Archives For business design

Adaptive Innovation: Launch, Learn, Repeat

January 23, 2013 — 1 Comment

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Successful startups have a clear and defined purpose—an offering, product, or business model like no other. They also know when to evolve, redesign, or adapt, in sync with emerging market needs. But how?

Arvind Gupta, a colleague in Shanghai, recently wrote about the importance of adaptive innovation cycles in emerging markets in Rotman Magazine. These are methods that I believe can be easily molded for businesses in both the US and European markets as well. Adaptive innovation involves stripping steps from the corporate R&D process and executing quickly in two modes: learning and creating. Some of us at IDEO refer to this as “the squiggle.”

This approach empowers designers to rapidly integrate information from in-market testing. Through repeated adaptive innovation cycles, a team can iterate an offering, product, or model in sync with evolving market needs and stay ahead of the competition. According to Arvind, there are four pillars of success to this approach: Purpose, Pace, Pulse, and Prototyping. Read more about the four pillars of adaptive innovation here.

Where could you be using adaptive innovation to improve an idea?

(Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In business design, design thinking, emergent design , , , , , ,
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How Might We Design for Behavior Change?

November 1, 2012 — 3 Comments

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If you talk to people at the Santa Fe Institute, or read any of their books, you’ll learn that a key characteristic of a complex system is that the more complex a system is, the more information flows through it. If this is true, then we ought to be thinking more about these information flows when we are designing for behavior change in complex systems.

Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis has studied the relationships between people with respect to their health, and one of the conclusions he has come to is that if you are in a network of obese people, you are three times more likely to be obese yourself. Conversely, if you are in a network of non-obese people, you are three times more likely to not be obese. This is a very important insight for design: that the behavior of those around us significantly affects our behavior. Intuitively we might know this, but we don’t necessarily always think about it when we’re designing systems.

One way to exploit this insight is to put the tools of design themselves into the hands of people in the networks who may be delivering services. For example, at IDEO we’ve been working for several years with Kaiser Permanente, teaching nurses and doctors and technicians how to use design thinking to improve patient care. Kaiser now has its own consulting group made up of nurses who have become experts at this. They go around to hospitals working on different problems, creating wards and hospitals of the future, and evolving the designs over time as needed. Continue Reading…

In business design, design for behavior change, design thinking, designing for impact, emergent design
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15 Minutes With: Heath Ceramics’ Cathy Bailey on Business Design

October 26, 2012 — Leave a comment

photo Jeffery Cross Heath 580px

“When I walked into Heath it sounded so different from my office.”

It was this visceral difference between the sounds of a small ceramics manufacturer and those of a consulting design studio that got Cathy Bailey started on the path to co-leading Heath Ceramics. In partnership with her husband Robin Petravic, Cathy has shaped Heath into an icon of the San Francisco manufacturing revival. I got the chance to sit down with her after a recent IDEO Design Evenings event to chat about the challenges and rewards of designing a business. Some highlights from our conversation:

Ten years ago Cathy Bailey was tiring of design consulting. While out looking for ideas that might be the genesis of a startup, she came across Heath, a Sausalito-based ceramics manufacturer founded in 1947 by Edith Heath. While not a startup, Cathy realized that Heath was a business with “good bones”—and that the 50+ year-old company was a place where “people really cared about what they were making.”

What followed was a process of editing, rebuilding, and redesigning much more than the Heath product line. Cathy and Robin’s challenge was to redesign the business itself and create a company where “design is the whole thing”—the business model, the culture, and the story.

Many small manufacturers of craft-based products have disappeared, because the traditional business model of creating relatively high cost products distributed through wholesale channels results in prices that the market cannot support. Heath Ceramics has shifted to direct-to-consumer for the vast majority of its sales. This means that as a manufacturer, Heath must now go beyond the products and take responsibility for designing a great consumer experience both digitally and at its retail outlets. The reward for this broader investment in design is the capture of more profit margin. This is a lesson learned by the likes of Apple, as well as Heath—and one that could be a applied by many more high quality, low volume manufacturers.

“The culture had good bones but it was nostalgic.”

How do you go about evolving a culture that is more focused on the past than the future? One of the unexpected challenges, and one of the reasons it took a while, was the time needed to connect to and understand a group of people who were totally different in their backgrounds and experience. As designers, Cathy and Robin had been used to spending most of their time with people who were essentially similar to themselves. Now they were working with craftspeople who could offer considerable perspective when it came to the products and the craft but had never been asked to engage with the broader design of the business. The first step was to open the books to employees so that they had the opportunity to understand what design trade-offs might be necessary. This first step “changed the dynamic” of the culture.

Heath Ceramics is as much a story as it is a selection of products. It has a rich set of narratives ranging from its founding by Edith Heath in 1947 to its deep expertise in glaze. Celebrated restaurants such as Chez Panisse and The Slanted Door use Heath ceramics, making it a part of the San Francisco food movement as well as the manufacturing and craft revival.

Despite the challenges and risks of reinventing a small craft-based manufacturing business in the USA, Cathy tells me, “it’s not such a risk if we can tell the story.”

Might this idea of designing the whole business be the basis for a resurgence of craft and manufacturing elsewhere in America?

Photo by Jeffery Cross / Courtesy of Heath Ceramics

(posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In business design, creative culture, design culture, design thinking , , , ,
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Permission to Innovate

December 31, 2010 — 1 Comment

HBR

I was given the opportunity to contribute to the HBR Agenda 2011 and wrote a short piece on the idea of successful companies earning  ‘permission to innovate’ from customers and stakeholders. You can see it here and the other 23 contributions from far more esteemed folks such as Dan Pink, Michael Porter, AG Lafley and Bob Sutton here.

In business design, strategic thinking , , , ,
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Design nations

October 31, 2010 — 13 Comments

Singapore at Night

I am off to Singapore in a week for my first visit. I have been invited by the government to give a talk on design thinking and meet with various government and business leaders to talk about the role of design thinking at a national level.

It is interesting to think about national scale design and innovation policy and the person who I believe has done most with this is John Kao with his I20 group of 25 national innovation leaders. There seems to be a group of small to medium size countries that are committed to building innovation infrastructure to drive economic growth and I wonder what are the key elements for success in this endeavor?

Finland is a great example of a country that has done many of the right things. It has an integrated design and innovation policy and has created new institutions like Aalto University to facilitate greater cross-disciplinary collaboration. What is not clear is whether this is actually generating increased numbers of innovative companies or increased economic growth.

I have been wondering whether top down government policy is what really makes the difference or whether instead there are emergent characteristics that determine a nation or region’s success in the global innovation economy. When I look at places that have generated significant innovation in the past- London, New York, Paris, Silicon Valley, Florence, Rome, they all seem to have been successful ‘fusion cities’ (or regions) that benefited from ideas flowing in from the outside and the interaction of diverse populations. That’s why I think cities like Singapore, Shanghai and Mumbai may one day be seen as equally productive innovation hotspots. Each of these cities has the opportunity to help translate ideas and forces that exist in the world for the rapidly expanding Asian market. The mix of ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ helps ideas mutate in the way that they must to create relevant innovations.

How will the western concept of brand mutate to serve Asian markets? How will the idea of social networking mutate within the community minded societies of Asia? Will social entrepreneurship be different in Asia? Will there be Asian Einsteins and Steve Jobs’?

I wonder whether these and many other questions will be answered by cities like Singapore that actively promote a fusion of outside and inside and that are positioned as hubs in the Asian network?

In business design, creative culture, design of government ,
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