment of Truth (FMOT) as P&G puts it, see definition here. My work at the various Innovation Centers around the world continuously helped me realize that P&G had captured the essence of reaching the consumer - Design enables success at FMOT.

See my friend and colleague Franz Dill's blog here discussing P&G's Innovation Centers and some of the work we did as detailed in Mr. A. G. Lafley's book "The Game Changer". Franz was also the founder of the first Innovation Center there.

While the above is a commercial venture for increasing shareholder value, I was happy to see that in academia SCAD has introduced anthropology and psychology to compliment their excellent curriculum in Industrial Design program, see here.

The quality of experience offered by the product or service may or may not result in repeat business. This is where the product companies of the world are engaging in immersive and experiential environments for learning consumer behavior. See another of Franz's blog here regarding Cargill's Innovation Center.

The SCAD students produced impressive results for the dilemmas I brought to them from UAE and Germany. My friends and faculty at SCAD that is; the Industrial Design Dean - Mr. Victor Ermoli, the Chair - Mr. Tom Gattis and a dedicated Professor - Mr. Robert Fee, should feel proud of their accomplishments as the No. 3 Industrial Design program in the USA.

This Charrette helped me solidify my belief that in the end, yes, it is all about design and experience. Or did Dr. Ivan Pavlov already discover this indirectly in the late 19th century when he developed the concepts of Classical Conditioning?