Dear Don,

Your post and your article with Roberto Verganti make two slightly different points.

Your post says that the Dutch funding agency is completely wrong with respect to funding applied research for innovation. Your article says that the kind of research that the Dutch agency wants to fund leads to incremental innovation.

The article is right.

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/incremental_and_radi.html

In the article, you even argue for the kinds of applied research that lead to incremental innovation, “invaluable as a way of improving the product and enhancing its appeal” (Norman and Verganti 2013: 4).

Nearly all the examples I provided to Karel were cases of incremental innovation. Incremental innovation has many uses. These uses include saving and extending resources under economic constraints; mastering or attempting to approach mastery of existing technologies – vital in cases of massive sunk costs; doing what we do significantly better. This accounts for the success of Kaizen, Toyota, and Deming management methods. In a world often typified by waste, incremental innovation has many virtues.

But incremental innovation necessarily embraces the past, and this is visible in most design studio work, anchored, as it is in the artisan craft guild tradition. It is also visible in the centuries-long evolutionary innovation process that Henry Petroski (1994) describes.

In contrast, your elegant model of radical innovation offers a significant reconceptualization. I’d like to frame this in the context of another great Norman piece, your article on “Why Design Education Must Change” (2010).

Having read the 2013 article before, one profound issue caught my eye. You describe two kinds of innovation. This is a classic distinction, one noted in most of the innovation literature to which I referred (Friedman 2001: 25-26). The problem in most of the innovation literature is that it is possible to analyze the problem without reaching toward a solution. Roberto’s book (Verganti 2009) and your article demonstrate convincingly that these are two different conceptual spaces, and this suggests that there is no way to leap from incremental innovation to radical innovation. The difference is a difference between two conceptual ecologies, the one involving “Improvements within a given frame of solutions (‘doing better what we already do’)” and the other “A change of frame (‘doing what we did not do before’)” (Norman and Verganti 2013: 5).

To understand the deep and radical nature of radical innovation requires a kind of background knowledge and deep understanding of the world – as well as an ability to reach out to work together – with all of the many kinds of people with whom one might innovate as a designer. This is where your Core77 blog (Norman 2010) is linked to your new article with Roberto: design education doesn’t often help design students to develop the range of skills and background knowledge required for radical innovation, and it doesn’t afford them the habits of mind required to be able to sort genuine innovation from surface appearances – or even to understand when things do and don’t work.

As you write, “Radical innovation is the center of attention of design studies, where it is taught in design schools, and advocated by people discussing innovation and ‘design thinking.’ It is what everyone wants, but in fact, successful radical innovation is surprisingly rare” (Norman and Berganti 2013: 6). While you can’t say that design schools are less likely to be sources of radical innovation than other schools, I can say that they are generally unlikely to do better. For every Technological University of Delft or Loughborough University where people hit the sweet spot to a degree that rises above average, there are a dozen schools where people ignore the fact that many of the nice-looking things they create don’t work at all.

To me, this involves two paradoxical issues. You nail the first in the Core77 blog: a better education. To innovate in a radical sense or to create a new frame, designers must know enough about the old frames to step outside them. Now here, I’m ready to agree that no one can tell where a radical innovation might come from or how it might work – anyone from one of Eric Von Hippel’s lead users to a hospital patient unhappy with a bedside table to a kindergarten student playing with clay might contribute to a radical innovation. For professional designers to understand what is happening when this happens to take the next step, design professionals require a better education. The reason that few design schools prepare designers capable of radical innovation is that they cater to design students who tend to be concerned with their own genius while knowing too little about the world in which a radical innovation must find a place.

Before getting to the second paradox, I’ll point to a radical innovator in another field whose radical innovations support the model you and Roberto posit. This is Albert Einstein.

While I could point to several Einstein examples, I want to suggest a specific innovation to demonstrate the nature of placing the innovative structure in a new ecology through conceptual reframing.

Einstein built his 1905 paper on Brownian motion on several well known and long-established physical and chemical facts. What made this paper radical was that he looked at issues long known to many thousands of scientists, but saw within them a new kind of meaning. Subjecting well known observations and empirical data to a new conceptual framework, Einstein (1998 [1905]: 71-98) explained Brownian motion. In doing so, he also resolved a major question in physics by demonstrating that atomic theory was a description of physical reality rather than a heuristic account. While this answered a question that was 2,500 years old, Einstein also answered a question that physicists were unable to answer in the decades preceding this paper. This question was important enough to shape considerable controversy among leading scientists of the time: are atoms real or are they merely useful in making equations work?

This gets back to the Core77 essay: this kind of deep radical innovation on the part of professional innovators demands a deep enough foundation in some fields and a broad but reasonable foundation in others. This is the “T-shaped” individual that we talk about in design schools – but lacking the foundation of a conceptually rigorous education in addition to a creative, artistic education, design schools do not educate T-shapes.

