An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design.
Business thinking is integral to design thinking. A design solution can only benefit from the sophisticated analytical tools — discovery driven planning, option and portfolio theory, prospect theory, customer life-time value — that have evolved in the business sector. The unforgiving world of business can help design teams think responsibly about constraints, even as designers test those constraints as a project moves along. In prototyping an e-banking concept, for instance, an interaction designer might observe that the assumed source of revenue, advertising, would compromise the quality of the user experience. A business-oriented designer on the team might respond by evaluating alternatives, such as subscription or referral fees. This collaborative process allows everyone to assess the “viability” component of the innovation equation in creative ways, not merely as an after-the-fact market analysis.
Above matrix can help evaluate the innovation efforts within an organisation. Companies can use this to get a good picture of their innovation efforts.
Projects in bottom-left Q — tend to be incremental in nature. Majority of a company’s effort is likely to be put into this type of innovation, which might include the extension of a successful brand or the next iteration of a current product.
Evolutionary innovation might involve adapting an existing product so that it can be manufactured at a lower cost and thus marketed to a wider population. Ex: Tata Nano.
The most challenging type of innovation — and the riskiest — is that in which both the product and the users are new. A revolutionary innovation creates entirely new markets, but this happens only rarely. Ex: iPod. Segway, by contrast, was a failure.
A company’s best defense is to diversify its portfolio by investing across all four quadrants of the innovation matrix.
CONCLUDING
Design thinking is unlikely to become an exact science, but there is an opportunity to transform it from a black art into a systematically applied management approach. The trick is to do this without sucking the life out of the creative process — to balance management’s legitimate requirement for stability, efficiency and predictability with the design thinker’s need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation. The objective should be Integration: holding these conflicting demands in tension while we create innovations, and indeed companies, that are more powerful than either of them.
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