Thoughts on this Review: It seems a bit odd to review a  book review, but it seemed important to offer an opinion in this case..  Overall, Witzel seems to give a pretty solid overview of the book. However, in what seems to be an attempt to belittle the Design Thinking process that the book outlines, Witzel says that this is a rehash of old concepts that date back to the 1800′s.  I assume (maybe incorrectly) that Morgen Witzel has read the book that he references, but I do not agree with the comparison and conclusion.  I have included a link to the book in the article below for those of you who have A LOT of time to read pages of very detailed manufacturing issues.  The concept that Babbage introduced in that book was one of strict and detailed systematic analysis – not design as Martin makes the case for in his book. While Morgan Witzel is a very respected historian and business author, I think the “added” information in the review takes away from his credibility as a reviewer on this topic.

Original Article HERE (via) LA Times

What makes innovation work isn’t really a mystery…

The idea that a systematic approach to design is key to success isn’t as novel as ‘The Design of Business’ may make it seem — the concept was introduced in the 1800s. Still, the book is worth a read.

How McDonald’s Corp. got its start is discussed in “The Design of Business.” In the 1950s, the McDonald brothers figured out what American families wanted to eat when they went out for the evening: a simple, quick and tasty meal. (Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times / March 12, 2009)

By Morgen Witzel November 9, 2009

What distinguishes truly innovative businesses?

Over the years, we have been told that innovative companies master the art of knowledge management; focus on their core competencies; get close to and listen to customers; have a long-term strategy for innovation and invest in the future; or are superior in identifying disruptive technologies.

Now, in “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage” comes a new idea, or what purports to be one. Roger L. Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, argues that the key to success is design, or what he calls “design thinking.”

This attempts to harness the creative talents within a business and give them a focus toward a goal. Traditionally, says Martin, businesses have relied on one of two models of creative thinking.

The first is the analytical model, in which companies invest heavily in formal analysis of environmental trends, new markets and so on and try to predict where the world is going.

The second is the intuitive model, in which managers trust their instincts and feelings and develop innovations they think will work based on a kind of educated guesswork.

Martin says that “neither analysis nor intuition alone is enough. Rather than forcing a binary choice to drive out either analysis or intuition, the burden of this book is to reconcile the two modes of thought.” The rest of the book aims to extract the best from both methods to combine them in a new model called the “knowledge funnel,” which comprises three stages — illustrated by Martin in the opening chapter by telling how McDonald’s Corp. got its start.

The first stage concerns broad-based, often highly intuitive thinking in which people ponder questions and suggest answers. Martin terms this stage “the mystery,” or the thing we cannot explain.

The second stage is the development of “a rule of thumb that helps narrow the field of inquiry and work the mystery down to a manageable size.”

The third stage is the algorithm, a formal system for managing knowledge and getting innovation to the market. At this point, intuitive thinking ceases, and it is all about system and process.

In the 1950s, the McDonald brothers sought to figure out what American families wanted to eat when they went out for the evening. After experimenting with formats, they came up with a rule of thumb: Americans want a simple, quick and tasty meal.

Enter Ray Kroc, who formed a partnership with the brothers and developed a formal system for rolling out the concept to restaurants across the U.S. and then around the world — the algorithm.

Later, Martin shows how companies such as Apple Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. have used this system to good effect — Apple to stay at the cutting edge of product development; P&G to refresh its customer offerings and make its products more attractive.

On the face of it, this looks like a good system. Start with the intuitive understanding, then use a combination of intuitive and rational methods to map out a design concept and translate this into a product or service, then use formal systems thinking to roll it out.

The discerning reader may well be saying, “So what?” Although the book uses contemporary examples, the idea that a systematic approach to design is essential to business success was argued persuasively by Charles Babbage in “On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures” in the 1830s.

Should that put you off reading the book? No — old ideas still have value. In fact, for readers interested in the processes of design and of translating innovations from concepts from product to market, there are some interesting bits of detail and discussions on how exactly this is done.

Morgen Witzel is a frequent contributor to the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.

Overview of Article:

Redefining a Profession

LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. “Oh, I don’t know,” drawled the designer. “Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package… I’ll call you then.”

Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike’s sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, “Change by Design.” “Few designers today would even touch this type of project,” he writes of Loewy’s assignment. “What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter.”

He’s kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I’d like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown.

Born in Britain, Mr. Brown is now the president and chief executive officer of IDEO, a design group based in Palo Alto, California. His book?’s objective is summed up by its subtitle: to demonstrate “How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation.” He marshals lots of examples of how this works in practice, although his underlying theme is as much about how design itself is changing, as how it effects change in other industries.

When Mr. Brown, 47, started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things, such as the widgets he developed in his first project for a machinery manufacturer, or visual ones, like the graphics on a Lucky Strike packet. Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school “design,” which he regards as “technology-centered,” to the “human-centered” discipline of “design thinking” — a term coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop tech products for clients in Silicon Valley.

Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is “about more than style.” In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.

For IDEO’s designers, this has meant working in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers, computer programmers, marketers and behavioral scientists. One design thinking project involved developing a new type of low-tech weekend bicycle — named “coasting” — for Shimano, the Japanese cycle components maker, to persuade the adult Americans who had loved riding their bikes as kids to take up cycling again, rather than developing a dazzling new bicycle as old-school designers would have done.

