BenQ's iF award-winning Black Box concept has designers all over the world going "but that thing's been on my sketchpad for months!". Well, we could all have won an iF award guys. The pictures released by Benq show the device as a mobile phone, a calculator, a radio and a sort of ambient fishbowl. All good and useful things but nothing near what the device truly represents.

Instead of BenQ's mobile phone-type idea, what we're looking at, folks, is the next generation of mobile device. The one that will change literally everything for quite a lot of people. Every tech editor and gadget fan has been preoccupied for the last year with products like the fabled next generation video Ipod . The gorgeous Onyx concept from Pilotfish and Synaptics treads similar ground. It seems to be all about growing the screen in your pocket.

The little surfaces that Gabriel White has devoted an entire blog to are about to get a little bigger as the screen expands to fill the front of the device. The history of buttons is about to get a virtual chapter as we chuck out those tiny QWERTY thumb boards. The tactile issues will get sorted and someone will liberate us from fingerprint smudges and scratched screens. The touch screen is finally developing to match the physicality of human hands. Maybe we're reaching the tipping point for convergence.

If this description makes the next generation look like a gentle evolution of the current generation of Communicators, Palms and BlackBerries, take heart. This is not about the device. The most attractive thing about the Black Box is it's name. If it truly is a black box and no longer a phone masquerading as all sorts of other stuff, then the potential can be unlocked. What its really about is access. Leave all the smartphone baggage and the tiny computer baggage behind for a moment and consider a device that doesn't get in the way of people's access to internet, e-mail, documents and contacts. A transparent device designed for open ended access.

Because it accesses and stores these online, the device has less software, storage and processing power. A black box. Not exactly a phone nor a computer nor a pda but something able to perform the most essential actions of those devices as well as any of them, maybe better. All that at the lower cost of a simpler device.

This is not the Origami, and it's not the $100 laptop, it's what these things will be by the time they're useable mass-market products for the whole pyramid. If they manage to somehow fit in your pocket.

In a simpler device, the pre-existing design sophistication of all those Googly web-based apps is connected to mobile broadband instead of having a powerful device and heavy proprietary phone applications. It's an alternate-reality realization of the partly unfulfilled consumer-level application service provider dream.

In addition, a Black Box can support total language and culture customization. Instead of imposing Scandinavian or American logic and Roman script on others, make the portal transparent to each culture. All anybody needs then is their own culture, eyeballs and fingertips.
At the bottom of the pyramid, people have already demonstrated their willingness to shell out months of wages for a mobile phone.

It's the utility, convenience and economic potential of these items that makes them so desirable. All of these could be dramatically heightened by the next generation. If the device is not a cultural and technological hurdle but an easy portal to go through, this could be the next emerging growth market.

Mobile phones connect the world's poorest to other individuals. The next generation device could connect them to the world. It has the potential to change everything from banking to grassroots business networking. It's an enormous leap for the biggest mass market but can it be made effortless? That's the challenge but it's not such an outrageous one.

As Niti Bhan has pointed out, Nigerians are the largest group of outside visitors to BBC mobile. Any visitor will tell you that it's a simple, useful and well-sorted mobile destination. Just the kind that the Black Box is looking for.

Tasos Calantzis is the managing director of the award-winning design company Readymade

Victor Lombardi of the Noisebetweenstations blog has kindly consented to a reblog of his seminal post "Is design the new management consultancy?" here. He uses logic and evidence to break down the facts and reach the possible answer. Which is no, design is not the new management consultancy.

Some folks are asking this question. I've spent the past two years making the transition from designer to business consultant, jumping a lot of hurdles along the way. Here's a little of what I learned:

* Highlight opportunities instead of bitching. As designers, we walk around in the world and feel overly sensitive to everything that isn't designed well. We watch customers struggle when using poorly designed products. There's an inclination to highlight these faults to executives whom we think should know about these faults. And maybe they should, but mostly they need help seeing the big opportunities. It might sound like product faults and market opportunities are simply the flip side of the same coin, but it's the difference between being perceived as a whiny designer and a valued business advisor.

* Know your limits. When I hear a designer say, "We were doing the same kind of work McKinsey would do" I think "You really have no fucking idea what McKinsey does." I used to work at BCG (in the IT dept) and I have yet to meet a designer with thinking, methods, and tools nearly as sophisticated as those consultants. Just consider the career path at these firms: they take the top students from the top business schools who in turn have taken the top undergrads, and so on. Then the consultants work in a demanding up-or-out environment where excellence is necessary. This culture breeds great execution much more effectively than the best design studio cultures.

And I've beat the design thinking drum as much as anyone, but it's naive to believe only designers think this way.

* Invest in new hammers. Not every business problem is best solved by a product/service design or redesign. Sometimes an acquisition is the answer, or a divestiture, or hedging the financial markets. Business leaders have a lot of tools in their toolbox: marketing, sales, operations, finance, IT, HR, strategy, customer service etc., and each of these in turn has a deep toolbox, with practitioners who all want more strategic influence. Understanding them - and knowing when product or service design is not the best approach - makes for a more well-rounded management consultant.

* See the big picture. Sometimes design does have direct influence on business strategy. But describing that influence in terms of customer experience alone can lack the information that executives want to hear. Learning how to describe design's benefits in financial and strategic language is key.

* Be realistic about the influence of design. The current barrage of Fast Company and BusinessWeek stories on design can lull us into the impression that design is now king. In my experience, this isn't anywhere near the case. Sure, there are great changes happening: I see more companies doing field research and more realization of the power of customer experience. But it'll take years for the generations of business people to change their thinking and practices.

* Know what you mean when you use the word strategy. Unfortunately, strategy has become a muddled word, the meaning even traditional management consultants don't agree on (see Strategy Bites Back for an amusing look at the situation). But this is no excuse for us to practice muddled thinking. Here's a simple way I've been clarifying it in conversation:
o Product/service design: decide how to create something
o Design strategy: decide what to create, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)
o Business strategy: decide what a business should do, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)

Join the conversation in Victor's blog here.

Grant Gibbs designed the Hippo Water Roller to give poor, rural South Africans an easier way to collect water. The Hippo is a plastic tank which doubles as a wheel, with a handle. It's easy to fill and easy to pull over rough rural terrain, even by children. It's an ingenious solution and as it turned out, people love the product, but will not pay for it. Despite its success as a development aid project, it was always acknowledged that it would not be a commercial success.

On the other hand, an interesting fact that emerged from the 1999 ICSID Interdesign, hosted by the Design Institute of South Africa was that the same disadvantaged people would pay someone to deliver water to their homes, rather than fetching it themselves from a communal tap. It seems that time is as valuable at the bottom of the pyramid as at the top.

At the opposite end of the technology spectrum, mobile phone company MTN has become one of the fastest growing telecoms companies in the world by expanding into risky markets in Africa. Some stories tell of people traveling for days to spend several month's wages on a phone. It's easy to assume that the explosive growth of mobile phone sales in Africa is simply a matter of usefulness; people are able to communicate where previously they were not. However it's possible that this is only part of the reason.

Aside from the inevitable calls to far away family and the crucial contact number for an itinerant handyman, mobile phones are used to arrange a lift, a party or for other social events that would have otherwise meant a possibly fruitless walk. In other words, the phone provides convenience, just like the service of water delivery.

C.K. Prahalad has pointed out that developing world customers are savvy and value-conscious. That's true, but there could be more to their discernment than that. Maybe the difference between the Hippo Roller and MTN is that these markets need not only great usefulness but also great convenience before they'll open their wallets. Add the possibility of earning extra money and you may have a winner.

Tasos Calantzis

We live in an uncertain world.  Many people find uncertainty personally stressful and try to create order by making early decisions that reduce risk and uncertainty. Traditional business practice is to eliminate uncertainty so that planning can take place. That's good practice and common sense, but here's a tip for managers who want to improve their design team's innovation depth: develop the ability to tolerate uncertainty.

A tolerance for uncertainty may allow better quality answers by delaying decision making until more is known about a situation. The point is convincingly argued by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business, Tom Peters and others. 

Toyota exercises a similar attitude while developing their cars. Jeffrey Liker describes this as Principle 13 in The Toyota Way;  "Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options, implement rapidly".

In practice this may mean periodically re-evaluating the reasons for doing something; even the reason for the entire project or the reason for the company's existence. It may mean not deciding on any particular design until later in the process.

It will certainly mean walking with uncertainty for a little longer than you'd normally be comfortable with. Both Mr Martin and Professor Liker point out that this uncertainty should be planned for and incorporated in your design process. Let's call it disciplined uncertainty; reconciling the two worlds of reliable process and creative exploration.

Don't be afraid of uncertainty, it may seem like procrastination, foot-dragging or even indecision, but provided you've planned to be uncertain for a while, you're likely to see more powerful ideas from your team. 

by Tasos Calantzis

You've presented nearly your entire product idea in under a half hour and three slides remain. Here are the last three rules before you finish.

Rule#10: Show that there is inherent intellectual property that can be defended.

Intellectual Property for our purposes here describes the valuable ideas that could defend your product in a competitive environment. Usually we'd be talking about robust intellectual property such as a utility patent, however that's not the only kind. Proprietary processes, economies of scale, exclusive supply deals, speed to market or your company's powerful brand name all create barriers to entry for competitors and leverage for negotiation when selling the product. All to make dealing with you the easiest, most logical option for your partners and tricky for competitors. In addition, it's taken for granted that the idea doesn't infringe on any one else's idea. That's easily and checked on Google but much more thoroughly so by your patent attorney.

Rule#11: Admit that there are unanswered questions (even doubts) about the product idea.

Of the roughly 30,000 new product introduced by the consumer packaged goods industry every year, 70% to 90% will not be in the market after 12 months. Clearly, there is no such thing as a "sure thing" in this business. You gain credibility if you acknowledge this. You may have unanswered questions about practicalities like production or selling price issues. They could also relate to intangibles like the product's likelihood of attracting investment. Telling potential partners your doubts encourages them to think of solutions together with you.

Rule#12: Demonstrate that this could form a growing business.

Product ideas that have the potential for expansion into a range of products or an entire new business have the edge on one-hit wonders. After the realism of the previous rule, this is the opportunity to show some optimism about the potential beyond this idea. The previous slides should have answered the important business questions, this one reminds everyone why they were worth asking in the first place.

By now you've realized that this series is not perfect and should actually have been called "A Pretty Good Product Pitch". Nonetheless, these 12 rules are a fast way to summarize the key facts that decision makers need to evaluate a product idea. They're also not a bad way to sort out your own thoughts about that hit product you have in mind. And to make sure your next product pitch ends in success.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

Within a large design group you are likely to encounter two distinguishing career goals: designers who want to manage others and designers who don't. As a result, it makes sense for the organizational structure of the group to support the career goals of both individual contributors and managers.
[...]
In both cases, the opportunities may exist beyond the design organization. Product Leads may opt to pursue more direct product ownership by absorbing business responsibilities and becoming business/product owners in the Product Management organization. Strategic Designers may instead expand their skills to include new business growth and move into Product or Corporate Strategy groups. The diagram below illustrates these potential growth paths as well as those found within the design group (red lines).

Read the full post accompanying this growth chart here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

In Design Group Organization I outlined the structural relationship between Product Leads (designers responsible for a specific business unit's product designs) and Strategic Designers (designers who lead the integration of corporate strategy and product concepts) within a large design team. In this organizational model, Product Leads and Strategic Designers often work on the same product but in different roles and at varying capacities.

During the ideation phase of a new product, the Strategic Designer is heavily involved. They work with key business stakeholders and corporate or product strategy teams to illustrate a vision of success through product concepts. They use the power of narrative and visualization to collaboratively develop a product vision that corporate stakeholders ultimately sign-off on.

During this process, the Product Lead is involved but does not need to absorb the overhead of the strategy development process. As a result, they remain able to direct the efforts of their design team on existing products for which they remain responsible. The Strategic Designer is handling most of the hands-on work and meetings for the new product.

As the ideation phase moves closer to implementation the Product Lead becomes more involved. They begin to work closely with the Strategic Designer on more detailed information architecture and interaction design concepts. Gradually this process generates a complete design spec for the new product. During this period, the Strategic Designer's involvement lessens as the Product Lead takes on ownership of the product.

Read the full post here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

It's hard to work in a large design team without getting at least somewhat involved in how the group is organized. During my time within such teams, I've been a part of many discussions and iterations of different organization models.

