Around the globe, design is making a splash in the development of better business.
“Like an old Cadillac.” That’s how a member of a market-research focus group described Motorola’s cell phones, circa 2001. And their competitors’ phones? “Like a BMW or an Audi.” Ouch. This unfl attering comparison—and its presumable connection to Motorola’s then stagnant 14 percent worldwide market share to Nokia’s then 36 percent—helped prompt the company to focus more on design. It restructured its design team and moved it to a sparkling new downtown Chicago offi ce. After taking the helm in 2004, CEO Ed Zander began routinely dropping by the design department to participate in product decisions, and says he expects design to be a main driver of product development.
Five years later, the downtown offi ce, dubbed “Moto City,” has the feeling of a corporate nerve center—access to sensitive areas denied to all but a handful of employees—and the company’s market position has been nothing short of transformed: by mid-2006, Motorola had 22 percent of the global market and was on track to sell 200 million phones for the year, led by the iconic success of the sleek, fashionable, and nearly impossibly thin RAZR (“razor”).
Jim Wicks, head of Motorola’s consumer product design group, explains the strategy behind the new phones. “The intent was to start with the basic silhouette, and then get deeper into the character, attributes, and lines of the device,” says Wicks. “[As you get closer] you see the aluminum and magnesium keypad, [and] feel the signature soft touch. Then you see the way the user interface works, how it directly connects to Yahoo! or Google, how it plays music. The result is that whether you’re three meters away or it’s in the palm of your hand, it stands for Motorola.”
“Companies know how to make just about anything...but they often lack a framework for determining what should be made.” —Patrick Whitney
Motorola’s recent innovations are about more than simply a coolerlooking phone; they’re about designing an entire user experience of seamless connectivity. While the word “innovation” usually conjures up associations of R&D labs, new high-tech gadgets, and scientists with cartoon light bulbs turning on over their heads, it can also include more abstract things—a new business idea, a new service or brand, or a combination of the above into a seamless new experience.
The continued prominence of Harvard b-school innovation guru Clayton Christianson, author of 1997’s remarkably successful The Innovator’s Dilemma, and new publications like BusinessWeek’s “INside Innovation” suggest that innovation is more than a passing corporate fad. And yet, despite its popularity, innovation continues to be an almost entirely unplanned activity. “[Almost] all fi rms are plumb lousy at it,” says Larry Keeley, president of innovation strategy fi rm Doblin and a part-time instructor at IIT’s Institute of Design (ID).
“Some facts can help here. The average fi rm succeeds at innovation a mere 4 percent of the time.” This is symptomatic of an activity Keeley says has reached “about the same state as medicine had when leeches were a primary form of treatment.”
So where do managers turn when they want their organizations to innovate reliably? Keeley, and his students and fellow faculty at IIT, offer one possible answer: the world of design.
Design—the creation and shaping of the products, communications, services, and environments of society—has been around for a long time. Its present form can be traced back to the drafting tables of early-twentieth century manufacturers, where the designer’s role was to style products, advertising, and packaging to appeal to mass markets. In the interim years, however, as the global economy has shifted from mass markets to ever-more segmented local ones, the designer’s role has shifted as well. No longer content with styling existing products, a growing number of designers are applying their skills to a more fundamental problem: figuring out what to make in the first place.
For Patrick Whitney, ID director and Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor, this “what to make gap” [see sidebar] is a primary raison-d’etre of the modern design profession. Whitney often treats visitors to ID to an impromptu lecture on the concept. “Companies know how to make just about anything,” he says, sketching the gap diagram on the nearest whiteboard, “but they often lack a framework for determining what should be made.” According to Whitney, this gap between what producers know how to make and what consumers actually need and like, is exactly what design can fill.
The skill-set of trained designers—analyzing problems from a human-centered point of view, developing solutions through successive prototypes, and conveying messages with maximum clarity and effectiveness—is essentially an approach to creative problem solving. Design thinking applied to the problem of making music portable, for example, led Apple not only to a successful product—the iPod—but also to a piece of software, iTunes, and the fi rst viable business model for selling music legally online.