Is there a way to distinguish T-shapes from cranks, a way to distinguish potentially radical innovation from magical thinking? Once again, I’ll refer to Einstein. In an essay titled “how can we be sure that Albert Einstein was not a crank?” physicist Jeremy Bernstein (1993: 15-27) addresses this issue. Bernstein asks how we can distinguish between the idle speculation of crank research and the fruitful speculation of the innovator.

Bernstein proposes two criteria to separate the production of a crank from the real thing. One criterion is “correspondence.” The other is “predictiveness.”

Correspondence involves the ways in which a new proposal melds with prior art, the way in which a new theory explains the earlier theories and models at a deeper and richer level. “I would insist,” writes Bernstein (1993: 18) “that any proposal for a radically new theory in physics, or in any other science, contain a clear explanation of why the precedent science worked. What new domain of experience is being explored by the new science, and how does it meld with the old?”

Now I won’t take this analogy too far – some of the issues involved in the radical innovation you describe in your new article (Norman and Verganti 2013) are not predictable in many respects. Even so, on a physical basis, even the most radical innovation involves some kinds of correspondence and predictiveness. You can’t design something whose radical properties require perpetual motion to work. You can’t design something that works by reversing the arrow of time – at least not with our current knowledge of physics, despite the fact that many equations work the same way in both temporal directions.

What is the case, then, is that the skills and rigorous mindset that we need for incremental innovation also underlie the skills and ability to generate radical innovation. The difference is the ability to reframe. Without understanding how the world is, genuine reframing is difficult, perhaps impossible. A knowledge of the frame is the difference between reframing and fantasy.

You write, “The bottom line is that both forms of innovation are necessary. Radical innovation brings new domains, new paradigms, and creates a potential for major changes. Incremental innovation is how the value of that potential is captured. Without radical innovation, incremental innovation reaches a limit. Without incremental innovation, the potential enabled by radical change is not captured” (Norman and Verganti 2013: 6).

At this point, I’ll conclude with a brief conjecture. Without making a truth claim, I am willing to offer a conjecture on the relationship between incremental and radical innovation that has a great deal to do with design — and with educating designers.

Incremental innovation is common, widely distributed, necessary to social well-being, and essential in making the results of radical innovation workable in daily life. Radical innovation is rare. It involves reframing and placing an indeterminable number of problems, opportunities, and ideas together in a new context. My conjecture is this:

Many people have the skills and capacities necessary for incremental innovation. Few people have the ability to create a new conceptual context within which the reframing of meaning for radical innovation takes place. Few people have the demonstrated capacity for professional engagement in radical innovation. I posit: First, both of these propositions hold true across nearly all professions, including but not limited to design. Second, the kinds of professionals we describe as “T-shaped people” have the capacity to generate radical innovation. Third, those design professionals who are capable of radical innovation as a career path emerge as a small sub-set of those design professionals who master the skills necessary for incremental innovation. I can see counter-arguments to this and exceptions. It seems to me possible to carefully delimit and explain the counter-arguments and exceptions within the reasoned frame of my conjecture. I’m already over 2,000 words, though, so I won’t do it. This is a conjecture, not a truth claim.

There are many “incrementals” and few “radicals.” My conjectural proposition is that the few radicals emerge from the far larger set of incrementals. The deep and broad skills needed for radical innovation on a professional level generally entail the rich skills that also permit incremental innovation.

This brings me back to the concept of correspondence and the patient mastery that Einstein needed to pave the way for his massively radical reframing of physics. Even Einstein did not manage it that often – his work required years of patient struggle, careful study of his predecessors and their physics, all refracted through the lens of David Hume’s philosophy and Euclid’s logical geometry (see: Einstein 1969 [1949], Bernstein 1996, Pais 1982).

Radical innovation is rare, even for radical innovators:

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.” (Cited in Bryson 2003: 123)

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design>    Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China

--

References

Bernstein, Jeremy. 1993. Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos. New York: Basic Books.

Bernstein, Jeremy. 1996. Albert Einstein and the Frontiers of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bryson, Bill. 2003 A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books.

Einstein, Albert. 1969 [1949]. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Albert Einstein. Philosopher-Scientist. Third Edition. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1-94.

Einstein, Albert. 1998 [1905]. Einstein’s Miraculous Year. Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics. Edited and introduced by John Stachel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, Ken. 2001. “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice.” In Design and Technology Educational Research and Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda. E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69. Available at URL:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
(Accessed 2013 May 5)

Norman, Don. 2010. Why Design Education Must Change. Core77, 2010 November 26. Available at URL:

http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp
(Accessed 2013 May 5)

Norman, D. A., and Roberto Verganti. 2013. Incremental and radical innovation: Design research versus technology and meaning change.” Design Issues. [In Press] Pre-print available at URL:

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/incremental_and_radi.html
(Accessed 2013 May 5)

Pais, Abraham. 1982. Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Petroski, Henry. 1994. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Verganti, Roberto. 2009. Design Driven Innovation – Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.




-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------