It caught my attention that Design Sojourn posted a new post claiming that User Centered Innovation is dead. User Centered Innovation, which famed IDEO and structures a number of industrial design programs, was seemingly placed in the obituary section prematurely.
My take on this issue would be, design and innovation had always been a pretty much debated issue. There are many schools of thoughts, and each are pretty much geographically and demographically separated. No single perspective would fit all designers/ business thinkers and not all projects could be untaken using a single framework.
Having read Roberto Verganti’s Design Driven Innovation, it was pretty much from an Italian design’s perspective. Truly, Italian design is successful and unique, but too much of particular style of design would kill the framework eventually.
Most firms quoted in the book are firms that produce niche products which are not as technology intensive as compared to most of IDEO’s clients. It is true that products and innovation requires support from a design perspective, but other aspects like user usability, manufacturability, marketability and financial viability are important factors.
User Centered Innovation may seem like a form of incremental innovation, but looking into Boston Consulting Group’s Growth-share analysis, it is what that turn stars into cash cows. Most award winning and best selling designs are not designs that are radically different, but designs that communicates its use best.
Design Driven Innovation would be particularly fueled by markets that are invariably niche, which carries a huge potential for exceptional profit per unit sold, but application of such design strategy company-wide might not present the most attractive P&L.
User Centered Innovation on the other hand, I see as being more adaptable. It could be applied after the company applied Design Driven Innovation on a particular product line to improve on its usability and manufacturability. This form of innovation could be untaken radically too, as the framework could be used to create a radical product, leveraging on similar target groups, their habits, previous knowledge and articulation of visual/ auditory elements.
Both innovation frameworks could, and should be used side by side in projects with a pinch of salt from business strategies to foolproof and meld out a better product/ service. New strategies and frameworks descend periodically but what matters most is the articulation of such processes. New strategies and frameworks do not die out, but are better supplemented with new ones.
That’s probably the reason why people still read The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1776).