From these experiences, I've developed a model that seems to be able to sustain a large amount of distinct project work and simultaneously support the diversity of the designers within the team.

The model is under laid by the fact that in addition to different skill-levels, designers also have unique strengths and interests in particular types of design work. In particular: product design, strategic design, and design management.

Read the rest of the explanatory text that accompanies this diagram here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

Based on the previous conversation with Don Norman, author Trenouth then spoke to Craig Vogel about his thoughts on the subject:

Author of "Breakthrough Products", former IDSA president, and Director of Center for Design Research and Innovation, Craig Vogel shared his thoughts on activity-centered design and personas.

Experience design and activity design are the same. But knowing a person's preferences is also important because a functional solution should be complimented with lifestyle attributes.

Norman is a psychologist and not a designer. His focus is on human activity which is fine. I think there is more to products than [just the] action analysis but it is an essential component.

So according to Vogel a study of activity while necessary, is insufficient. Norman says that a study of activity is not only necessary and sufficient, but it is potentially dangerous to look beyond activity as this could prove distracting, resulting in poorer product designs.

In the integrated new product development process outlined in "Breakthrough Products" Vogel says that good product design results in products that are useful, usable and desirable. Norman is a social scientist. As such his professional bias is toward measurability and hence activity-centered design. Usability is easily measured, while utility and desirability are not.

Norman's concern is valid though. Human-centered design and tools like personas can often find themselves distracted by matters irrelevant to the design. Vogel's respose is that the danger is in untrained implementation, and that a human-centered perspective and tools like personas are incredibly valuable in delivering products that are more useful, usable and desirable.

John Trenouth has a masters in design from Carnegie Mellon University and over a decade of experience designing interactive products and systems in both telecommunications and healthcare. Currently he blogs at niblettes and runs a boutique design firm Spire Innovation specializing in product innovation and design research.

If you've made it this far into your product pitch without everyone glazing over, you're probably going to get to finish your presentation. So now you can relax and give a bit of background information before delivering the most important bit of information; the product's revenue potential.

Rule#7: Describe the thinking behind the product.

You might want to head off some time-consuming and arduous cross-questioning by describing what lines of thinking you've discarded in the past. Of course then you'd have to say why have you've chosen your current approach. It's not necessary to go into detail but the people listening to you need to be able to make their own minds up about whether your idea has been tackled in the most promising way.

Rule#8: Explain what potential customers think of the product.

If the budget allows good qualitative research, commission it by all means. If not, a good indication of the product's likely appeal can be obtained with a simple questionnaire. It's critical that no-one closely involved with the project be sent to gather this research. They're likely to sell the idea, however tacitly, to the interviewees. This kind of research doesn't need hundreds of respondents. Usually as few as 20 or 30 properly filtered respondents will give a good idea of whether the product has the right appeal or not. The filter to be applied is simply the core user description from Rule#3.

Without going into the psychology of the interview situation, there are at least three points to note. First, the object is to understand whether the person sees any valuable, rare benefit in this product that they would actually pay for. Second, dead end questions (for example yes/no questions) are much less helpful than open questions that don't lead the witness and allow them to express their opinion. This would include, for example, asking whether they see any difference between this and other similar products. Finally, the most important question is going to be something like "Why wouldn't you buy this product?". This is to discover whether there are any hurdles to this person adopting this product. People overwhelmingly prefer the status quo. Almost every new product has to displace some existing product or preconception in your customer's life or face utter failure. This is a good place to find out whether your product has enough appeal to do that.

Rule#9: Estimate the potential revenue of the product.

As a project develops, sophisticated financial analysis may become necessary but, like all of these rules, the idea is to arrive at a realistic guess early on. Working on a scrap of paper or a quick spreadsheet, what is your best estimate of the retail revenue of the product over time? What key assumptions are you making about the size of the core market? Awareness levels? Distribution coverage? Sustained market share? Price? Repurchase rates and repurchase cycles? In other words, nothing that the census bureau and a bit of web surfing can't turn up.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

Jonathan Ive, CBE, has been extensively covered by BusinessWeek in the September 25th issue. The lead article is an indepth well written look at the design process at Apple followed by the highly reserved Ive and his team. What are the key things about this team at Apple?

They're close-knit and self supportive.

It's a team that has worked in idyllic comfort for many years. Some designers were at the company long before Ive arrived in 1992. They rarely attend industry events or awards ceremonies. It's as though they don't require outside recognition because there isn't any higher authority on design excellence than each other, and because sharing too much information only risks helping others close the gap. [...] "Its good old-fashioned camaraderie -- everyone with the same aim, no egos involved," says British fashion designer Paul Smith, a friend since the late 1990s when Ive sent him a new iMac. "They have lots of dinners together, take lots of field trips. And they've turned these gray frumpy objects called computers into desirable pieces of sculpture you'd want even if you didn't use them.

They're global bringing numerous cultures to the creative table.

And they personally reflect the design sensibilities of Apple's products -- casually chic, elitist and with a definite Euro bent. The team, made up of thirty- and fortysomethings, has a definite international flair. Members include not only the British Ive but also New Zealander Danny Coster, Italian Daniele De Iuliis, and German Rico Zörkendörfer.

They're important - to the company and are treated as such.

Most of Ive's team live in San Francisco, and rumor has it that the starting salary for the group is around $200,000, some 50% above the industry average. They work together in a large open studio with little personal space but great privacy. Many Apple employees aren't allowed in, for fear they'd catch a glimpse of some upcoming product. A massive sound system pumps up the music. Ive invests his design dollars in state-of-the-art prototyping equipment, not large numbers of people. And his design process revolves around intense iteration -- making and remaking models to visualize new concepts. [...] Ive's team at Apple isn't the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations. They work closely and intensely with engineers, marketers, and even outside manufacturing contractors in Asia who actually build the products. Rather than being simple stylists, they're leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes. The design group was able to figure out how to put a layer of clear plastic over the white or black core of an iPod, giving it a tremendous depth of texture, and still be able to build each unit in just seconds.

Read the rest for a peek into the mind of the man behind the iPod. Or take a look at this slideshow of his work. In fact, go figure out the details of why you really love the iPod.

Andrew Zolli recently wrote in his piece in BusinessWeek,

And eventually, corporate managers will master these skills, at which point every consumer product will be permanently dipped in white acrylic, come with an ergonomic fly wheel, and embody a whimsical anthropomorphic cuteness.

Then what? To find the next deep wellsprings of innovation, you have to learn to listen to "weak signals"-fringe ideas today that will be common wisdom tomorrow.

He identifies three key areas as fringe ideas for innovation - 'ecology', 'gaming' and 'social networking'. One could also view these as emerging markets, that is, those that can be defined as emerging opportunity areas for innovation. Then, instead of the run of the mill understanding that emerging markets are countries or nations, lets look at them from the socioeconomic and geopolitical point of view. Now, we have 5 emerging markets:-

1. Geographic
Here is where BRIC, ASEAN, Mercosul et al get covered - the emerging markets of India, China, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt etc

2. Gaming and virtual worlds
This is an emerging market in its own right, witness only the amount of business being done on Second Life. Does it also include stuff like all the brand placement in "Talladega Nights" etc?

3. Social networking or "my life online"
This is the sweet spot where companies like Skype, Typepad and Google perceive as emerging markets, among others.

4. Sustainability
There is probably a better word for this emerging market, but ecology, the environment, global warming, climate change and resource contraints lead to the emergence of a market for 'green' products, services and messages.

5. Social development/ bottom of the pyramid
Dominic Basulto over at the BusinessInnovationInsider blog has an excellent summary of CK Prahalad's latest look at the opportunities in this space. Here is a snippet on innovating for this market,

Prahalad outlines the four conditions that must be present for similar types of breakthrough innovations to occur:

(1) The innovation must result in a product or service of world-class quality;

(2) The innovation must achieve a significant price reduction - at least 90% off the cost of a comparable product or service in the West;

(3) The innovation must be scalable: It must be able to be produced, marketed, and used in many locales and circumstances;

(4) The innovation must be affordable at the bottom of the economic pyramid, reaching people with the lowest levels of income in any given society.

And finally, while it may or may not be an emerging market in its own right, demographic changes in the western world point towards the 'greying' population, a segment that requires significant design and development insights in healthcare and lifestyle products.

"You dominate in one market, does that help you dominate in another?"

Wal-Mart's recent problems in Germany and the subsequent analysis uncovers some of the pitfalls that face market leaders when they choose to cross cultural borders. The common theme is that if you do not already possess an 'iconic' brand - Starbucks or Apple are the common examples - you must adapt to the indigenous culture. And this applies across the board from your business model, marketing strategy and product mix to choosing to follow HR practices from your home culture or local culture. While none would like to acknowledge that their brand may not be considered as iconic as Starbucks' or Apple's, here are 5 common mistakes companies make when structuring a global brand strategy.

1. Interpret, don't translate
2. Value is contextual
3. Playing follow the leader
4. Making assumptions
5. Ineffectual leadership

Download the full article [PDF] from ReBrand here.

Your product pitch isn't going well and the reason is suddenly clear. No-one else thinks the idea is much good. If only the clock could be turned back and an extra week spliced in, then this could all have gone so much better. Or could it? Here's the checklist you'd have needed; filled with the 12 essential things you already knew but somehow forgot this time.

Rule#1: Explain the usefulness of the idea in one sentence

Any aspiring moviemaker, salesperson, social networker or evangelist knows that you have to explain your killer concept in 30 seconds if you want anyone to listen. Yes, the old elevator pitch. It doesn't hurt to relate it to what your listener already knows too. There's going to be a hiccup if you've got to explain particle physics before they get it. Before your audience starts getting ideas about how close this thing is to reality, BJ Fogg recommends explaining how long you've been working on this right up front; to create a realistic expectation.

Rule#2: Show that the product is dramatically better than current products.

According to Doug Hall, it is critical to explain the one or two most important benefits of your product. Surprisingly, mentioning any further benefits actually decreases your chance of success. That needs to be immediately followed by two supporting arguments. Firstly, why should anyone believe that you can deliver those benefits and secondly what is the most dramatic, meaningful difference between this and other products?

Rule#3: Understand exactly who will buy the product.

Google probably knows more about you than your own government by now, so it follows that you could find out quite a bit about the exact kind of person most likely to buy your product. If that doesn't work you could always buy some research. What about their lifestyle drives their burning desire for your product? Very often, you'll learn more from observing the way people feel about things than how they are able to articulate those feelings. What about them will cause them to perceive your product as really quite a lot better than alternatives? The sagest advice is that if everybody is a core user, nobody is a core user. It is extremely unlikely that your product will make dramatic difference to everybody, all the time.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

A recent five part Design Directory article penned by Tasos Calantzis was written to bring insight as to how design can be integrated into the realm of business. More to the point, the lead-in suggests that design's primary corporate challenge is to gain equal billing alongside traditional C-level functions. It was also suggested that this thinking might ruffle some feathers. It is without a doubt that this was one of the more prophetic statements made within the article.

Throughout the article there are several terms thrown about in a shotgun fashion. Included are terms like design thinking, design of product systems, and the commoditization of design. All of which are hot button topics and very quickly polarize discussions when it comes to how design should be implemented in a corporate environment. 

The article alludes to the idea that designers can't forget that their core competency is product styling. One might infer from this that Tasos believes that designers need to realize that the real value of design is styling. It can be summed up by the quote:

"The most familiar image of design is as a creator of style. In fact despite the many other meaningful things that design can do, it could be argued that infusing products with designer style is the core competence of design."

If one truly believes that the design industry is becoming a corporate commodity it is easily argued that it is because a designer is thought of as "stylist" by the corporate world. Throw a million design monkeys into a room with a million crayons and eventually you will end up with a rendering of the next "iPod Killer". 

There is no doubt that good styling can help make a product a hit. It needs to be made clear that what makes for a long lasting, timeless product that people can't imagine their lives without is a product that has been thought of in context of its whole system. At the very least someone that truly understands the idea of design thinking should be leading that charge. Low hanging fruit examples would be products such as the Eames Chair, or more contemporary products like the iPod. Products such as these didn't get designed believing styling was the core competency of the process. It was the designer's understanding of the experience of sitting in a comfortable chair reading a book, or having their music collection become something that is easily extensible and carried with them in their pocket. On the contrary, one could argue that companies like Sony have great styling. Their products are beautifully fashioned, but they seem yet to grasp (or arguably have forgotten) the holistic system of design.

