It is common knowledge that most new products and services fail when brought to market. Charles Kettering, Board Member of GM (1920-1947) famously noted that when it comes to innovation: “You don't know when you are going to get the thing, whether it’s going to work or not and whether it’s going to have any value whatsoever." And even as things may have improved a bit since Kettering’s time, thanks to today’s attention to innovation processes and user-centered development practices, there’s still uncertainty that haunts all innovation attempts.
This high fail rate of new products and services stands in interesting contradiction to the flood of “Best Case” studies you will experience if you happen to attend a lot of business and innovation conferences. Best Case studies are certainly great stories and we all love to tell them, but I’d argue that in real life failures give you much more of a learning experience and motivation for improvement then success would ever do – think about the road to excellence if you do sports, think about how your kids grow up etc. And certainly this is also the case when it comes to business. So shouldn’t we hear much more fail stories and learn from them?
Over the past few days, IIT held their annual Design Research Conference. The conference, run and organized entirely by the students of IIT’s institute of Design and led by graduate students Tal Shay and Kate Pemberton, brings together practitioners and students in an intimate setting to discuss issues of design, research, business, culture and society.
I gave a talk that I’ve been building and refining for the past few months, entitled “A new global design intellectualism: predicting – and avoiding – the commoditization of design research.” The talk articulates what I’ve observed over the past decade as a repeated cycle of offshoring, responsive process innovation, and cultural expectations point to the demise of a particular skill or set of methods in the United States.
