Design & Innovation

Another good article from this month’s Inc. was about P&G’s concept for using innovation for growth and how small businesses and entrepreneurs can use this process regardless of their size, industry or product type. The goal is to design processes that will ensure companies continue to innovate repeatedly and reliably. Because most of are still business minded and are looking for a step by step process, I thought this article might helpful for bringing your ideas to life!

The steps identified include:

1. Find out where to play, and playing in a market that is underserved. There are better chances than inventing a new technology that may not be needed or may be only a trend. This involves selecting a strategy that make sense for the small company and not trying to be something that you can’t possibly be.

2. Use your customers to develop your product or service offering. In my case, because we do PR on behalf on many of our clients is to involve them in the marketing plan and brainstorm process so that the most well rounded plan is developed with their customers in mind. The more successful they are, the more successful we are.

3. Generating new ideas through brainstorms. One new insight was “In small companies some people invent and many people execute, but everyone must observe.” The more I read about new ideas for design, the more I think of new ways to incorporate in our business and in my every day life. The article talks about those that generate ideas should partner with another employee to gain feedback on its viability and to hash out details.

4. After the ideas are harvested, the next step is find out which ones are the most promising. Every quarter P&G project teams lay out their ideas and research on a poster board. It is as time for others to comment and ask questions and help to improve the idea. The best ideas may be implemented as a product.

5. Prototyping is the obvious next step, which bring us back to IDEO, Gehry etc. and the importance of design at the beginning stages. The author suggests that the sooner you have a visual the easier it will be to make improvements or adjustments. In this stage utilizing those that will use the product is particularly important because they will be your biggest asset or detriment depending on how well the design is executed.

6. For small business that have good ideas, they might not have the capabilities to take them to market, therefore a really good idea if marketed properly could be developed and manufactured through a larger company. P&G and other major consumer products companies are looking for these opportunities all the time.

7. As the company grows, it is important that the design team grows as the company grows and that they are implemented in all aspects of the business. Design thinking can be found in any discipline, from marketing to accounting to IT. In this stage it is also important to teach the new employees to use the same design thinking process so that as the business grows, each employee learns how to innovate for themselves. Although innovative companies usually are made up of innovative people, those that make the operation decisions must help breed innovation.

Innovation Philadelphia is a local non-profit that seeks to infuse the region with creativity and fresh ideas, thus cultivating a booming creative economy in the greater Philadelphia area. The non-profit focuses on developing technology-driven creative industries such as communications and marketing, software development, architecture, engineering and planning, graphic and multimedia design, product and merchandising design, and information technology.

Unfortunately, Mayor Michael Nutter failed to recognize the importance of innovation in the city’s economic growth and cut funding for Innovation Philadelphia in his proposed budget for the 2009 fiscal year. You can support the mission of Innovation Philadelphia and send a message to City Hall by attending one of the many young professionals events hosted by the non-profit or by encouraging your company to sponsor an event.

Since we spent the last week immersing ourselves in design culture and learning how to apply design concepts to our business core, I thought it’d be interesting to look at the flip side: how designers learn more about business strategy.

As Professor Yoo mentioned, several design schools have begun to teach students how to become more business-savvy in order to manage a successful design studio. The synergy of business and design is a hot topic as of late, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) has been leading the Design/Business revolution.

AIGA conferences dealing with the application of business tactics to the management of a design cooperative:

• SMART/MODELS
• Business & Design: October 25-28 (Tom Kelley & Malcolm Gladwell are presenting!)
• Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders: July 27-Aug 1

More AIGA Design/Business resources:

• a guide for explaining to “by-the-book” CEOs the pivotal role that design plays in business
• Gain, the AIGA Journal of Business & Design

I’m encouraged by the fact that business professionals and designers are reaching out and collaborating to bridge the gap. By learning from one another and fostering a mutually beneficial relationship, Design & Business can together create a stronger, more productive economy. I encourage everyone to sign up for AIGA’s e-newsletter and check out their website…it’s a great way to “keep the momentum going” post-trip.

In the Design of Business Article, Dean Roger Martin’s main idea is that companies need to become more innovative to survive and business leaders today need to understand designers better in order for the company to be more innovative.  He’s essentially saying that business leaders need to become designers.  I do agree with him that companies do need to become more innovative.  However, as I mentioned in my other blog post on Frank Gehry, I really think that business leaders have a different mind set than designers.  Business people think differently, more logically than designers do.  Most are not very creative people.  If business people or leaders wanted to be a designer, they wouldn’t be business leaders today.  I don’t think that anyone can force business people/leaders to become a designer.  Even if they try hard to think like a designer, it may not work.

Many organisations are investing heavily in “Web 2.0” technologies that allow this style of two-way communication. They recognise it as part of the collaborative workplace that is replacing the top-down autocratic style of management of the previous century.

Some of the features that are available as part of Facebook are ideally suited to establishing workgroups or interest groups in the business world. You can set up a membership list, where interested people sign up and take responsibility for maintaining their own contact details rather than an administrator needing to maintain a distribution list.

You can use the Events feature to plan and promote meetings or events, easily invite everyone on the membership list to attend and then automatically see who’s coming and who isn’t. Compare this with sending a large number of emails and manually collating the results.

Of course, within the workplace, you may already be using your email and diary application to achieve the same purpose, but Facebook allows you to establish a group that crosses company and even geographical boundaries to easily manage a group of people from all over the world.

Another useful feature is the discussion board which allows members of the group to post topics for discussion which all members can see. Compare this with email conversations that are hard to manage and share without flooding members’ inboxes.

The News and Photos features allow you to keep members up to date with what’s happening in the group. You can allow members of the group to post items.

I was reading an article about how they’re predicting in 2008 websites will make their websites more Web 2.0. So if a website doesn’t blogs, wiki’s or commenting features they will this year. Already a growing trend having people make comments on articles and such it’s going to be necessary to stay in the competition.

Here is the link to the article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=312215&intsrc=news_ts_head