Designing Product Systems is a term that came out in this article that requires more discussion. Designing product systems is a philosophy on which the design industry can hang their hat. Company's like IDEO have laid the foundation for this type of thinking while companies like OneOak Design (Developers of Product Systems) have recently been founded on the principle of designing for product systems. Designing product systems stems from a basic belief that design is integral to the development of any product.

A colleague once described design as the spearhead of the product development process. However, designers need to be more than the head of the spear, for that implies that design is far too free to be pointed in whichever direction the wielder wants in the heat of battle. A designer needs to be able to assimilate information from virtually every single business discipline in order to be successful in the process. Corporations that believe that design is a "need to know" player in the process will never be able to realize the impact design can have on their product line.

Mr. Calantzis gets design. One could even go as far as agreeing that he understands design thinking. Walking away from his article(s) believing that his voice is one that will be carrying design into the bored rooms of the corporate world is a bit of a stretch. The article had a bit too much of a feeling of resignation to the status quo. Too much of a feeling that design SHOULD blend into the noise. He said:

"Using design to improve the way things look and work may be an old fashioned notion but it served industry well for the whole of the last century and it remains one of the things that designers do best."

Maintaining that what designers do best is styling is keeping the industry in the 20^th Century. Design is part of a larger holistic process. Design is a complex industry that is as difficult to describe as "Engineering" or the color black. A true design thinker uses their skill of styling as one of the many tools in the chest to realize the conversion of disciplines. One could argue that there is no other industry that that must listen and translate information from virtually every other discipline in the building. Without understanding the market, the product fails. Without understanding the Engineering behind the product, you can't properly style the product. Without understanding the manufacturing process one can very quickly design in more problems and costs downstream that will completely strangle the products success.

It is the corporations that understand that designing a product as part of a complex system that are ushering in the next wave of products that tap into the social fabric of human nature. Design is growing up and trading in its styling badge for one that is more representative of the growing responsibility of design in the corporate environment. Resigning to being a stylist is not doing the industry and the products it represents justice.

Jon Winebrenner is the industrial design partner in the Vancouver, BC design firm OneOak Design. For the five years prior to starting OneOak Design Jon worked as lead Industrial Designer for Sierra Wireless on the now defunct Voq Smartphone program. It is during this time working for Sierra Wireless that he had the opportunity to work along side companies like Ziba Design, fuseproject, and RKS Design. Between being a fly on the wall while working with these companies and seeing a full Smartphone development process fail from the inside out, Jon was allowed to learn to believe in the Design for Product Systems philosophy.

Part of the fuzziness in defining what design actually is, is due to old definitions having outlived their usefulness. Some businesses  have come to realize that design is much more than making things look pretty. In many cases a link can be found between how effectively design is used in an organization and the overall success of that organization.

A short list of companies who are undisputed industry leaders could include Nike, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, Nokia , Toyota and Samsung. In each case, success can be attributed to other factors but the influence of design has been integral. 

These are companies who aim to be the absolute leaders in their industries; unique and far ahead of their competitors. They have discovered that the tactical ability of solving business problems with design creates successes that can now be knitted together with the emerging culture of innovation to create a strategic tool. For these leaders, design has become integrated into the business as a C-level function.

For companies like this, one finds a hierarchy of design thinking. Firstly a robust design process produces individual products which are carefully considered relative to their competitors. More than that, these products are designed in response to latent user needs and therefore ahead of current thinking. They form part of well-designed product systems which solve business problems. Finally, design thinking is applied in ten areas of business, transforming the organization.

It is this last layer of design thinking that contains the true advantage. Design is not an activity that is owned by designers. It is merely a profitable use of creativity. It can be learnt and applied by anyone in the organization. This is part of it's power. Used correctly, design thinking can give any person in the organization a new ability to create dramatically increased value; just like efficiency, quality and customer focus have been able to.

Design has the ability to create products and experiences that have never existed before. When people all over the organization are thinking in this way, the true originality of their ideas cannot be predicted. Competitors can only follow because the organization is continuously disrupting the field.

Design is not the only way of disrupting the field. Methods like Six Sigma, the Toyota Way and the Theory of Constraints also make the same claim. The difference is that these are all process improvement methods whereas design applies innovation to products and experiences. In fact a good design consultancy will use these and other methods as tools in creating disruptive innovation through design.

Design has a great ability to be used in collaboration with other fields of expertise. That's why it works so well with branding, advertising, engineering and architecture and other fields; to the point that it sometimes becomes indistinguishable from them.

Thanks to Jess McMullin for producing the original template on which this series is based and for giving his permission to use it.

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Hybrid Organizations as a Strategy for Supporting New Product Development is the title of a research paper by Alison Rieple, Adrian Haberberg, and Jon Gander of the University of Westminster.

A summary of their findings:

This paper focuses on strategic alliances, in which one firm (normally a large, multi-product corporation) obtains critical product-development resources, such as design or technological know-how, from an independent firm (normally a smaller and more specialized design consultancy or a technology developer). The two firms develop a fairly close relationship - perhaps only for the period of a specific assignment, but often over a longer period spanning several projects. These hybrid relationships are governed through informal means, such as unwritten agreements between key individuals, as much as through the more usual form of legal contracts.

Crucial to the success of a hybrid are "boundary-spanners." These are members of the partner organizations who are able to move freely within both, translating the requirements of each into language and behavior that is acceptable to, and understandable by, the other. Trust between the senior managers who set up a hybrid in the first place, and the boundary spanners who maintain the relationship subsequently, is a critical factor. Trust lowers cost and raises productivity. Cooperation increases under conditions of trust, because with trust such costly barriers as formal contracts and detailed monitoring can be removed. The resulting less-formal specifications can also allow the parties to respond more rapidly to any changes in circumstances.

Hybrids protect the smaller firm from the stifling effects of the larger firm, while allowing its creative knowledge to be exploited. This happens through what is, in effect, a "semi-permeable membrane" in which certain features are blocked from movement while others are transferred.

Boundary-spanners, or bridgers, as they are sometimes described, are people who move between both organizations, translating the norms of each into language and behavior that are acceptable to, and understandable by, the other. There is almost no research on the role that boundary-spanners have in hybrid organizational structures, and yet they are likely to be one of the most important factors in the success of those structures. After all, new product development is a social-, collaborative-, and interaction- intensive process involving experimentation and negotiation over the lifecycle of the new product's evolving form, bringing together knowledge, expertise, and technologies from different sources into a whole. Learning involves the negotiated resolution of constraints and generates new knowledge, which may then be embedded in the design of new technologies, products, or processes. Thus boundary-spanners need to be skilled first of all in the nuances of creating a new product.

A perfect example of successful boundary spanners can be found in an article written by Tom Mulhern and Dave Lathrop, of Conifer Research and Steelcase Inc., respectively. Their article,"Building and Tending Bridges: Rethinking How Consultants Support Change," detailed the way in which design consultant Conifer Research used its methodological expertise in furniture and workspace design to improve Steelcase's product innovation and organizational performance. Although Mulhern and Lathrop had not worked together before, they had "worked around each other" and knew a lot of the same people. They were both part of an established network of relationships and reputation, and this is likely to have facilitated the development of trust between the two organizational boundary-spanners.

Mulhern and Lathrop also epitomize the internal boundary-spanner role. Steelcase had previously gone out of its way to seek external perspectives from a "host of brilliant, innovative, but generally outside resources, with the outcome generally packaged as a 'deliverable.'" But in order to achieve the impact they sought, Mulhern and Lathrop recognized that their job would be to inspire insiders to take up the cause. They described this process as developing "experience bridges." The bridges they established linked people, information, and process and thereby "dramatically accelerated" progress through the development of shared understanding.

In conclusion, it seems as though a strategic alliance between a large corporation and a small creative house works effectively for product innovation, with the role of the boundary spanner being crucial to the success of this approach.

Using design to improve the way things look and work may be an old fashioned notion but it served industry well for the whole of the last century and it remains one of the things that designers do best.

In this century, however, more is being asked of design. And faced with new threats, designers are happily obliging. It turns out that design thinking is well suited to solving all sorts of business problems. Organizations looking for a steadier advantage than the usual tit-for-tat style of competing have turned, amongst other things, to design.

The question has been whether products themselves could open up new markets, to actually create new opportunities instead of being created to fill opportunities. In order to do that, this type of organization has had to start to figure out how to think ahead of the field instead of reacting to the moves of competitors. It's probably true that design's main advantage over other types of business consulting is it's ability to understand people's needs and meet them in practical and desirable ways. To do this, designers use ethnographic research to observe real people in real situations. As humans, our actions betray needs that are simply too obvious to mention. Very often the way customers behave points out unexplored day-to-day problem areas. This is where an astute team could make life much richer for a customer. 

This results in the ability to spot opportunities for the business before competitors do.

That's not to say that design could supplant other types of business problem solving, just that design could be thought of as a permanent, legitimate business function. This has propelled design's day-to-day role from thinking about individual products to thinking about product systems.

By this description, solving business problems using design starts to look like a whole lot of wrenching change. That impression isn't diminished by the term "culture of innovation" which gets thrown around as a new aspirational goal. In reality though, innovation is not just for the guys in lab coats and creativity can be learnt. Businesses find that workers at the coal face are full of ideas of how to make better use of their time and effort as well as pleasing customers. Sometimes all that's required is a good design team to guide the process.

That process starts by linking the tactical hits that are possible through ordinary form and function design. These small successes together with customer understanding and a growing ability to solve problems creatively allow the organization to move faster with new ideas.

All of which makes for a distinct advantage. However this does not yet add up to leadership in an industry. For that, design needs to be a strategic tool.

Next: Leadership

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

From Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton's new book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense comes this concise encapsulation of design thinking,

Design thinking is one of enlightened trial and error wherein one observes the world, identifies the patterns of behaviour, generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats the process, and keeps on refining.

From this starting point then, lets look at each word in turn, from the point of view of putting it into practice.

Design is fundamentally a value system, a set of principles, that is then manifested in tangible form.

Conventionally, this has been known as setting the design criteria. However, rather than specification guidelines, as used in engineering, if one were to change metrics and numbers into values or emotional responses, one could, in fact, create a method for building and managing a brand.

For example, once you are able to identify your core value proposition, what sets you apart from the rest - it doesn't even have to be only your competition or the industry in which in you belong, but in totality - you can then use those characteristics to set your criteria.

Here is way that the persona or story, once identified, translates into the 'design criteria' or the specification document i.e. the PRD. However, when you take this one step further, into the perceptual or intangible, you can use the same qualities, identified by the persona or story, to articulate the essence of your brand.

Once a picture of this hypothetical brand is captured, to a degree, by this snapshot, every element that supports it, is held up and measured against one question only. Does this activity, action, message or product, work towards maintaining the integrity of the big picture brand personality? Or does it set up a cognitive dissonance in the customer's mind because it breaks away from the existing perceptual image of the company or brand?

This then becomes the only feedback necessary in guiding the process of building the brand, product design, marketing strategy, or even corporate planning. Are we being true to ourselves? Are we consistent with our brand promise? Are we keeping the faith?

And as you can see, this process of do, check, tweak, redo, maps on to the definition of design thinking given in bold above and also the basic user centered design process.

Design thinking is nothing more than the application of the user centred design process to all and any business activity, rather than just the creation of tangible products.

One of the recurring patterns of late is how mobile phones - not just the handset, but the system as a whole, have become drivers of innovation in emerging economies.

For those who have no fixed address, a phone in their pocket provides a connection to the rest of the world, and a means to be reached. The story of Jeevanlal Pitodia, the pavement dwelling vegetable seller without a fixed shop or stall triggered this thought. Neelakantan's observations only fueled them - whether it was the cab driver or the junk seller.

For all of them and more, the phone was more than just a device with which to place a call. It's an instant office, a receptionist who'll take messages, an inbox where orders can be placed, the equivalent of an email address or website, and most important, for all micro entreprenuers, a means for new clients to reach them.

Not just in India or China; this phenomena of the handphone - freed from the shackles of state sponsored infrastructure required for landlines in the majority of these developing nations - has demonstrated its effect in improving the micro economy and providing opportunities for the entreprenuerially minded in hitherto backward regions around the world.

Larry Keeley talks about post industrial platforms, philosophies such as self expression, political freedom, enlightenment and mastery - he said that these were the foundations on which successful businesses of the future would be built. One can see them all, in one form or the another, in the simple concept of one very small, but very powerful device.