This kind of strategic design is nothing new. In the 1950s and 1960s, ID, under then-director Jay Doblin, helped pioneer this application of design to business problems. And a few smart companies have used design strategically at least since Josiah Wedgwood industrialized the nineteenthcentury London pottery business, bringing mass production to what had been, literally, a cottage industry. Until recently, though, strategic design was not a common industry practice; but there are signs this is beginning to change.
“Nobody is educating prospective managers in how to think differently. That’s exactly what we can do.” —Harvey Kahalas
“The emergence of China and India [as global economic powers],” wrote a 2005 BusinessWeek editorial, “will force every single major corporation in [the West] to choose between offering ever lower-cost, lower-value goods, or innovating to create new, higher-cost, highervalue goods.” It went on, “[But] how do you generate profi table innovation? [We’ve] been hard at work for decades churning out numbers-oriented, metricmeasuring, linear-focused executives who are much better at managing costs than managing imagination. So where should executives go to learn how to turn themselves and their companies into great innovators?”
Six months later, BusinessWeek answered its own question, coining a new term— “d-schools”— to describe a small group of design schools offering innovation managers a serious alternative to traditional M.B.A.s. Among them were IIT’s Institute of Design and Stanford’s newly formed Hasso Platner Institute of Design; several others have since joined the list. And a barrage of press coverage in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Newsweek and elsewhere has led many managers of innovation to discover strategic design.
One of those managers is Doug Look (M.D.M. ’06), a product manager who got an early taste for user research while working for AutoDesk, Inc., maker of AutoCAD and other leading design automation software. “We were out there speaking to customers, understanding their needs, helping refine new products,” recalls Look. But the company’s methods were focused on validating existing concepts, not generating new ones. “Then I read some articles in BusinessWeek and thought, ‘Wow, that sounds a lot like what we’re doing, but it’s taking it another step.’”
ID’s Master of Design Methods (M.D.M.) degree was created in 2003, partly as a way of teaching design thinking to the large number of innovation professionals who, like Look, aren’t in traditional design roles. It’s a two-semester crash course in design methods for business, and enrollment has doubled annually since it was created.
In 2006, ID launched another program combining business and design: a threeyear Master of Design/M.B.A. dual degree, offered with IIT’s Stuart School of Business. Harvey Kahalas, Stuart’s dean, says the program addresses a growing need. “Many recruiters have said to me, ‘I know where to get traditional M.B.A.s. I know the top schools,’” says Kahalas. “‘But those schools are educating people to practice continuous improvement in what they’re already doing—nobody is educating prospective managers in how to think differently.’ That’s exactly what we can do.”
As the traditional M.B.A. becomes a commodity degree and employers seek experts in the fuzzy practice of innovation, many young professionals are turning to design (or design- fl avored) education to advance their careers.
Back at Moto City, Brad Nemer (M.Des./M.B.A. ’04) swipes his corporate keycard and enters the restricted access area. Although he has a backstage pass of sorts to the top-secret design department, Nemer, despite his degree, doesn’t consider himself a designer. A product portfolio manager, he works “upstream” from design in the product development process. Still, Nemer sees himself as a catalyst for good design at Motorola. “I can infl uence the life or death of a product in a way I couldn’t from the design department,” he points out. “Part of it is business thinking, like how many customers are there, how many can we reach, how much will it cost to reach them. But the other part is that what makes a great phone is 80 percent design. Design is so important [because] the user experience is so important.”
Nemer is blunt, however. Without the M.B.A., he wouldn’t have the job. “The baseline [for working here] is a business background. But it is a huge edge to be conversant in design and be sensitive to those issues.” As global competition for the hearts and minds of consumers continues to grow, businesses are starting to recognize the value of user-centered design strategy, and the new breed of professionals who know how to practice it.