The third innovation: design-driven innovation

What is the success rate of business innovation? What gaps hinder the success of innovation? What is "the third innovation"? How to cross the gap through "the third innovation"?

In view of the above problems, the following contents may bring you some inspiration and thinking.

As a business innovation consultant, my job is to understand, analyze and solve all kinds of innovation problems faced by business.

In the past, I contacted innovation managers from medical, manufacturing, finance, cultural and creative industries and cultural tourism industries, and together with them, I solved the following innovation challenges with design thinking, such as:

"How to create explosive products of smart home appliances?"

"How to understand the needs and pain points of tourists in detail, and design the tourism and holiday destinations that tourists can really enjoy for the six product lines of eating, living, traveling, traveling, shopping and entertainment?"

"How to build an innovation system, give the R&D team stronger innovation ability, and continue to lead the transformation of precious metal cultural and creative industries?"

"How to use artificial intelligence to integrate the portraits and opinions of well-known doctors in the field of cancer, and finally provide patients with valuable products and services?"

Our customers are engaged in different industries and business models and provide different products and services. But in fact, they all have a topic of common concern, namely:

"How can we be more competitive in China and even in the international market through systematic, efficient and fruitful innovation?"

Is it easy to find the blue ocean? Clay M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School who died some time ago, mentioned in his book that there are 30,000 new products listed every year in the world, but 90% of them eventually fail, which is still the statistics of products that have been successfully listed.

Let's look at another data. This is CB insight's analysis of the cause of death of 10 1 startup. No market demand ranked first, with a proportion as high as 42%.

Therefore, considering the unlisted products and listed products, it can be seen from the data that the success rate of enterprise innovation is about 5%, including incremental innovation (micro-innovation) and subversive innovation.

If we only look at subversive innovation, its failure rate is extremely high, 3000 ideas = a commercial success. It can be seen that innovation is a matter with high risk rate. Only a few enterprises can really discover the blue ocean.

Four innovation gaps

Combined with my years of practical experience in innovative projects, the reasons for this phenomenon can be summarized as four insurmountable innovation gaps.

The impact of this epidemic is global. I also want to talk to you about the classic cases of innovation failure all over the world. We should study failure first to avoid failure.

Gap one

The gap between product and demand

In many cases, this gap is not the product design itself, but "users want to eat watermelons and enterprises sell apples." The product does not really meet the needs of users.

As early as 2003, not all of us used mobile phones to play games. Two different devices are still needed: one for playing games and the other for making phone calls.

Nokia's N-Gage tried to combine mobile phones with games, but users didn't buy it: first of all, it was ugly, but the price was not low, 300 dollars a set; When you want to change the game, the user needs to take off the back cover and take out the battery.

In order to integrate multiple functions, N-Gage has to balance them all, so each function is not so extreme, and the product does not hit the needs of users. This innovative product, which was highly anticipated at that time, was cancelled by Nokia several years later.

Its competing Nintendo game console is really praised by users. In June 2006, Nintendo launched the wii series game consoles. This game machine has original somatosensory operation, and players can realize the operation in virtual games through physical movements. For example, you can play tennis by waving your arms in the game. This immersive experience hits the needs of users and is very popular.

Gap 2

The gap between service and real experience

Nowadays, enterprises pay more and more attention to the value of intangible services, but service design is a professional field. Once the design is not in place, the service provided by the enterprise will deviate from the real experience of the customer, and the customer will not buy it.

Video consumption is the highlight of cultural and entertainment consumption. Blu-ray DVD headed by Sony and HD DVD headed by Toshiba have experienced a protracted war in this huge market.

In a series of battles, the Blu-ray camp finally won the support of more content producers and gained an advantage. In order to save the decline of high-definition discs, Toshiba announced a sharp reduction in its retail price by as much as 50%, further weakening the profitability of the new generation of DVD products.

When Sony-led Blu-ray Disc finally won, what was waiting for Sony was not excess profits, but missed business opportunities.