If only designing successful new products was always as easy as making the new one work better than anything before it. Every product manager knows that it's not - but try telling that to your designers! Their training is in making things look and work better. What your designers would call incremental functional improvement is one part of creating successful design, but it's not enough to ensure success. That's why adding blades to razors has been such a game of diminishing returns.

Clearly there are good reasons to compete by making something that works better than any competitor. This is the beginning of innovation. But that still doesn't take us out of 5 blade razor territory. The improvement must be much bigger than that.  It's important to actually make something easier or more effective for the customer in a way that they can somehow measure.  And when they measure it, it must be dramatically different. As Doug Hall and his peers point out, a big reason why many products fail is the ordinary person's resistance to change. This means that a new design has to be an extraordinary improvement over previous designs before someone is persuaded to give it a try. The temptation to take a leading product and make the new one 10% better is a well-documented way to fail with new products.

The way that companies usually go about innovating is by studying other successful products (especially competing products) and trying to improve on them. This is both the strength and weakness of functional improvement. On the one hand, improved function can clearly give a new product an advantage, but because the new product is based on previous products, it's also easy to copy.

This means that there is seldom a long term advantage to functional improvement and success is often hit and miss. This focus only on single products instead of the deeper thinking that can produce a whole system of innovative ideas, hampers longer term success.

Like adding style to products, adding extra benefits by innovating is not normally costly compared to the potential for success that it offers. It can be quite an efficient way of using existing resources to improve sales. You don't have to be 3M, HP or Samsung to have innovation. It's just a way of thinking that can be learnt. Innovation is simply a clever idea that has been successfully commercialized. Any company can do it  by training its people to think like, well, designers. 

But developing people's creative abilities is still not an asset that can give a company a long term edge. It's a great start because it creates the raw material for the reinvention which every company must have to succeed, but to win in the long term a culture of innovation is needed.

Next: Solving Business Problems

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributorTasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Chris Conley was in town last week for a short presentation he made on the behalf of the IIT Institute of Design. DD went to find out more about the work he's doing at his product development firm, GravityTank.

DesignDirectory: Chris, your bio says "At Gravity Tank he leads the development of Integrated DefinitionTM, a way of working that leverages the core competencies of design to enable cross-functional client teams to define new product and service innovations." What exactly does this mean?

Chris Conley: Well, let me start by explaining why clients come to us and perhaps that will lead to some clarity about GravityTank's offer and what we do there. There are three key reasons companies approach us:-

1. When they're looking for new market opportunities - usually within their existing product line or new product categories areas to explore. They know the market opportunity they want to target, such as "baby boomers" or "retail channels" but need help to define the product or product category that would allow them to take advantage of this opportunity.

2. New product or service definition - this kind of program results in a unique document describing what products or services should be developed and why. It provides the essential information, the 'show and tell' that neither the traditional technical specifications documents nor marketing's MRD provide. We deliver a clear design direction that our clients can then take to their favourite industrial design studio for the final design and development work. It's much more than a design brief as it includes strategy elements, related business numbers as well as platform considerations and design criteria to shape the final form.

3. Business challenges - This is the fuzziest of the 'fuzzy front end', when a business is facing a very specific challenge, but doesn't really know why and want us to take look not only at their products and services but their business system to see what can be tweaked.

DD: So your final deliverable is not the design of the product but a waymarker towards that design? It sounds like it's more tangible than the 'blue sky' innovation and brainstorming popular today and yet not the deliverable of an industrial design studio. Yet you prototype, in fact, you're a big proponent of rapid prototyping and it's benefits. How does that fit in with what you do?

CC: I'm always amazed at how hard it is to convey that we use design and prototyping to help figure out what to go and design. Business people use spreadsheets to model a potential business early in the process. But they are not the same folks that implement the actual business system that builds and launches the business in the market. But in design, it is hard for people to understand that while you may not be doing the final production design, design and prototypes are essential to figuring it out what to pursue.

DD: Those are words to remember, indeed. Thank you, Chris.

The most familiar image of design is as a creator of style. In fact despite the many other meaningful things that design can do, it could be argued that infusing products with designer style is the core competence of design. So we enter a discussion about beauty and the value of beauty.

The company that decides to use design to differentiate itself is betting that improving its style is a way of attracting customers. There's an interesting difference in approach to design between different cultures. The yardstick that businesses use to measure good design in the USA is usually improved sales. This is pragmatic and measurable. In Europe, however weight is given to abstract elements of design(the kind art students would talk about; proportion, line, color and so on) which determine whether a particular design has been well executed or not. Ordinary Europeans, and therefore businesspeople more frequently recognize these elements intuitively and are able to form an opinion on a design. This is perhaps why European products have certain characteristic styles that are easy to identify.  

It has been said that other countries like Japan blend the two approaches. This understanding of how design style is perceived is important when deciding when design can be exported across borders successfully.

In product design, improved style means making products look stylish and cool. However there are several layers to this 'coolness' as Diego Rodriguez so eloquently explains. To artists, designers and all aesthetes, creating beauty is in itself valuable. Businesses in America sometimes need to be convinced of that, usually when customers with the same sensibilities react to the beauty by buying it.

In the world of designers, few are able to marry the high art of original, iconic style with the depth of  technical and commercial abilities needed to succeed with complex consumer products. As successful as Michael Graves has been working together with Target designing coat hooks and wall clocks, his range of consumer electronics was a failure. Even Yves Behar of Fuseproject, who has an apparently technically competent portfolio, commented in a revealing interview that the $100 laptop project is much more difficult for his studio than their regular work designing slick lifestyle products.

There is a downside to designer style. If style is the only reason for using design, the gain turns out to be short term. Style is easy to copy (just ask Alessi)and the style focus tends to be on one product at a time because the company is looking for quick easy successes by applying style. Since the reward is short lived, it's prudent to allocate a minimum of resources to developing style as a differentiating factor. Hence the company employing design only for it's style potential is always either playing catch up or jumping ahead only to fall quickly behind again.

In this situation, similar to the company which doesn't yet use design for style, cost is the major weapon. Improved style cannot sufficiently differentiate products and services without highly competitive costs to attract customers. Attractive or distinctive style does offer a business a significant advantage over competitors whose style is less so. It places the company near the head of the pack and can sometimes stop commoditization and purely cost-driven competition.

Fortunately, style is closely followed in the minds of businesspeople by another attribute of design which adds benefits which make it harder for competitors to follow.

Next: Improving Function

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributorTasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Much of the discussion about the role of design in companies is clouded by jargon and designer up selling. Most designers will tell you with a straight face that design is the most important factor for any business, which is obviously just not true. There's a more realistic battle for designers selling their services to corporations. That is to get design equal billing alongside the traditional C-level functions.

Design evangelists may be aghast at such a statement but it is possible that design is just not a real requirement for some companies. For example, a company may simply have much more pressing operational problems than design. For design to be effective, quality and cost must be under control, engineering, inventory and supply chain must be efficient and marketing and sales must be in working order. Design may also be considered fundamental to a company's functioning but it may simply not be the priority yet.

A company could be functioning effectively but be working in a utterly commoditized area. Should the manufacturer of the yellow triangles that cleaning staff around the world use to warn of slippery floors be looking for a design edge? There's no doubt that the most moribund industry (coffins anyone?) can be attacked with design. Indeed these are often the juiciest targets for an ambitious company daring to redefine an industry. The question is whether this is a sure-fire requirement for every dull, worthy market.

On the far end of the spectrum, highly sophisticated companies working in high technology areas could also see design as a less than strategic tool. Design thinker Steve Portigal noted the irony of Flextronics, the $18bn global ODM, being voted one of the Wired 40 based on it's design ambitions. In fact Flextronics caused a little seismic event amongst designers a few years ago when then CEO, Michael Marks announced to the world that design had become a commodity and was no longer a strategic advantage. This was shortly after the acquisition of Frog, the celebrated boutique shop and was followed by the shedding of Frog together with some other non-core businesses.  Only time will tell how prophetic Mark's words turn out to be.

In the case of defensible intellectual property devoid of design, the candidates are rare who can build a company on that basis as opposed to a single product. Most end up like Polaroid. There are also cases where some other advantage; massive scale, superior reach, hyper vertical integration and so on, confers an advantage that design simply can't match. However,  these advantages boil down to cost.

And cost is where the discussion winds up. For without design the reliable tools of quality and efficiency strive to lower the price without any hope of raising it sustainably. So there may be exceptions but for most companies another tool is required; one that can break the zero-sum game of cost-driven competition.

Next: Improving Style

The Power of Design by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis is a series in 5 parts looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Thomas Friedman articulates this fascinating list of the seven categories of skills he's identified that the global workplace will need as it evolves and changes. From the exclusive interview at YaleGlobal,

One is great collaborators. When so many more things are going to be made in global supply chains, the ability to be a great collaborator, to be able to work cross-culturally and multinationally,there's going to be a huge number of jobs around managing and coordinating these global supply chains.

Second are great leveragers, people who can leverage technology, so one person can do the job of twenty. Rather than competing with India or China, where twenty people might do the job of one, you make up for the labor cost by leveraging technology.

Third are great explainers. Boy, there's going to be a whole industry in explaining. Because there's enormous complexity out there, so whether you're a teacher, a manager, a journalist, the ability to explain this complexity is going be in huge demand.

Fourth, I would call great localizers. Great localizers are people who can localize the  global. What does that mean? They can take the power of this global platform and turn it into a local business. Now that's everything from the eBay entrepreneur, [...] to the garage owner in New Haven, who goes online one day and says to his partner, "Hey Bill, did you see this? We can get out hubcaps for half-price from Romania at half the cost that it would take us to get them from Rochester." So they're leveraging the global platform, by localizing the global.        

Fifth, I'd say, are gonna be people who are great adapters. People who can stay one step ahead of the forces of digitization and automation. And that's going to apply to a lot of people in a lot of industries.       

Sixth would be what I would call people who are passionate personalizers. If you can bring real passion and a personal touch to any vanilla task, there's going to be a job for you in the flat world.       

Seventh I would call anything green. Nayan, anything green, and there is a job for you in the twenty-first century. Because green technology is going to be the industry of the 21st century.

In short, excellence in

• Collaboration across cultures, globally.
• Leveraging both knowledge and relationships.
• Communication (explaining complex concepts with clarity)
• Localization (understanding users?  )
• Adaptation (design thinking? tweaking of prototypes based on user feedback?)
• Passionate Personalization (Empathy?)
• Sustainability (solutions bubbling upwards?)

Global marketing is becoming more and more important along the years with the increasing trend in internationalization. Having too many choices, marketers face the challenge of determining which international markets to enter and the appropriate marketing strategies for the countries they are planning to penetrate. Here is a quick summary of information from around the web.

BRIC is a term used to refer to the combination of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

General consensus is that the term was first prominently used in the thesis of the Goldman Sachs investment bank in 2003 that the economies of the BRICs are rapidly developing and by the year 2050 will eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world. In addition, the term "BRIC" can also be used to refer to a purported trade and cooperation agreement between these countries that is said to have been signed in 2002. Finally, "BRIC" has since become a more generic marketing term to refer to these four countries, or even to newly industrialized countries in general.

Mercosur or Mercosul (Spanish: Mercado Común del Sur, Portuguese: Mercado Comum do Sul, English: Southern Common Market) is a customs union between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela, founded in 1991 by the Treaty of Asunción, which was later amended and updated by the 1994 Treaty of Ouro Preto. Its purpose is to promote free trade and the fluid movement of goods, peoples, and currency. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru have associate member status.

ASEAN The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN was established on 8 August 1967 in Bangkok by the five original Member Countries, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.  Today it includes Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. The ASEAN region has a population of about 500 million, a total area of 4.5 million square kilometers, a combined gross domestic product of US$737 billion, and a total trade of US$ 720 billion.

Emerging markets ranked by Market Size

The Economist ranked the market potential of 24 countries identified as "Emerging Markets". The Emerging Economies comprise more than half of the world's population, account for a large share of world output and have very high growth rates which means enormous market potential. They can be distinguished by the recent progress they have made in economic liberalization. Promising opportunities for trade is opening as their need for capital equipment, machinery, power transmission equipment, transportation equipment and high-technology products is substantial and is increasing rapidly.

Here are links to some information rich websites on new product strategy and development:

The New Product Development Body of Knowledge

An extensive collection of the A to Z of corporate strategy and new product development, covering basics such as Porter's Five Forces to the fuzzy front end and ideation techniques.