Another project encouraged the nurses employed by Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. health care group, to work out how to improve the care of patients by redesigning their own schedules. A third analyzed people’s spending habits to invent a new Bank of America service that helps them to save by rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar and depositing the difference in a “Keep the Change” account, just like throwing spare coins into a change jar. IDEO’s teams of design thinkers have also worked on projects for nonprofit organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S. government campaigns, as well as on conventional product design and branding programs.

Mr. Brown gives glimpses of what it’s like to work at IDEO. He recalls an executive from the furniture company, Steelcase, sinking into a snazzy-looking chair only for it to collapse. (It was a painstakingly detailed $40,000 foam prototype, not the real thing.) He also recounts the horror of the lead designer on the development of an Oral-B toothbrush, when he spotted one of his products washed up on a deserted Californian beach, six months after the launch. And what designer wouldn’t relate to his description of how: “I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, ‘Give me the next (Apple) iPod,’ but it’s probably pretty close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond (under their breath), ‘Give me the next (Apple ceo) Steve Jobs.”’

There is a danger of books like this deteriorating into sales pitches, as their designer-authors trot out examples of their companies’ prowess. But Mr. Brown writes with a winning combination of thoughtfulness, pragmatism and enthusiasm. IDEO looms large, but the references are relevant, and interspersed with descriptions of successful exercises by other companies, from the development of the Netflix online movie store, to that of United Airlines’s Premium Service between San Francisco and New York.

Mr. Brown also puts design thinking into a historical context by explaining how some of his design heroes practiced it, albeit unknowingly. Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great 19th-century British engineer, who designed the bridges, viaducts and tunnels of the Great Western Railway in southwest England and Wales, not only as spectacular structures, but to make passengers feel as if they were “floating across the countryside.” They still do.

Critically, he avoids the trap of presenting design thinking as a panacea. Mr. Brown charts its failures as well as successes, and sees confusingly designed Web sites and dysfunctional help lines, as the latterday equivalents of the Industrial Revolution’s “dark satanic mills.” Nor does he pretend that it is easy. Instead, he depicts it as a messy, uncertain, often inconclusive process, albeit one that is more fun, and much more productive than tweaking cigarette packets.

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: Matthew is one of the important voices in the Design Thinking community.  His views and recommendations are worth listening to.

Original Post HERE: From Open Forum/ Idea Hub

This is the year that Design Thinking tipped as a full-fledged management approach. The wave has been building for a few years and now seems to be cresting, as indicated by the spate of new books on the subject. Of the many books coming out, here’s my list of picks to round out your D-Think library. (While all are new this year, not all are out yet.)

• A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business by Harmut Esslinger (Jossey-Bass, June 29, 2009). Hartmut Esslinger is the founder of frog design, a leading global innovation firm. He is also one of the most respected designers and business consultants in the world, having spent forty years helping build the world’s most recognizable brands, such as Sony, Louis Vuitton, Lufthansa, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Microsoft, and Apple. Most consider him one of the key catalysts of the design revolution. His book shows how he and his firm build creative design into the framework of an organization’s competitive strategy and gives the reader a step-by-step overview of the innovation process. Esslinger reveals how to arrive at a design that reflects an intense human experience that will connect strongly with consumers.
• Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti (Harvard Business School Press, August 3, 2009). Roberto Verganti is Professor of Management at Innovationat Politecnico di Milano and the founder of Project Science, a consulting institute that advises global corporations on the management of strategic innovation. Roberto authored the popular article “Innovating Through Design,” published in the Harvard Business Review December 2006 issue.
• Change By Design: How Design Thinking Tranforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown (HarperBusiness, September 29, 2009). Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO. According to Stanford professor and author Bob Sutton, “Tim Brown has written the definitive book on design thinking. Brown’s wit, experience, and compelling stories create a delightful journey. His masterpiece captures the emotions, mindset, and methods required for designing everything from a product, to an experience, to a strategy in entirely different ways.”
• The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin (Harvard Business School Press, November 9, 2009). Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a professor of strategic management at the school. He has written widely on the intersection of design and business. You can download a free PDF of his Rotman Journal article here.
• Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, edited by Thomas Lockwood (Allworth Press, 3rd edition, November 10, 2009). Thomas Lockwood is president of the Design Management Institute (DMI), as well as being the publisher of DMI’s Design Management Review and Design Management Journal. This book is an anthology of essays, intriguing case studies, and practical advice from industry experts. It’s organized into three sections which focus on the use of design for innovation and brand-building, the emerging role of service design, and the design of meaningful customer experiences.

I also suggest two more titles that aren’t about Design Thinking but focus on two critical ingredients of good design process management: collaboration and motivation.

• Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten Hansen (Harvard Business School Press, May 11, 2009). Morten Hansen is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and INSEAD in France, as well as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. According to Jim Collins, “This book represents the culmination of fifteen years of some of the best research on the topic of effective collaboration. It does not matter whether you lead a business, conduct an orchestra, guide a school, operate a hospital, command a brigade, run for public office, direct a government agency, or coach a sports team—every complex enterprise requires collaboration.”
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink (Riverhead Hardcover, December 29, 2009). Just in time for the New Year, this book by Dan Pink promises some great new insights into the drivers of creativity—namely autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Dan’s bestselling book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future is probably the first widely-read and accepted take on design thinking, before the concept actually had a label. To get a sneak peak at Drive, take a look at Dan’s recent TED talk.

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and blogs here. You can follow him on Twitter here.