One of my favorite Guy Kawasaki-isms was “Let a thousand flowers bloom” from his talk/book, Rules for Revolutionaries. The simple idea was that you can’t think of every use of your technology/product, so let it go and see what users with do with it.

End users are a dispersed R&D department, you just need some tools to observe them and potentially integrate some of their iterations back into your development process.

I was reminded of all this while reading this article about user uses of free Internet-based talk technology.

via futuramb …

As we have been developing the Innovation by Design programme, we have purposely taken a user-centered approach to innovation. If you look at the classic venn diagram around design innovation, human values, or user needs, are external to the organisation. Technology and business are very internally focused. P A Martin Börjesson argues that a technology focus operates from a convergent mindset and is less successful at generating innovative solutions. Apparently some research was done at Karlstad University that proves the point:

… a group of users was invited to participate in an innovation process for end user services for mobile phones. During two weeks a large number people divided in test groups were provided with new mobile phones and notebooks to write down ideas about possible new services for that phone that pop up in their daily life. An interesting result was that the test group without technical knowledge outscored the group with technical knowledge both from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. An even more interesting result came from another group consisting of non-technical people, who half-way through the experiment received some education about technical possibilities. After they received their mid-experiment lecture, i.e. learned more about the inner workings, their innovation score dropped.

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Not two words you expect to see together, nonetheless I have been blown away by the ambition of the new TRIL centre (Technology Research for Independent Living). In a joint venture between Intel and the IDA, the team at TRIL are taking design for accessibility to new levels in their approach to some of the most common human problems as we age. They describe themselves as:

“a coordinated collection of research projects addressing the physical, cognitive and social consequences of ageing, all informed by ethnographic research and supported by a shared pool of knowledge and engineering resources.”

I would say that they are taking core design principles and applying them to one of the largest problems we face: the aging population. We really want to work with these people.

It seems uncharitable to carp about such an extraordinary investment in the future of the country but I cannot help but look the proverbial gift horse of the NDP in the mouth.
In the race to invest in R&D it seems that we are forgetting one critical constituent; the user.

Much of the NDP builds on the foundations of the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, an important but dull document. In so doing it focuses quite rightly on the importance of R&D, but as we have observed before, investment in R&D is not sufficient in itself. You need to find ways of making sure that the investment is commercialised in the best way.

Both documents continue to create a technocracy that ignores the user, the human element. Not a short term problem, but it will have an impact on our competitiveness in the long run if we cannot turn world-class R&D into attractive, desirable products and services.

William Gibson’s glorious observation that “the future is already here; it is just not evenly distributed” is one of the best arguments I know for high quality ethnographic research. Undertake enough observation and you will start to get user insights about what the future will be.

Nevertheless, it is always useful to get a helping hand when it comes to predicting the future. I am no great fan of “futurology”; it always seems either too simplistic (extend the trend) or too complex (study the chicken entrails).

Courtesy of those brilliant people at Experientia I was directed to a recent collection of papers called Sigma and Delta foresight scans that look ahead at developments over the next 50 years. The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation’s Horizon Scanning Centre, and complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The papers look forward at emerging trends in science, health and technology. As well as assessing the current state of thinking they also examine the possible implications for society. The sites are clunky but the insights are very sound.

For the second year in a row, Booz Allen Hamilton finds “there are no significant statistical relationships between R&D spending and the primary measures of financial or corporate success: sales and earnings growth, gross and operating profitability, market capitalization growth, and total shareholder returns.”

However the study does report that “effective innovators excel at four key elements. The high-leverage innovators distinguish themselves not by the money they spend, but by building strong capabilities in the four principal elements of innovation: ideation, project selection, product development, and commercialization. High-leverage innovators listen closely to their customers across the entire innovation cycle. Companies such as Stryker and Black & Decker design their innovation strategy around a keen understanding of their end customers’ needs.”

How loud can you say DESIGN THINKING? Design thinking provides context for ideation and deep understanding of end user benefits improves your success at picking the right opportunities. Effective use of design during product development reduces risk & costs. This is the making of design innovation.

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