Because users still need so many steps to play Blu-ray DVD movies, they will eventually vote for a better service experience. When VOD completely abandons the unnecessary actions of taking out and putting in discs, the playback service becomes a one-click VOD.

Therefore, VOD has completely subverted the video broadcasting industry by simplifying the service process, and the leader of subversion is Netflix, the world's largest paid video website.

In a short time, there are fewer and fewer users of CDs, whether DVD or winning Blu-ray DVD. Nowadays, many notebook computer manufacturers no longer regard the optical drive as a standard configuration. So when the two groups were fighting for the next generation DVD standard, they had no idea that the ultimate winner was not in this DVD storage field at all.

Only by crossing the gap between service and real experience can we truly grasp the direction of innovation.

Gap three

The gap between technology and market

In the early days of Google Glass, there were thousands of users as "explorers", which looked cool. But on the one hand, users can't find a suitable usage scenario for this product, on the other hand, it is easy to attract criticism from people around them.

Robert Scoble, a well-known American technology blogger, once listed nine reasons why Google Glass was doomed to fail after eight months of trial. Most of the reasons are not the Google Glass technology itself, but the lack of user experience and the limited distribution, testing and purchase channels of applications.

The most prominent thing is that it may invade personal privacy. It is equipped with a camera. With such equipment, it is easier than ever to take candid photos, which makes many people feel uncomfortable.

Besides, its user experience in China is also very bad. Due to great restrictions, Google core services such as navigation and Google Now cannot be used in China. This belongs to not thinking completely from the user's point of view. Technology is out of touch with the market.

Gap 4

The gap between organizational vision and practice

The gap between organizational vision and practice, to put it bluntly, is that management and grass-roots and middle-level ideas can not be consistent, and everyone says one thing and thinks another.

Every department of a big company has its own KPI, and the wall between departments is hard to break. Many big companies closed down, not because they were crushed by their rivals, but because their own organizations were closed and their personnel were lazy. Watching its buildings rise and its tall buildings collapse.

Kodak Company, the full name of Eastman Kodak Company, was once the largest manufacturer and supplier of film imaging products and related services in the world. Due to the decline in performance, the multinational giant had to file for bankruptcy protection on 20 12 to restructure its debt and business.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when people mentioned "film", they would think of Kodak. It was the most glorious era of Kodak, and the Kodak brand almost monopolized the entire photography market and was rated as the most valuable commercial brand in the world. In any case, news such as bankruptcy can't seem to be associated with Kodak.

Did Kodak fail because it was not good at innovation?

In fact, Kodak is one of the most innovative and pioneering enterprises. Kodak once owned more than 10,000 patents, including film, color film, film portable camera and "fool" camera. Even many analyses about Kodak reported that the world's first digital camera was invented by Kodak, but it failed in the process of transition from film to digital technology.

Later, when digital photography has become a popular technology, Kodak finally adjusted its organizational structure and set up an independent digital camera department. Kodak hopes to let the digital camera department run independently and strive to rebuild the glory of its film era.

But any organization has organizational inertia, and the inherent departmental assessment will hinder the new reform of the system. For example, Kodak's digital camera department tries to control the sales channels of digital products, but these efforts have caused tension between the digital camera department and the original channel organization and the original ecosystem, including dealers and retailers.

This inertia is enormous, because Kodak has about 8,000 retail washing shops in Chinese mainland market around 2002. This is a huge ecosystem. As an advocate and supporter of film technology, such an eco-store has played a powerful escort role, and any effort to subvert such an ecosystem will inevitably suffer from its resistance. ?

To sum up, there are four major gaps in innovation: the products and services in the front desk, and the organization and technology in the middle and back office. The emergence of these four gaps mainly stems from the following two points:

There is no "doing the right thing"

This stems from the deep insight and deficiency of human needs, and innovation is superficial.