The Tabor Report on Product Strategy

Do you have a problem here? It is very rare that you'll perceive product strategy as the critical issue from within your company. The symptoms you'll notice are unfocused value propositions, poor press and analyst reviews, difficulty getting leads, no repeatability in sales cycles, endless pricing debates, poor sales volume, and a high degree of shelfware. You are likely to believe you have a "target market problem" or a need to "rework the go to market plan," when the problem is the product itself. For lots of psychological reasons, people outside your company will see a product issue much more clearly than you.

Product Design: One strategy for the Environment and Business

On waste from the Texas Government.

Guidelines for designers working on designs for the elderly

What is such a market looking for? In a recent study my organisation undertook with an American research corporation, the fundamental requirement of elderly people that emerged was that the product should enhance and not degrade their health. This conclusion, however does not have as easy application as might at first be thought.

New Product Introduction.

An outline of the NPI process along with a comprehensive list of tools and techniques used during the product design process.

Guide to effective product design.

Answering questions from "what is good design?" to "How do we reduce risks by prototyping?" Recommended - Briefing an Industrial Designer

LG Electronics has just won Red Dot's prestigious Design Team of the Year award with a corporate strategy of raising their image globally through the use of product design. From their design philosophy page:

Step One: The core management philosophy is the first and foremost element of their corporate strategy of embedding design as a means of raising their global brand image. In their words, "The message, which a corporate pursues such as spirits, visions, culture etc. including philosophy, should be effectively conveyed to customers for uplifting the corporate image.. Hence the management philosophy should be considered at the beginning."

Step Two: This is their formula for product identity. In their words, "PI(Product Identity) means to embody and to sustain the brand image through product design. CIPD, the process to make products' identity & uniqueness gradually for customers' recognition of brand and its value."

Step Three: How they see product identity's role in raising the overall corporate image of the company. In their words, "As an essential factor in connection between customers and company, product conveys of company to its customers. CIPD, Corporate Identity through Product Design, aims at propagation of sustaining LG's identity as well as its establishment through design activities, which will help us to gain the trust from customers."

Finally their global design organizational structure:

From the UK Design Council's new Design Factfinder site comes this interesting concept of 'design alert' businesses. Their definition from their glossary,

Design alert business

As part of our annual survey, we interviewed 1,500 businesses across the UK. From these, we identified 250 businesses that had observed a direct impact from the use of design on several business performance measures. We call these businesses 'design alert'. We went back to them with more detailed questions on their use of design and whether they could quantify the results. The bottom line benefits that design alert businesses have seen are explained in The link between design and business performance.

From the details of the research, the most outstanding factoid was this one:

Do design alert businesses employ designers at senior levels?

Half of design alert businesses have a designer at senior managerial and/or executive levels.Senior management is the most common level at which designers are found.

While the rest of the research demonstrates the increase in return on investment in design among 'design alert' businesses, nothing underscores their commitment than having designers at the seniormost positions in management.

Herman D'Hooge, innovation strategist in the User-Centered Platform Solutions Division at Intel, explains a user-centered innovation process and how your company can use it to engineer and develop innovative products. D'Hooge also gives an example of a product - China Home Learning PC - that was developed for the Chinese consumer market with this strategy.

This is from Electronics Business Online and a good read. The sections covered by this case study include:

How to foster innovation
Translate process into engineering product requirements
Case study: the China Home Learning PC

And here is the summary:

People-inspired technology innovation increases the likelihood that a product or technology being developed will meet the needs and desires of actual users. As such, it is a risk-reduction technique that starts with understanding the needs and desires of real people and continues with working through an iterative creative process of defining user experiences and then translating that into actionable technical requirements.

Although technologists can simply be handed a technical requirements specification, there is tremendous value in involving engineers and technologists throughout the design process: from user research and observation to working with the user experience developers, because it instills a deeper appreciation of the reasons for designing the product and the resultant technology requirements. Using this process almost always leads to superior technology product solutions.

Hewlett-Packard is making a name for itself as a leader in green design. From their website,

Design-for-Environment (DfE) is an engineering perspective in which the environmentally related characteristics of a product, process or facility are optimized. Together, HP's product stewards and product designers identify, prioritize and recommend environmental improvements through a company-wide DfE program. HP's DfE guidelines derive from evolving customer expectations and regulatory requirements, but they are also influenced by the personal commitment of its employees.

The Design for Environment program has three priorities:

* Energy efficiency - reduce the energy needed to manufacture and use our products
* Materials innovation - reduce the amount of materials used in our products and develop materials that have less environmental impact and more value at end-of-life
* Design for recyclability - design equipment that is easier to upgrade and/or recycle

HP's DfE guidelines recommend that its product designers consider the following:

* Place environmental stewards on every design team to identify design changes that may reduce environmental impact throughout the product's life cycle.
* Eliminate the use of polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame-retardants where applicable.
* Reduce the number and types of materials used, and standardize on the types of plastic resins used.
* Use molded-in colors and finishes instead of paint, coatings or plating whenever possible.
* Help customers use resources responsibly by minimizing the energy consumption of HP's printing, imaging and computing products.
* Increase the use of pre-and post-consumer recycled materials in product packaging.
* Minimize customer waste burdens by using fewer product or packaging materials overall.
* Design for disassembly and recyclability by implementing solutions such as the ISO 11469 plastics labeling standard, minimizing the number of fasteners and the number of tools necessary for disassembly.

By intending to use the same concept as that of the Wikipedia, the USPTO has announced their Peer to Patent Program, in order to better scrutinize new patent applications without increasing the load on their existing manpower resources. From the Daily Tech,

One of the goals of the program is to excessively scrutinize inventions while increasing certainty and stability in the patent program. To get some more information about the Peer to Patent program, please look around this website, which also includes a very extensive FAQ section. An interesting policy is the project's response on companies or individuals that may attempt to game the system:

Competition will drive more information into the process. So long as people make valid arguments as rated by their peers, their personal agenda is irrelevant. Having many participants in the process dilutes the effect of any bad apples or unconstructive participants. Within any social reputation system, norms evolve to safeguard the quality of participation and we can expect something similar here.

Certainly, there are some interesting connotations with this idea. Imagining IBM, AMD and Intel validating or invalidating each other's patents would solve dozens, if not hundreds of fringe IP law suits before they even occur.

Talking about fringe IP lawsuits, the BBC has this news snippet on Walmart seeking to protect it's use of the "Smiley Face" as a trademark in the United States. At this point, no one is quite sure who designed the ubiquitious logo.

Meanwhile, in another article, the rise of technology and the internet has resulted in branding turf wars between brands who previously shared a common name - Polo, for example.

Disputes really stepped up a gear with the advent of the internet. The use of domain names has led to turf wars between the owners of trade marks that previously had happily co-existed.

AK Designs of Bluffdale, UT, creates a new product category that fills an unmet need among customers.

Styling, innovation and affordability put AK's offerings snugly between low-tech "banana" chairs and elaborate electronic chairs, decked out with speakers and leather, that sell for up to $2,000. AK's products were attractive to mass retailers like Costco and Best Buy, among others. Gamers looking for comfort and styling could find what they needed with AK Rockers, which can cost as little as $79.99.

"They (Best Buy) thought it would be great with gamers," Warner said. "They pulled it in and it blew up. They sold so many units." Design is the key to the young company's success, he said.

"These buyers - Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, whoever it is - they recognize that's an intangible. Anyone who has the right design sense, that understands the customer, it's gold."

Best Buy, for example, has about a dozen products in various categories it wants AK to develop. They're not the only ones smitten by the company. Costco wanted AK to develop an office chair; Best Buy did likewise only a few weeks later. The AK Octane, for both gamers and office workers, was born.

"We have three main principles that have to be part of anything that goes out our door, whether it's a product or if it's product design or sales packet. It's got to be cool, it's got to be innovative and it's got to be intuitive. When you look at it, you get it. You know how to use it. It welcomes you to it. It's not something you have to figure out," Warner said.

What social developments will create new growth opportunities and/or challenges for global businesses in the future?

"In creating the Top 20, we wanted to get beyond the trend lists that are really just about the U.S. or rich countries, and think about consumers everywhere," Tom Conger, founder of Social Technologies commented. "While a trend may be more mature in one part of the world than another, many of these trends are happening in the poorest nations, as well as the richest."

The 20 trends identified, in no particular order, are:

* Cultural Flows The spread of ideas, media, products, brands and lifestyles, collectively referred to as cultural flow, to new places is increasing as the number of cultural poles rises and the world becomes more interconnected. Cultural flows are significant because they expose consumers in both developed and developing markets to new ideas, products, and ways of thinking.

* Time Pressure People around the world are feeling more pressured for time in their lives. Many consumers feel they have less time to manage mounting levels of activity, information, and choice, and the resulting accelerated pace of life. While time pressure and its effects are felt most intensely in developed countries, change in occurring most rapidly in emerging markets.

* Cultural Multipolarity The ability to produce and disseminate culture in its modern forms is rising in more places around the world. New centers of cultural power are ascending, driving the emergence of cultural multipolarity.

* Asia Rising The countries of Asia are strengthening their economic and cultural clout and boosting their prominence in the world. This is clear whether measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates, increasing scientific and technological capabilities, the growing variety of goods and services now available to Asian consumers, or simply the feeling of buzzing energy on a busy street in Bangalore, Shanghai, Bangkok.

* Media Spread More people have access to mass media than ever before. Media devices including radios, televisions, computers and mobile phones are becoming more affordable, while new broadcast media, like satellite and the Internet, are increasing choices and accessibility.

* Social Freedom The range of personal, political and economic options open to individuals is growing around the world. Propelled by political change, economic growth, and information flows, social freedom is expanding the range of choices available to consumers and allowing individualism to spread.

* Transparency No, this isn't Sarbanes Oxley, or at least not entirely. The increasing ability to gather, store, and share information is making it easier to know about people, products, companies, and governments, propelling the world towards transparency. Driving factors include information technology, the spread of media, social freedom, and rising incomes and education levels.

* Monetization Consumers are increasingly substituting purchased products, devices, and services for labor and time. As more people equate time with money, many are choosing monetized goods and services - from packaged flour to washing machines to dog-walking services - that offer convenience and time savings.

* Rising Mobility People are upgrading their mobility, enabling them to move farther and faster than before. Rising mobility in emerging markets will be transformational, impacting lifestyles, and opening up new areas of demand for mobility-related goods and services.

* Migration Over the next few decades, international and internal migration will continue at high levels, altering both the lives of people moving and the societies and regions receiving them. This migration will affect language, social values, food, entertainment, and many other aspects of daily life.

* Networked World Networked information devices are spreading, enabling new connections between people, organizations, and objects and allowing more information to travel faster. Already, 15 percent of the 6.4 billion people on the planet have some form of direct Internet access, and the number with access to fixed and mobile phone networks is higher still, at over 2 billion. The networked world trend is having profound impacts, which are likely to accelerate.

* Consumerism Thanks to globalization and rising incomes, consumerism is becoming an option for more than ever before. As this happens, lifestyles that rely on consumer goods - and center on the acquisition of these goods - continue to spread around the world.

* Changing Families The basic size and structure of families are changing all over the world. Fertility rates are falling, resulting in fewer births and smaller families. Smaller families are driving the aging of the world population, and changing the structure of many societies in emerging and developing markets.

* Women's Power Women around the globe continue to gain social, political, and economic power. They are exercising greater control over their lives and pursuing new options, propelled by better education and changing values and social attitiudes.

* Electrification Access to electricity is growing around the world, and a number of developing nations are pushing forward aggressively with electrification programs. Electricity changes lives - how people cook and do daily chores, how they work, their access to entertainment and information, and the general pace of life.

* Aging The global population is not only aging, but will age faster in coming decades than in the past. By 2050, the median age is projected to rise by 10 years, to 37 and there will be nearly 2 billion people aged 60 and over.

* Ethical Consumption Ethical consumption integrates personal values into purchasing choices. Rather than focusing only on standard consumer variables such as price, quality, and convenience, buyers consider ethical, religious, political, and other beliefs in their decisions.

* Population Growth Population growth continues to be one of the world's most significant trends. Every decade adds hundreds of millions of people to the global population, with the vast majority in medium- and lower-income countries.

* Growing Middle-Class Over the last century the emergence of large middle-income groups within more developed societies has gone hand-in-hand with the creation of modern consumerism. Now a new wave of middle-class growth is unfolding in emerging markets.

* Urbanization The number of people living in urban areas has risen sharply in recent decades, from roughly 1 billion in 1960, to 3 billion now. People's lives change when they move from rural areas to cities. They can do different work, increase their income, and encounter new social rules, ideas and lifestyles. The fastest urban growth will occur in emerging and developing markets, driving the creation of vast numbers of new customers.

