Dear Rosan and Don,

Interesting thoughts. I agree with Don that designers aspire to
disruptive innovation – and I agree that design research generally
leads to incremental innovation. Both are valuable.

Incremental innovation is more successful for a reason: incremental
innovation seeks improvements to working products and services. This
reduces waste, improves productivity, lengthens the life cycle of
products, and spreads sunk costs over a longer product life to enhance
profitability.

Incremental innovation is a parallel to Thomas Kuhn’s description of
normal science. During the 19th century, for example, physics and
chemistry made immense and important gains from incremental innovation
that built on the work of such innovators as Carnot, Faraday, Maxwell
and Boltzmann. When Planck, the Curies, and Einstein addressed problems
that were unforeseen in the 19th century, they ushered in a radical
innovation that led to the new physics.

In design and engineering, however, as in evolution, radical
innovations represent dramatic potential gains and huge potential
losses.

First, radical innovations often represent a massive investment that is
a complete write-off when they fail. Or else they represent a massive
investment in which the returns on investment do not go to the original
creator-investors, but to later entrepreneurial adapters. I recall a
talk Don gave in Seoul in which he showed us several of his pioneering
inventions and radical innovations. Alas, most of Don’s radical
innovations were twenty years before their time – which is once reason
why Don is a Don Norman and not quite a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Second, radical innovations change the ecology around them, and once a
new ecology grows around the new innovations, there is often no way back
to prior potential choices.

Third – and this is why designers want to be radical innovators –
is that successful radical innovators have fun and occasionally achieve
a measure of glory.

By the way, please don’t blame Paul Hekkert for the message that
designers seek to innovate by shaping new markets. That’s the fun
factor at work. As Don has also noted, most designers want to do cool
things. It’s boring old guys like me who wonder why one might wish to
innovate if something works well. I had my first mobile phone for a
decade, one of those charming old Ericsson bricks. The only reason I
moved to a new phone was that my model was so obsolete that they stopped
making the original battery pack – when my last battery wore out, I
could no longer recharge the phone. I’m not quite Amish, but “use it
up, wear it out, make do, or do without” would be a good motto for my
sampler. But there is another side to me – and that is the side that
wants things to work better, serving more needs with less waste at lower
cost. And that’s what Paul is also talking about. Paul and his
colleagues at TUDelft are working with us at Swinburne, and with
colleagues at Cambridge and at University of Vienna to understand why
people make preferential choices among designed artifacts or services
based on universal models of aesthetics that we don’t yet understand
fully. This also involves the need for basic research and raises the
potential for radical innovation.

Even successful radical innovations represent immense risk and loss.
The history of railroads was marked by boom and bust, by bankrupt and
failed companies. This was also true of the early automobile industry.
There were nearly 300 automobile companies in Detroit in 1900. A few
years later, there were only a dozen or so. Even the once-dominant Ford
Motor Company was Henry Ford’s third attempt to making a successful
automobile manufacturing firm. Let’s not even talk about Silicon
Valley – one reason the place is a luxuriant hothouse of startups and
successful ventures is that Silicon Valley also represents an industrial
version of the Cambrian explosion, with life forms blossoming and
withering in micro-seconds on the evolutionary time scale.

Toyota Way, lean process, and Deming’s Fourteen Principles represent
incremental innovation. Henry Ford and Steve Jobs represented radical
innovation, though you can argue that Ford moved from radical innovation
to rent seeking through market lock-in, while much of Jobs’s success
involved incremental innovation and improvement to originally radical
products.

There are probably ways to innovate that represent a mix – but these
also involve finding ways to embed new ideas, products, and services in
the mind and behavior of users. Goran Roos (2012) puts it nicely:

“The most common objective of design in the innovation process is to
change the behavior of individuals who use a designed artifact in such a
way that the user perceives that his new behavior improves his life. As
a consequence, when the user adopts the new behavior, the provider of
the designed artifact also becomes better off, as do other members of
the ecosystem surrounding the product or service. … The Apple iPhone is
a good example of this is. Users of this artifact change their behavior
due to the user interface and the capabilities of the iPhone. One aspect
of this new behavior includes buying and using applications as well as
increasing data use. As a consequence, the user feels better off. So do
telecom operators, application providers, and Apple itself as a producer
and business model innovator.”

Designers use three routes to shape behavioral change: they enabling
desirable behavior by making the behavior easier for the user than
alternate behaviors; they motivate users to modify or change behavior
through education, incentives, attitude change, or other mechanisms;
they sometimes push users to desirable behavior by making alternate
behaviors impossible, difficult, or prohibitively expensive in economic
or social terms. Is this good or bad? Both. If by innovation we mean
finding ways to induce people to buy hula hoops or change their phones
every season, I say it is bad. If by innovation, we mean finding better
ways to persuade people to stop smoking or use computers more
effectively, I’d say it is good.

We often do not think deeply enough about how or why we innovate. In
this sense, Rosan has it quite right when she writes, “what troubles
me is that this aspiration and the drive toward new-market disruptions
are seen as more valuable and appealing.”

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 |
Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design

References:

Roos, Göran. 2012. “Introducing Strategic Design.” Strategic Design
Letter. Melbourne, Australia: Swinburne University of Technology Faculty
of Design. [In press.]

See also: Roos, Göran. 2011. “How to Get Paid Twice for Everything
You Do. Part 1: Integrated Innovation Management.” Ericsson Business
Review, Issue No. 2, 2011, pp. 55-57; Roos, Göran. 2011. “How to Get
Paid Twice for Everything You Do. Part 2: Value−appropriating
Innovations.” Ericsson Business Review, Issue No. 3, 2011, pp. 56-61;
ICS Ltd. 2010. Victorian Design Roadmap Project. Report Prepared for the
Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development of Victoria,
April 2010.

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Rosan Chow wrote:

—snip—

I was a bit taken aback by such a view. First, is it really true that
the most ‘innovative designers’ find new-market disruptive
innovation more appealing than low-end ones? Even if it is true, is it a
good thing? The rhetoric of design(er)’s ability to create new
‘things’ that people never imagined or dreamed of has been around
for a while. The first time I heard it came from Mies van der Rohe. This
is certainly an aspiration that should not be denied or undermined. But
what troubles me is that this aspiration and the drive toward new-market
disruptions are seen as more valuable and appealing.

—snip—

Don Norman wrote:

—snip—

We argue that yes, design classes and designers love disruptive
innovation, which is what radical innovation leads to. That is what IDEO
and Frog and (name your favorite large design house) pitch to their
clients. We argue, that design research leads only to incremental
innovation, which is actually a lot more common and a lot more
successful.

—snip—