There is no "doing things right"

This stems from the lack of good methods for effective cooperation among innovation teams, and it is difficult for innovation to land.

How to cross the gap of innovation?

Let's talk about different ways of innovation first.

Traditionally, innovation mainly comes from two ways: one is subversive innovation that realizes product performance leap with the help of technological breakthrough.

The second is gradual innovation based on market analysis and various micro-innovations. The first kind of subversive innovation is actually the abbreviation of subversive "technical" innovation.

These two innovations pay more attention to the practicality, market share and sales volume of products, but lack innovations that really aim at the inherent meaning of products and services and the user experience of the whole link.

For a long time in the past, it seems that these two innovation models have become the whole of enterprise innovation. However, with the advent of the era of experience economy, the gap of innovation began to appear.

The third innovation mode I am talking about today: design-driven innovation. The essence of design is to create new design language (meaning), thus promoting product innovation.

What is its value?

DMI (American Institute of International Design Management) published a research report on design value in 20 13. The report shows that the business performance of design-driven enterprises is 228% higher than that of enterprises with the average S&P index in the past decade.

Only enterprises that regard design as their business strategy and core competitiveness can get long-term returns and show strong commercial expression.

In the past eight years, after leading and participating in more than 50 innovation projects of different scales in China, my experience is that to effectively bridge the four innovation gaps, we can't just rely on gradual innovation or subversive innovation, but we really need to implement the third innovation model in enterprises: "design-driven innovation".

Etymologically, the word "design" means "giving things meaning".

60 years ago, good design was more of a pure product aesthetics. Now, the evaluation focus of excellent design has become whether the product or service can better achieve a specific purpose and function, and whether it can bring lasting impact to society.

The so-called design-driven innovation is the third innovation mode that uses subversive innovation to create full-link user experience and finally achieve commercial success on the basis of the inherent meaning given by users to products. Design-driven innovation is the reconstruction of products, services, brands, user experience, business model, organization and operation. From connotation to exterior, help enterprises to cross the four gaps of innovation.

What is the bottom thinking of the third kind of innovation?

We call it design thinking.

Design thinking originated from Stanford University is a classic innovative methodology. IBM, Airbnb, Huawei, JD.COM, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Volkswagen, Osram, etc. A considerable number of people I have worked with before are innovating their products, services and even organizational culture with design thinking.

What is design thinking?

The double diamond model of design thinking includes several steps: * * loving users, understanding needs, defining opportunities, innovative design and development plans. Its ultimate core is to design a truly touching experience based on the insight and analysis of people and bring about the sustainable development of business.

Two cases

First, let's talk about how to bridge the gap between products and demand.

1980, IDEO, a world-renowned innovative design company, was just established. At the beginning, there were only six people in IDEO, all of whom were recent graduates of Stanford University. The office is a very small room.

One day, suddenly a young man came in from the door: "I saw on Xerox that they had a cool invention. This thing can control the position of the cursor on the computer screen, and it can be held by hand. The weather is very cool. Can you design one? "

"Of course we can design. We graduated from Stanford. "

Then the man was happy and left. After leaving, the six of us looked at each other. What is this?

That young man is Jobs. Later, what IDEO designed for Jobs was the world's first personal computer mouse.

At that time, Xerox's mice were very expensive, at $500 each, which ordinary people simply could not afford.

When IDEO first designed a mouse for Apple, he gave up the expensive mechanical technology used in the early mouse. I have made many technological innovations and invented many new technologies. After hundreds of mouse prototypes, Apple finally adopted a one-button mouse instead of the three-button design of Xerox at that time.

At that time, the first generation rough roller designed by IDEO was made of metal. When Jobs tried it, he felt that the sound of metal was harsh and affected the user experience. As a result, they quickly set out from the needs of users, overcome technical problems, and made a roller with rubber on the surface, which has been used to this day.

The final result shows that the mechanical performance of this mouse is stable, beautiful and very economical, and its design has become a benchmark. Until today, most mice have adopted this mechanism.

