Susan Walsh Sanderson

WHAT MAKES PRODUCTS GREAT

What makes products great? What is the role of design firms in creativity and innovation, and how is this role changing? What accounts for design firms’ successes? How is the process of innovation and design changing? Does this differ between products and services? This paper reports the results of a study undertaken by the author and six others to address such questions, and is based on interviews of the founders of nearly one-hundred design firms in four countries and several industries. The sample ranged from three divisions of the largest international design firm to some of the smallest and newest ones. Manufacturers are responding to changes in technology and market demands by trying to introduce new products into the market more rapidly. They are struggling with new technologies and converging technologies that are creating opportunities for development of whole new product categories and for the entry of new types of competitors. While larger firms enjoy great resources in technology and science, these resources seem to be growing more available and open to all. There is also a growing richness of variety in the component supply environment, which enables greater creativity, combination and variety at the system level, but at the same time also widens competition; doubly so when new materials and software capabilities are considered. The innovation process seems to be becoming more networked, involving a greater number of actors including users, design firms and suppliers. The spread of roles across boundaries appears to be aided and abetted by open standards and increasing use of open source innovation processes. There is greater availability of a widening variety of sophisticated design tools such as computer aided design, simulation and visualization techniques, conferring innovative capabilities on smaller groups and organizations. In addition to the industrial design services they historically offered, many design firms are now providing turnkey services for new products and even entire product lines. That is they are more actively providing material and component choices and sources and marketing concepts to manufacturers in addition to product designs. We conclude that to be successful today products must be distinguished by more than sufficient function, consistent quality and low costs. A few of the welter of products in the market seem to account for the bulk of sales and profits in many categories. We believe that these examples emphasize customer delight, elegance and enduring value. They may even acquire increasing value over time. Our findings and examples imply that much competitive advantage might be gained by reconsidering traditional products with a fresh eye and approach using newer materials and design techniques. This paper is the first chapter of a book titled Design-Inspired Innovation by the same authors to be published later this year by Imperial College Press-World Scientific Publishers. What Makes Products Great? A design-inspired product delights the customer. The product emphasizes sophisticated simplicity and economy of means and low impact. If a product’s use is apparent, simple, and clear, it will stand out from all those that compete for our attention. Great products are those that have grown in meaning and value over their—and generations of users’—lifetimes. They capture our hearts and make our lives easier, better, or more interesting. Elegant products live on long after trivial variations have been relegated to the trash heap. Design-inspired innovation requires creativity of a higher order, whether the products are professional tools, machinery for production, consumer goods, or services. It is, in essence, a synthesis of technology and users’ experiences—boundaries that we observe blurring. Increasingly, products succeed because they have associated software and services that enhance their value. In the end, what the user remembers is a delightful experience with the entire package, and not whether that experience was provided or enabled by any particular aspect of the design. Most innovation improves products along accepted trajectories of higher performance and lower cost. By contrast, strikingly innovative products broaden and change the boundaries of performance, usefulness, and meaning. Few designs result in products that create such dramatic market success that they drive a company’s overall competitive strategy. People today hunger for products that offer more than sufficient function, high quality, and low cost. Even superb functionality no longer assures success for a new product. To achieve inspired designs and innovations, the aspiration must be for excellence and elegance. Excellence is achieved when a product is eminently good. Elegance—the tasteful richness of a product’s design—is achieved when a product is neat and simple. Customers do not necessarily want a wide variety, but they do want what is exactly the right choice for them. There is also a growing richness of variety in the component supply environment, which enables greater creativity, combination, and experiment at the system level, but at the same time also widens competition; doubly so when new materials and software capabilities are considered. Modularity means that we have the growing ability to design and produce products for small markets or even for a single customer. An example, a new concept for a riding saddle, is explained in detail below. Design-inspired innovations seem to be aimed primarily at elite consumers in highly developed economies, but we believe that there is no reason to maintain such an excessively narrow focus. Design-inspired innovation creates products that have meaning. Many people strive toward a world of greater beauty, humanity, and ethics, as well as one that provides basic necessities—and we sense a rapidly growing wave of interest in creating more meaningful products that also reduce waste and reside easily in our natural and cultural environments. In the developing world, greater numbers of people aspire to have the goods and services enjoyed in developed economies, while even greater numbers aspire simply to have basic products and services. More products seem to emphasize sophisticated simplicity rather than just a welter of features, and more products seem to emphasize economy of means and low impact rather than simply economy alone. For example, Tim Brown, head of IDEO, noted his company’s success in developing a disposable injection pen for providing insulin inexpensively to help diabetics. Examples in later chapters include a simple and effective emergency shelter and less wasteful designs for food packaging. Groups such as Britain’s Sorrell Foundation and MIT’s Age Lab are searching for approaches to provide better experiences and products for younger and older clients. Our thesis is that design-inspired products, those with both excellence and elegance, will be both more profitable and enduring. Of course, there are worries. Christopher Lorenz, in his seminal 1986 work on corporate use of design, warned that, “the trouble is that right does not always triumph, and principles are not always borne out in practice. Existing deterrents against the fully-fledged use of industrial design in many companies could take on new significance if globalization is managed badly. Design would then be pushed back to the dark ages of skin-deep styling, and the companies would be deprived of that ‘meaningful distinction’ which, as Theodore Levitt rightly argues, is so crucial to the creation of competitive advantage in an era of crowded markets and global competition.” Ironically, the best products may be the ones that almost disappear entirely: the human light, the music library, the wheelchair, a waste handling system. All of these, and other examples, are presented in detail in subsequent chapters, where we put what makes them “best” in the context of excellence and elegance. Design, especially its integration with other functions of a firm and its strategy, has received less emphasis in previous research than is merited by its importance to success in a competitive environment. For example, as Procter & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley, says “I’ve been in this business for almost thirty years, and it’s always been functionally organized. So where does design go? We want to design the purchasing experience—what we call the ‘first moment of truth’; we want to design every component of the product; and we want to design the communication experience and the user experience.” Where, indeed, does design go? We will argue that it must constitute the beginning of the innovation process and consider the totality of a product’s use and life rather than the design process being one in which the product is just conceived as an artifact or an implement. What is design-inspired innovation? How does it lead to competitive advantage? A growing number of companies recognize the importance of design-inspired innovation, especially those that aim to strengthen and maintain high product value. These companies are willing to take the large risks associated with this quite complex and uncertain approach. To answer the questions above requires taking the widely acknowledged definition of design as the integrated innovation of function and form and adapting it further to the framework illustrated in Exhibit 1-1. INSERT EXHIBIT 1-1 HERE The Exhibit shows graphically that three types of knowledge are essential to the innovation process: knowledge about user needs, technological opportunities, and product languages. The latter concerns the signs that can be used to deliver a message to the user and the cultural context in which the user will give meaning to those signs. The classic dialectic of function versus form leads designers to relegate the latter to the aesthetic appearance of products. Indeed, the debate often focuses simplistically on the contrast between functionalism and styling—parti