Design & Innovation

I recently purchased an inordinate amount of design books from Barnes & Noble, including The Ten Faces of Innovation, The Medici Effect, and Rise of the Creative Class. Although I’ve maxed out my credit card and singlehandedly boosted B&N’s second quarter profit margin, I’ve added yet another “design think” book to my summer reading list.

Accidental Branding by David Vinjamuri, adjunct professor of marketing at NYU and founder of ThirdWay Brand Trainer, examines the relationship between design, innovation, and business. Although he doesn’t explicitly call it “design think,” Vinjamuri reiterates many of the concepts we learned during our San Francisco Design Tour in his recent AdAge article, “Launch Products Like Entrepreneurs.”

Vinjamuri singles out Clif Bar, Baby Einstein, and Burt’s Bees as companies who have developed products that “solve a real need in a unique way.” Because they’ve carved out their own niche, these companies may never need to rely on traditional advertising.

Echoing David Kelley if IDEO, Vinjamuri’s motto is “Fail early and often” and “Prototype early and often.” (Forgive me if I’ve misquoted Kelley, all of this is starting to blend together!) When Vinjamuri asked Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson what was the most valable lesson he had learned during his tenure at the company, Erickson responded, “To launch products quickly and cheaply so I can afford to fail and keep innovating.” Frequent failure and constant prototyping is a common theme in our design education. Instead of spending all of your time and resources in developing that one, “perfect” product, it’s smarter to prototype several different options, even if it means you initially fail.

Vinjamuri also echoes Luke Wroblewski’s rejection of benchmarking as a viable decision-making tool. Luke equated benchmarking to forecasting the future by looking into the rear view mirror. How could you possibly be successful by replicating what your competitors have already done? It’s a backwards way of doing things.

Vinjamuri’s solution is to launch new ideas and products in a “launch channel” rather than the traditional wide release distribution channel. Vinjamuri suggests that innovative companies “seed the product among thos who will be selling it; involve them in the development cycle so they are already on board before the product ships.” He also suggests that the marketer of a new product should be the product’s core customer; the customer’s passion for and intimacy with the product will fuel its success.

Lastly, Vinjamuri advises that companies shift away from a quantitative research focus and reallocate capital typically spent on market research to brand management, prototyping, and small-scale manufacturing.