Similarly, the smartphone released by Apple in 2007 was not the first in the world, but it became the most successful smartphone in the world and helped Apple become one of the largest companies in the world today.

In the second case, I want to share with you a case of how to bridge the gap between service and real experience.

Together with an excellent entrepreneurial team, ideaPod, we created a new elite club on the Bund-the Bund House with design thinking. It just opened in the second half of last year, at the Bund 1.

In the stage of insight into demand, we and ideaPod team use design thinking methodology to analyze brand genes, investigate and gain insight into people's lifestyle and behavior preferences in the new space. There are 1 13 samples, of which 46% are from Beijing. 36% are from Shanghai, and other cities also have them. Mainly to understand the needs and pain points of the new elite.

We find that the attitude of the new elite towards work and life has changed a lot. They pursue self-realization and hope to control their own lives. I hope that work is life, and life itself is work, pursuing high-quality work, life and socialization.

Based on the interpretation of crowd portraits, I define the opportunity stage and want to do an innovative project different from traditional office space and joint office space. Create the fourth space of the city.

Sociologist Ray oldenburg put forward the concept of "the third space" from the perspective of urban and social research. He called the place where he lived "the first space" and the place where he spent a lot of time working "the second space", while the "third space" was an informal gathering place outside the place where he lived and worked. The concept of "the third space" highlights the social functions of places, such as cafes, teahouses, bars and community centers.

In 1990s, Starbucks introduced the concept of "the third space", which made the coffee house the best place for consumers outside of home and work, and became the leading brand of freshly ground coffee in the world with its unique storefront design, service and atmosphere.

The Bund residence is a model room of the "fourth space" of the city, and it is also a typical space innovation project. It is not just a space, but a creative elite club on the Bund. Here, we combine work, life, creativity and socialization perfectly, and connect online and offline, so that creative people can communicate, link and create here.

We believe that good design is not about people and things, but about the relationship between people, people and the environment, people and the whole society.

Innovative design stage, from scene to contact, innovative space atmosphere, products, services, UX. Online+offline integration to form an integrated design; Have a complete experience and don't leave the user.

Get through the offline scene and finally land the scene on four major contacts: space contact, brand contact, digital contact and service contact.

In the space atmosphere, we take space as the carrier of experience and redefine the relationship among people, brands and space from the perspective of experience.

Based on the needs of the target user-the "creative person" and the whole link of the user's journey, we plan and design the experience scene, scene contact and emotion in the experience process.

Brand communication dimension, analyze brand genes, and spread brand ideas through various offline innovation activities, online communities, official WeChat accounts, and word-of-mouth communication. , forming a good brand effect.

In digital technology, intelligent technologies such as intelligent lighting control system and conference room reservation system are perfectly integrated with offline experience.

Finally, in terms of operational services, we should formulate a set of operational service standards with "human experience" as the core, so that members can feel the humanistic care of space and enhance their sense of belonging.

The model room is ready, enter the development planning stage, and start the iteration of upgrading while operating.

The flow of people brought by activities and business meetings since its opening.

9700 people/half a year or so; 50+ brand, 20+ elite community, 16 Business and fashion celebrities have valuable interaction with Bund House.

"Experiencing inspiring design can bring people power far beyond your eyes." Now ideaPod is reopened. Welcome to play. I believe you will fall in love with Bund House.

We and the ideaPod team are planning and about to launch the high space service, hoping to bring the fourth space to more commercial real estate projects, create a space that people don't want to escape with design thinking, help more commercial real estate transform and innovate, and make more space full of vitality.

Write it at the end

A good innovation is not necessarily a good design, but a design that fully weighs the functions, emotions and social attributes will definitely be a good innovation. The epidemic sweeping the world has made us re-understand the world. The third kind of innovation driven by design will definitely bring value-added business and warm current of life to this "fragile world".