Rebrand100 has courteously shared their FAQ on rebranding with DesignDirectory, here are some key questions verbatim:

Q : When do organizations need to rebrand?

A : Organizations rebrand when they need to address strategic business goals, such as

* Better align with shifting customer preferences
* Manage a merger, acquisition or change in advertising strategy
* Extend products and services into new markets
* Showcase efforts for the environment or social responsibility
* Establish brand cohesiveness and consistency across media
* Revitalize or modernize an existing brand
* Spin-off new products or services, or develop a sub-brand
* Manage changes in internal management structure or culture

Q : What is the value of rebranding to the consumer?

A : The value of rebranding is in improving experiences that impact people's lives. Brands evolve to keep up with changing demographics, consumer lifestyles, various ethnicities becoming more prevalent and changing spending habits. Rebranding affects many touchpoints that provide consumer experiences, for example product delivery, or the bills you receive, as well as packaging, advertising and the retail environment.

Q : Do consumers know when something has been rebranded?

A : Not necessarily. Rebrands can be very visible, as in the case of new packaging or a new experience that resonates with consumers. In general, the more disciplines involved in the rebrand, the more visible it is to consumers. Sometimes rebranding is subtle, or purely internal to signal organizational shifts.

Q : How is rebranding different from branding?

A : Ongoing evolution makes rebranding different from creating new brands. Rebranding requires that a brand had previously existed, and had some identifiable personality in the minds of clients or consumers.

Q : How do companies approach rebranding successfully?

A : Successful rebranding requires a plan and a strategy. Companies need to assess the current brand equities, the marketplace and state of the business. They need to retain what works by leveraging existing brand equities to allow the brand to reemerge with a unique presence, a riveting promise and a fresh approach.

Q : What are the most common mistakes companies make in rebranding?

A : There are three common mistakes in rebranding:

1 . Not leveraging existing brand equity and the goodwill the brand has built among current customers.
2. The internal team is skeptical and internal buy-in does not occur.
3. The rebrand lacks credibility or is a superficial facelift with no broader strategy

Q : When are rebrands unsuccessful?

A : Unsuccessful rebrands share a few characteristics. In many cases, they're simply not believable. Sometimes organizations discard or ignore existing brand equities, or do not take consumer feedback into account.

Q : Are there best practices for rebranding?

A : It's essential that:

* a multidisciplinary conversation take place throughout the brand's evolution
* creatives are part of the core strategic team
* the organization is clear on its strategic goals
* existing brand equities are not discounted
* internal buy-in is obtained from employees
* there's an emotional connection, some sensory response by customers

The ups and downs of the auto industry have been in the news of late, particularly on the design front. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn's now well known speech has been covered extensively, but his words on the need for good design are well worth highlighting,

"Bland cookie-cutter designs undermine value as does price-dominated advertising," Ghosn said. "Permanent sales put us in the same category as mattresses and three-day suits.

"It doesn't have to be this way. Customers love their Blackberries, TiVos and big screen TVs. We must ignite the passion of buyers not just with cars with 500 horsepower and 1G skid pad capability."

Ghosn also took a swipe at retro car designs.

"When a culture starts to mine its past, it's usually because people are afraid of the future," he said.

A review of this season's major auto shows points out the general trend amongst automakers - 'frantic' was the adjective used - to churn out something for everyone. They offered vehicles powered by diesel fuel, hybrid systems and ethanol, massive pickups and tiny subcompacts, nostalgic muscle cars and futuristic crossovers. Here's the summary:

What's happened: Automakers, flush with new technology and eager to figure out rapidly changing consumer tastes, unveiled hundreds of new vehicles this year at the major auto shows in Detroit, Chicago, Geneva and New York.

Why the onslaught: Finding the right mix of vehicles to draw in consumers is more essential than ever - especially for struggling U.S. automakers General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. - because of fierce competition and high gasoline prices.

Filling niches: Automakers are responding with more products to fill every niche, which is a boon for consumers but painful and expensive for U.S. automakers.

Any wonder Ghosn was moved to speak as he did at the New York show keynote last week? Seems like a clear lack of focus.

Meanwhile, other manufacturers are pumping up their design and innovation investments - Honda breaks ground for a $15 million new design center in California while Aston Martin expands an ambitious retail program with an emphasis on design and detailing.

And a new US automobile manufacturer, Carbon Motors, announces their intent to collaborate with Georgia tech to develop the world's first vehicle built expressly for law enforcement agencies.

The company, which will market its innovative "purpose-built" vehicle directly to customers, also plans to revolutionize U.S. automobile manufacturing as a lean and integrated organization. In March, the firm announced plans to locate its headquarters, research and development center, direct sales center, customer service, and mid-volume production and logistics operations in the metropolitan Atlanta area.

Fortune Magazine says, Design guru Scott Henderson has won numerous awards for his cutting-edge work for companies like Cuisinart, Hewlett-Packard, and OXO International. Today, he's helping design a box to hold diaper rash ointment.
[...]
To gain an edge, smart manufacturers are doing whatever it takes to capture the attention (and aesthetics) of today's chic parents-to-be who are willing -sometimes even eager - to pay top dollar for products that seamlessly blend fashion and function.

"They realize, like so many companies don't, that design is the last great competitive advantage," says Henderson, who has two kids himself, and says that Skip Hop [bags pictured above] is his favorite client.

And not just companies but designers themselves are jumping in the fray with products specially created for young children and infants, starting their own firms like Arizona based Boon who recently got noticed by Target after winning the Innovation award at the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association trade show with the FrogPod shown below.

The Intellicot, created by four men whose final industrial product design project at Britain's Coventry University turned into "a labour of love" is another such story of a company created around a product. It is an aquarium-like creation, with classic wooden bars swapped for a breakout-proof polycarbonate glass wall and features a built-in video camera, connected to a portable monitor, that can be carried around the house.

Other trends showing up in the baby product segment of late include Walmart's entry into organic cotton baby clothes and organic baby foods plus all natural cleaning products. Looks like green is in as well as good looks.

From John Trenouth comes this excellent short deliberation on whether first to market is more advantageous than waiting for something well designed. Here is his post in full,

The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get your thing to market first. I generally skeptical of anything oft parroted. Sure the early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese. Here are a few examples:

* VHS. Worse than betamax on nearly every level. What's a betamax?
* Quicken. At the time of Inuit's 1984 release of Quicken there had already been over 40 commercial software packages for personal finance
* Office. Know anyone who still uses Lotus123, VisiCalc or WordPerfect?
* World of Warcraft.Released at a time when there were countless MMORPGs, most of which also fantasy based, and it left them all in the dust
* Dyson Vacuums. Upstart company is devouring the tired old vacuum cleaner market
* Del.icio.us. Blink.com came first by years, had vastly more users, and more funding, but its long gone now and Del.icio.us is the gold standard for online bookmarking.

I suppose I am just a little biased. As a designer I seek to optimize the user's experience with a product and the value they get from it. But in a true first-to-market context the value is in the raw capabilities the new product's functionality exposes (i'll post on the related basis of competition issue shortly). So, first-to-market scenarios are primarily marketing plays, while best-to-market scenarios are iNPD (engineering, marketing and design) plays.

But if you really are first to market, that means your latent market has lived well enough without your product all these years. So would a few more days or weeks spent on design really be too much to ask?

One argument might be that "we have to ship 1.0 to start realizing revenue, then we'll let the designers do their thing." Of course downstream redesignings are, generally speaking, drastically more costly than upstream design.

Another argument might be "we need to move now and capture market share before our competitors do." Forget the myopia of letting your competitors define your product strategies, but if your competitors are in fact that hot on your heels then now is the time to start redesigning your product, not after you and your competitor both deploy roughly the same product at roughly the same time for roughly the same customers. Competition then becomes a big stalemated game of rock, paper, scissors.

Check out Ari Paparo's post about how his experiences at Blink show how it is more important to get it right than to get there first.

From the PDF of The 25 Most Innovative companies in the world, here are the Top 10 companies, their rankings last year, and the reason Why they are considered Innovative.

Green product design requires a team approach to product development to ensure that each phase of the process - needs analysis, conceptual design, physical and functional attribute trade-offs, materials selection, process planning, production, use and service, marketing, distribution, and final disposition - is considered concurrently. The following steps address both corporate-level and product-level issues:

Develop Business Strategies to Capture Value from Lifecycle Thinking:
Cross-functional teams (including designers, purchasing, EHS, and operations) can explore opportunities to create business value while reducing environmental impacts across the product lifecycle.

Practice Full-Cost Accounting:
Full-cost or total cost accounting aims to improve financial analysis by incorporating the costs of product disposal and environmental impact - data that is often neglected by traditional accounting systems. Thus it helps identify opportunities to reduce waste and develop innovative business models.

Explore Reuse Options for Materials and Products:
"Closed-loop" production allows manufacturers to reuse materials and components in the creation of new original products. "Down-cycling" is possible when materials cannot be reused in the original product but can be reused in other, less refined products. For example, some fabric is reused as sound-deadening material in cars. Closed-loop manufacturing is preferable to down-cycling; its processes eliminate waste and resource use because waste serves as the resource. Companies can reuse materials internally or sell their "waste" to other companies that use it as raw material. Some companies specialize in using reusable materials and can be good partners in extended product responsibility efforts.

Perform Required Analyses During Product Design and Development:
Consider the environmental impacts of the project at every phase. Look at the effects of the manufacturing processes, the product distribution system, the product's intended use and operation, and eventual disposition. For each phase, specifically identify and evaluate the use of resources including energy and water, the creation of waste, effluents and other emissions, and potential effects on the health and safety of workers and users.

Ground rules for Green Product Design:

o Don't simply design products. Design product systems and life cycles and, when practical, design services. Customers want a solution for a certain problem, which may call for a service instead of a product.

o Don't assume that natural materials are always better. Some synthetics may have less impact on the environment than the extraction of a natural resource.

o Don't forget energy consumption. Many design teams focus their attention on material selection without considering the amount of energy needed to produce or process the material.

o Attempt to increase or extend product lifetime. Products that cannot be reused are often not economically or ecologically efficient or effective.

o Use less materials. This may seem obvious, but it is more complex than it appears. Take a critical look at product dimensions, materials strength, and production techniques to ensure that materials are used efficiently.

o Use recycled materials or recovered components. It is not enough to design products that are recyclable; incorporate already recycled material into the design.

Develop Markets for Green-Designed Products:
To attract consumers that support sustainability, many companies advertise their design for environment initiatives. Companies with reuse initiatives may find value in developing incentives and marketing these programs so that consumers will know how to return the products and will be motivated to do so.

Publicize and Celebrate Success:
Get the word out to employees, customers, suppliers and the community and reap the benefits of good public relations and responsible corporate citizenship.

Content summarized from BSR.

In the news today,

Venture capitalist John Doerr made his name and fortune with early investments in Netscape Communications, Amazon.com , Google and other pioneering tech firms that went from scrappy start-ups to household names.

Now, he and his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, are placing big bets on an emerging sector he calls "green technology," one he believes could become as lucrative as information technology and biotechnology.

Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins plans to set aside $100 million of its latest $600 million fund for technologies that help provide cleaner energy, transportation, air and water.

"This field of greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," Doerr said. "There's never been a better time than now to start or accelerate a greentech venture."

As one of Silicon Valley's most respected investors, Doerr's decision to champion green technology as the next big thing is generating buzz in the venture capital community.
[...]
VCs point to the global forces driving greentech investment: the rising cost of fuel, the economic expansion of China, India and other Asian nations; and growing worries over global warming.

"In my opinion, it's one of the most pressing global challenges we face," Doerr said. "It's causing the nations of the world to put an even higher priority than we have now on innovation."

How can you begin to incorporate 'green' principles in your product development process? Start with an introduction to Green Product Design and it's benefits to your entire firm then steps to implement it.

'Green technologies' are creating a buzz as the next big thing for the investment community, and 'green products' will soon be in the market. Here's an introduction to Green Product Design:

Green product design, also known as design for environment (DfE), design for eco-efficiency or sustainable product design, involves proactively addressing environmental considerations in the earliest stages of the product development process in order to minimize negative environmental impacts throughout the product's life cycle.

Green product design can encompass material selection, resource use, production requirements and planning for the final disposition (recycling, reuse, or disposal) of a product. It is not a stand-alone methodology but one that must be integrated with a company's existing product design so that environmental parameters can be balanced with traditional product attributes such as quality, cost, and functionality.

Green products can be made with fewer materials and can be designed to be more easily upgraded, disassembled, recycled, and reused than their conventional counterparts.

Implementing green product design can provide numerous benefits to a company. Focusing on resource efficiencies can reduce costs and often shorten production time. Because designing green products sometimes requires bringing diverse functional groups to the design table, green product design efforts can also drive product and process innovation.

Companies are increasingly regarding green product design as a comprehensive way to address pollution laws, resource use concerns, and restrictions on hazardous or toxic materials. Green product design can also provide an important tool in helping companies meet Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mandates, such as requirements by the European Union that electronics manufacturers take back and recycle end-of-life products.

Next: A summary of how to implement a green product design and development process at your company.

Courtesy BSR.

Packaging design can be viewed in four different ways:

• a means of protecting the contents of a package
• a contributor to the cost of the end product
• a sales canvas on which to promote the product's attributes and benefits
• a part of the product experience itself.

While many companies have traditionally considered packaging as one or both of the first two points, we're going to take a look at the last two - as it is here where design is concerned with adding real value. Whether you're a manufacturer or a retailer, packaging design should be viewed as an investment not a cost. Unfortunately too many businesses still look first at the price of design development rather than the value of the work.

A notable example of value addition is Target's new medicine bottle. Designed by Deborah Adler, a 29-year-old graphic designer whose ClearRx prescription-packaging system was launched last year to much acclaim. This NY Metro article analyses the design changes Adler made in order to improve and correct issues with existing systems.

Packaging design in the modern age has gone way beyond simple functional benefits. It is now one of the most sophisticated and powerful examples of the designer's craft. Most products are meaningless (or at least undifferentiated) without their packaging. It can often end up becoming the thing of real value above and beyond the actual product itself - the packaging becomes the brand.

An iconic example of the integration of a brand and it's packaging is the classic Coca Cola bottle, now a familiar shape no matter what is done to it. Designed deliberately to be "recognized in the dark" or even if broken, it is an example of packaging design as enduring art.

A well-designed pack must address the needs of its life cycle. This life cycle runs from the moment it is used to wrap its product (whether this is by hand or in a factory), through its journey to the point of sale, followed by its journey to the point of use and - finally with increasingly tough environmental laws - to its after-use. The WRAP Innovation Fund supports corporate efforts to decrease packaging waste through grants and research.

Good packaging leads to increased sales - Metaphase Design Group recently made news with their Listerine bottle redesign. Sales grew by double digits,  when  the old whiskey-bottle-style container was replaced with a design that features a built-in hand grip and a larger cap. The grip makes the bottle easier to lift, while the big mouth encourages buyers to chug straight from the container. It used to take about six months for consumers to finish off jumbo bottles of mouthwash. Now they empty them more quickly which means more frequent trips to the store to restock.

Increasingly, as big box retailers such as Walmart focus on improving their supply chain efficiencies, package design can play a large role in shaving shipping and inventory costs as well.

RFID technology enabled Gillette to get their new Fusion razor on store shelves 11 days faster than its normal turn-around time for product launches, which translates into 11 days of sales in 400 stores that the retailers and Gillette might have otherwise missed.

Gillette managers attribute the swiftness of the Fusion launch to the added visibility the tagged goods provided the company. This visibility began as the goods arrived at the retailers' distribution centers and ended, most importantly, at the retailers' box-crushing machines, where reads of the Fusion case tags allowed Gillette to infer that all contents had been placed on shelves. In cases where the retailer's feedback network showed the Fusion razors or promotional displays had reached a retail store's back room, but no read events were recorded showing the goods being brought to the sales floor in a timely manner, Gillette contacted the managers of those stores and requested the razors and displays be brought out.

- Some content adapted from Design Council UK.

No design focused blog would be complete without a shout out to Apple on their 30th Anniversary. Founded on April 1st, 1976, they have firmly established themselves as the poster child for the power of good design and continuous innovation as a fundamental aspect of successful corporate strategy.

A brand that attracts rabid fans, who demonstrate their loyalty and devotion above and beyond the call of duty.

A company whose commitment to innovation, supersedes any fear of failure - PC World's brief history of Apple's innovations that failed. To quote,

For a more comprehensive look at other failed Apple products, check out Insanely Great's 10 Worst Macs Ever Built and LowEndMac's Road Apples. But in the end, a history of high-profile failures does not mean that Apple is on the road to ruin. To the contrary, the high number of failures indicates a willingness to take big risks---and reap, on occasion, huge rewards.

Their marketing communications and brand strategy over the past three decades has consistently supported their innovative mindset, their design thinking, if you will. Here's a collection of iconic Apple ads through the decades. Who can forget 1984?

From Britain's Times Online comes this paean to "the great god of computer design, Jobs, and his son, Jonathan Ive", an art inspired analysis of Apple's product design genius,

For fear you will think, possibly correctly, that my rediscovered faith has driven me mad, I will not wax too lyrical about Ive's current designs. I will only say that I know of no product, the most refined cars included, that comes close to attaining their strangely glowing celebration of their functionality. Other products - Issey Miyake's clothes, say - are just as great works of art, but only Apple brings this level of aesthetic excellence to the mass market, and it does so within the demanding technical confines of the electronics involved.

Wired's roundup of their best Apple stories ever and a gallery of every Apple ever made.

And finally, in the unlikely event we were unsure how and why Apple is design's posterchild, is this tribute from The Australian Age,

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, it would have been easy to write off Apple Computer as an also-ran in the computer business. Mired in losses and suffering from an exodus of top talent, Apple's prospects were so dim in 1996 that some observers were convinced that a takeover was all that could save it.
[...]
Jobs's vision, his preternatural grasp of the importance of functional design and his flair for stage craft have transformed Apple into one of the world's most recognisable brands. Sales of its phenomenally successful iPod personal music player drove revenues and profits at the company to record highs last year and have established the computer maker as a dominant force in online music.

[Summarized from Shopping for Innovation, coauthored by Steve Portigal - read the full article for insightful details]

There are many things you need to consider before hiring a design firm, but we're going to start with three:

1.    The Problem  - Defining your needs
2.    The People - Who the players are
3.    The Partnership - The nature of the engagement.

Design firms are businesses, but with unique perspectives and unique work processes. Understanding a bit of the industry culture will go a long way in helping you to establish a successful engagement.

The Problem: Defining your goals
Having these goals well-articulated and written down on paper as a starting point for the discussion is crucial. You may find that your reasons for bringing in design services differ from others in your organization, so you need to get your story straight before you begin talking to creatives. Although your desired outcome may be very specific, the designer's process to delivering your outcome will inevitably involve challenging its very foundations. The key issue here is framing the problem correctly. So though you'll want to define your problem as clearly as possible to begin with, you should also be willing to engage in discussions with designers in order to craft a more open-ended, innovative, and ultimately actionable problem statement.

The People - Defining the Archetypes

While there will naturally be complexity and diversity, very broadly, design firms can be categorized very broadly into three types:

1. 'Bigbox' Design Firm - The firms represented by this archetype are large-say 50+ people-and are well-staffed in a broad range of services. They may have armies of model-makers or production people, or they may have specialists that you wouldn't expect (cognitive psychologists, for example). They attract strong talent, and often have detailed, rigorous work processes, since the logistics of operating a large business who's metier is creative can be challenging.

Pros and Cons - If you're looking for a firm to provide design services on a global level, a large consultancy may have some obvious advantages. Large firms often have the experience, expertise and ability to manage and work with the sometimes bureaucratic and rigid requirements of corporate behemoths, establishing credibility in executing across multiple platforms and geographical locations. But you'll pay 'bigbox' prices, they maynot be able to 'turn on a dime' like a smaller firm, you will have to go through layers to reach the design team and you may not always get the 'A' team. Ask to see the portfolio of the team assigned to your project.

2. 'Boutique' Design Firm - At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Boutique design firm, a smaller, often-nimble group - say 10 people - who are accustomed to highly creative, demanding assignments, and thrive on a compact organizational structure. Denise Lee Yohn, previously VP of Brand and Strategy for Sony Electronics and now running an independent marketing practice, reflects that "the smaller shops I've worked with tend to bring expertise instead of process, ways of thinking instead of methodologies." Shane Brentham, Autodesk, adds that "the smaller firms are often more willing to push the envelope a little creatively."

Pros and Cons -  Other advantages to working with a smaller firm: A more intimate connection with the designer, less insulation by account managers from the "talent," a personal connection and consistent hand-holding - designers who pick up their own phone. These are the kinds of things that can make working with a small design firm more personal and satisfying. Boutique firms can be faster with change orders, and turn on a dime (though they may not want to); redirecting a BigBox may require communicating your wishes - through an account manager - to many layers of participants. 

3. The Dream Team -  This is where a team of specialists - often including employees of the hiring firm, the design firm, or experienced outside freelancers - are put together to take on a specific project. Collectively, they possess the expertise appropriate to the design challenge, and are handpicked in a very calculated way. The idea here is that you assemble the best on a project-specific basis, and when the project's done, they're done (with the implication that you may reassemble the team together on another project if the results were successful).

Pros and Cons - This approach is not for beginners, and is very targeted. It recognizes that as design moves up the value chain and integrates more and more with corporate strategy at the core level, it becomes a specialty, not a commodity. And as product and service offerings become more complex, you may find that the best route to innovation is a customized route. Specialty areas can include research, new product definition, innovation planning or the application of design thinking to business processes. So while the concept is one of the best to work with, be aware of where and how you are intending to utilize this approach.

The Partnership: Anticipating the relationship

Are you looking for a "partner" or a "vendor"? This is a critical question to ask yourself before you begin searching out particular design firms, but its answer is something that may change once you start meeting some.

A partner is a firm to collaborate on jointly developing a new product or service offering. It's a relationship that places as much focus on the means as the ends; on the process as the product. The ultimate deliverables may be fuzzier in this kind of relationship, but through a rigorous review process, both parties work toward agreed-upon goals.

A vendor, on the other hand, can be thought of as a firm you hire when you have a specific product to be designed with predefined criteria. You've done your homework; you understand your market. You need good thinking, but you also need a pair of hands to actualize your wishes. Vendors don't challenge your business proposition; they fulfill it.

Another consideration: What are you intending to build with your design service provider, and where are you in the product development cycle? Sometimes a design firm is brought in to fix a problem; other times a design firm is brought in to provide strategic design services and to really take a look at what the company is about, where their legacy is, and to help shape their aspirations for the future. Are you looking for this kind of long-term, strategic partnership, or are you looking for someone to build a working prototype and bill you for it?

In the end, of course, finding and cultivating a successful working relationship with a design firm is an emotional process - you're looking for chemistry. It is a very competitive field, filled with many highly competent, qualified companies. The best thing to do is to go out and meet all kinds of shapes and sizes; only then will you have a better idea of how you feel around these people and their organizations, and what kind of designers you'd like to work with.  Do your homework, make a short list of companies, and then meet them. If you're shopping for innovation, be a smart shopper.

This research on how teams work, (PDF link) and what makes them successful from Northwestern University, published in the journal Science, focuses on creative teams in the arts and sciences. These findings unearth some intriguing points that I can see being transferred very easily to the creation of a successful innovation team.

Highlights of this research study :

• They discovered that the composition of a great team is the same whether you are working on Broadway or in economics.
• The researchers [...] found that successful teams had a diverse
  membership - not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team
  members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the
  experience of the entire industry.
• Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the
  members of successful teams were interconnected, [..], across a giant
  cluster of artists or scientists.
• "Do people go out of their way to collaborate with new people?"
  said Luis A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and
  biological engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. "Do
  they take this risk?
• "We found that teams that achieved success [..] were fundamentally
  assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who
  had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the
  same collaborations over and over again."
• "We discovered that assembling a successful team depends on
  choosing the right balance of diversity and cohesion - achieving the
  bliss point intersection of the two." Diversity represents new
  collaborations while cohesion comes from repeat collaborations.
• "The entire network looks different when you compare a successful
  team with an unsuccessful team," said Amaral. [Unsuccessful teams]"
  form a network broken into small, unconnected clusters while the
  [successful ]teams give rise to a giant, connected cluster. A strong
  correlation clearly exists between team assembly and the quality of the
  team's creations. You need someone new to get the creative juices going
  so you don't get trapped in the same ideas over and over again."
• "If your systemic network has teams with only incumbents, and
  especially incumbents who have worked together repeatedly, your field
  tends to have low impact scores. The fact that we found this across
  fields with equally powerful minds suggests that how the brain power of
  a field is organized into different kinds of networks determines the
  field's success."

If you're seeking the services of an innovative design studio or strategic new product development consultant, take a moment to analyze the stage at which your company is at right now before you browse through the search fields in our design directory. Derived from Sylver Consulting's insightful analysis, here are some things to consider before hiring an 'innovation consultant' :

1. Which of these statements best describes your organization?

A. Currently engulfed in the flames of the "burning platform" . Profits are dropping, products are not selling and you know you need help to figure out  what to do about it.

B. Emerged from the days of the "burning platform" and have come to understand that innovation is not a start/stop process, but an evolving one that requires constant attention.

C. Leader in your industry and are determined to stay there. Failure is accepted within the organization because you understand and fully embrace the numbers game in product development.

What is motivating the firm at each stage?

For companies engulfed in the flames of the "burning platform," the need for innovation is a reactive mode. The turnaround time on the project becomes the foremost goal, and "innovation" in this situation is often an attempt to play 'catch up' with their rivals.

For organizations that have recently emerged from the days of the "burning platform," the focus now shifts to quick hits and small wins— there's some stability in market share and sales, but the days of job insecurity are too close to feel comfort with "blue sky" or "conceptual projects" that cannot provide immediate returns on investment.

Industry leaders or those that choose to behave like leaders, think strategically about where they are today, and where they want to be in the future. They still need the small wins for continuing the cash flow, but they  more tactically about how those successes contribute to the longer term corporate strategy.

How does this understanding help you maximise your investment in design services?

Because the motivation for seeking help defines the "innovation tolerance" of the organisation which in turn provides insight into the success criteria for the project. By understanding the level of innovation you need, you can identify the deliverable that makes the most business sense. This kind of analysis helps determine if the project needs to be geared toward discovering the breakthrough, revolutionary product in its category (the iPod), or if the conservative, low/no cost solution is the more appropriate direction to drive (the new Word template).

What next?

Once the requirements have been framed correctly, in the context of your organization's current needs, you are able to identify the kind of design firm appropriate for the task at hand. The deliverables drive the budget, the timeframe, the results, and ultimately help define the metrics of success for the given project.

Via Core77's blog comes this success story on OXO - who made a mark in design with their award winning OXO Goodgrips potato peeler - its a fascinating read about their innovative culture and continual striving for perfection. Their corporate philosophy is based on the principles of Universal Design, and how it benefits users, one of the few firms that have placed good design as a core competency in their corporate strategy. 

I've pulled out some lessons from their idea generation and product development process:

Talk to people - Talk to shoppers in supermarkets, talk to chefs in restaurants, talk to cooks, talk to culinary students, and most importantly talk to your customers.

The staff is constantly considering products to Oxoize [...] The theory of universal design, meaning one tool should fit all of them, compels Oxo to look for ways to change anything for the better.

"We do a lot of shopping, we do a lot of talking to consumers and chefs," Sohn said. "We do consumer testing, we do a lot of surveys, we talk to people we know, people our sales reps know, all over the country."

Listen, really listen to your customers - These days, many of OXO's products are not developed from scratch but instead are product ideas or prototypes submitted by their own customers. After all, they are the ones who will buy and use your products.

The measuring cup is one of five Oxo products that were not in-house eurekas but came to the company from outside in the last 10 years. "We have some very passionate consumers," said Gretchen Holt, [...]. Ideas also flow in from retailers and wannabe inventors.

An ice cube tray that releases one cube at a time came from a man who only insisted that the tray carry a line saying it was invented in Peru; a potato masher was suggested by a "mom in Toronto who was not looking to make money" and took a case full of mashers as payment; a mango splitter was devised by a minister from upstate New York who travels to underdeveloped countries in the tropics where mangos are a staple.

"He came up with a prototype and a video of him using it," Sohn said, but other prototypes may show up as "two paper clips stuck together with gum." One idea that did not work out was a turkey lifter that just didn't sell.

Know when to let go - Even after months of investing time and money on a particular product idea or project, OXO is willing to kill the project if it doesn't meet their corporate vision of an innovative yet affordable product that also looks good.

Oxo can "spend 18 months on a product and then make a decision not to go forward," Witt said. "We might find seven things needed but if they were incorporated, it would cost $900," Sohn added. "We don't believe in making something unaffordable." And that is one reason why the company is careful about embarking on products, let alone dreaming them up from scratch. As company president Lee said, "When you create something new, you create a hundred other problems."

Leave the design to the experts - Oxo tests the prototypes and works closely with their design firms to iterate and reiterate their products until they are satisfied with them, but once they have the product idea they hand it over to the design firm to bring it to life.

Surprisingly, what Oxo does not do is design. The staff is made up of product managers and engineers, all focusing on the idea end. They then work with nine industrial design firms, including two in Japan, to translate pie-cutter-in-the-sky notions into eminently usable gadgets.

"The ideas of what to make and what features to offer come from here," Lee said, then designers at companies such as Smart Design in New York and Bally in Pittsburgh do the rest. Once the prototypes come back, temps are hired to test them repeatedly - throwing a chip bag clip against the floor 10,000 times, running a measuring cup through the dishwasher into soapy infinity - and the second-guessing begins.

Good is never enough - To truly create products that inspire loyal and passionate customers, never be satisfied with products that just 'do the job'. OXOnians believe that every product that rolls out should have a 'wow' factor or 'eureka' factor.

"Oxonians," as they call themselves, can work for years to perfect a single product only to start trying to find something wrong with it as soon as it arrives from the factory. Good is never enough.

"A lot of this is just a culture of people constantly looking for something wrong, not only other people's products but ours as well," said Alex Lee, the company's president.

Be willing to make and learn from mistakes - With over 500 products in their lineup, there are bound to be some that don't quite make it, if it bombs, kill the product or tweak it some more. "We never consider anything finished," said Larry Witt, Oxo's vice president of sales and market development.

Not everything turns to squishy gold in Oxo's hands, though. Lee said an attempt to make a better bagel slicer was a disaster because it was designed using bagels from the tri-state area around company headquarters.

When it was unveiled at the housewares show in Chicago that year, the local bagels were smaller and did not fit. After struggling to adapt it to fit bagels of any size, the company ultimately gave up. "If we had known how hard it was," Lee said, "we would have designed it from scratch."

Steve Portigal contributes his perspective of ethnographic research and its applications.

As companies continue to realize the need for understanding customers (especially when considering the launch of a new product or entering a new market) they are turning to tools such as "ethnographic research." With designers, market researchers, anthropologists and others offering this sort of service, trying to put forward an acceptable definition of ethnographic research is an increasingly tricky endeavor. The literature is littered with alternative terminology, from "site visit" through "contextual research" through "user safaris." Although precise terminology is not without its place, it's probably more useful here to set the jargon aside and consider a simple three-step process:

1. We examine our users (be they consumers or other) in their own context
2. We develop a set of inferences (you might also call this interpretation, or synthesis)
3. We apply our new insights to a business or design problem otherwise, why are we doing the work?)

Of course, it's the stage of "examine our users" that gets the most attention, because it's the most tangible part of the process. We can further break that into three key activities:

1. Observation

- watching what people are doing, how they do it, getting a sense of usage, and of process

2. Interviewing

- interacting directly with some people who can shed light on our problem, be they customers, users, former customers, future users, lead users, etc.
- asking questions, giving them exercises or tasks
- listening to what they say, how they say it, what they don't say
- paying attention to where what they say and what they do doesn't align

3. Understanding cultural context

- considering the culture within which our people are making decisions
- looking at media, trends, advertising, and other symbols of cultural "norms"

So often, companies go to the trouble of studying customers, only to address the opportunities revealed by usage. For example, an award-winning snow shovel was redesigned when the design team went out to watch how their product was being used, found that women instead of men were shoveling, and so they made the handle smaller.

But there's much more that can be revealed. What is the shoveling occasion (or, if you will, ritual) really about? What meanings does it hold? Does it hearken back to childhood? Or does it represent female independence? Or the nurturing of motherhood? Or the abandonment by men? Probably it's none of those, but the point is that within the ordinary activity of shoveling we can find deep meanings that can provide enormous opportunities for innovation as we question the basic assumptions about what the product could possibly be.

Maytag intends to sell Hoover. Apparently, Hoover's market share had fallen dramatically in the last quarter of 2005 and this first mover - the inventor of the vacuum cleaner - has thrown up its hands and given up the fight against Dyson - the upstart entrant in the playing field. This articlefrom the Times Online has some amazing figures for the market share beating taken by Hoover in the 4 years since Dyson entered the US market. I've converted their table of figures into a chart that better demonstrates the plunge,

Consistently across all the news and analysis this weekend is the singular message that this drop in Hoover's market share in just four years, after decades of market leadership, is entirely due to the lack of any consistent strategy of innovation and design. On the other hand, Dyson's iconic status as an industrial design leader, engineering innovator and persistent inventor (over 5000 prototypes alone for the first model James Dyson launched) does not require introduction. Add to this, their award winning new market entry strategy and you have all the ingredients of a winner.

What is amazing is that some ways this entire episode breaks all the rules of conventional business wisdom - vacuum cleaners are commodities in today's market, while every other player in the market competed on price, Dyson walked in not only with an entirely new technology but also pegged his unusual looking (then) product at a price point over 200% higher than the industry average. He was the late entrant in a very mature market with very established players with very well known brands - after all 'hoover' has become a generic term for cleaning up in UK english. Here are the seeds of a case study of disruptive innovation and the strategic use of good design.

This little cellphone by Motorola won the second tender by the GSM Association for their "Emerging Markets handset programme" announced last week.

Designed to retail at $30, the GSM claims that they have already received orders for 12 million phones. Many wonder where the profits may lie when the cost of production is squeezed to the barest minimum in order to develop a product affordable by those in developing markets, since developing a cutting edge phone for the US, European and Japanese market offers higher margins.

Developing products for those at the base of the pyramid can be profitable, in more than just one sense. CK Prahalad, eminent strategy guru, whose HBR Article "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" [free reg. required] first articulated the opportunities that lay in volume markets, rather than the margin markets of the developed world.

These emerging markets provide alternate options for companies facing stagnant home markets and looking to expand beyond their traditional areas. And in the case of affordable mobile communication, offer opportunities for sustainable development that traditional aid cannot always provide. The real challenge would be the development of user interfaces that do away with the need for text based menus and screens - thus obviating both the language problem as well as the literacy problem. Then a truly global system of communication would be possible.

"China's market is not just big, it is also increasingly crowded. For foreign companies, making money here demands more effort," says Alan Horton, an analyst at US-based Summit Consulting Co.

From China Business Weekly comes this insightful look at the current state of the market and what multinationals must overcome in order to succeed in China. Statistics quoted are sobering - from 3 or 4 brands of shampoo in the 1980's, there are now over 3000. Over the same period, the number of toothpaste brands rose from 100 to almost 800. Fruit juice makers were unknown two decades ago, now there are more than 160. More than 100 car models were launched in 2004, double from only two years before.

So how do multinationals cope? Going Chinese seems to be the direction chosen by most, either by cutting costs or by developing more locally popular products.

"You can't survive in China without becoming a Chinese company. That includes local technology development, product design, procurement, manufacturing and sales," says Yun Jong-Yong, chief executive of Samsung Electronics

And, adds Gary Coleman, global managing director of Manufacturing Industry Practice with Deloitte,

"Emerging markets around the world offer significant growth potential, but the most successful and profitable companies will be those that really understand their customers and take a different approach,"

The two most important things for competing successfully in a new market are
a) understanding local customers and then
b) designing products that address their needs and values.

Contextual research provides one such means to effectively understand a market - also known as ethnographic research or user observation - insights derived from the results provide direction and guides for new product development. Firms like SonicRim conduct large scale contextual research programs in countries around the world for their clients, using ethnographic techniques such as observing users in their natural environment or interacting with products to generate the insights that lead to the development of new products and services. Based in the Bay Area, Cheskin is another such firm that leverages their expertise in market research to uncover opportunities for innovation in service and product offerings. Others deliver new product definition documents based on research results along with a cohesive business strategy to support the successful new market entry. Alternative strategies include working with specialists like Portigal Consulting, who leverages his extensive network of professionals around the world.

Research has increasingly become a vital first step in the design process, and as global markets rapidly become more competitive, it is one that cannot be overlooked.