"design" innovation in 7 laws?

A recent Fast Company Article provided an overview of Phil Mckinley's 7 laws of Innovation

where his breakdown occured including Phil's "Rule of 18" - the typical investment cycle for "innovation" inside a firm. Oddly, and yet again, business marketing and design vocabulary become mangled.

What Phil is actually speaking about is product development and at best NPD or New Product Development cycles. In his podcast "Measuring Innovation" his metrics, models and philosophy are right from MBA and design textbooks on how to launch products. More Phil goes on to say, "metrics ... made clear during the recent earnings call were surrounding sales figures, short-term milestones that the TouchPad did not hit. The one simple metric determined an entire program's success (or failure, in this instance)." which oddly ignored all together the patent, legal and corporate ramifications leaving us to ask, now is "INNOVATION" the scapegoat.

 

Design, Engineering, R&D, and New Product Development are all portions of AN innovation which is still defined correctly by Joseph Shumpter and recently refined by Clay Christensens's disruptive innovation models focusing on the phrase "creative disruption", which certainly we cannot see HP's tablet as being. The iPAD yes. The HP tablet no - regardless of corporate marketing.

Design Thinking - the ABC's in a nicely packaged movie

Often the reality of design thinking is labeled as a secondary thought to the organizational functions of who you are working for -read your organization, who you are serving -read your boss, or who you are selling to -read your customers. The difference between creative innovation, breakthrough projects and the all powerful ROI is constantly ignored as working together and necessary to work together in order to make game changing product. 
 

Finally it seems there is a movie, "Design Thinking" and with it all the basics and a few nooks and crannies that any CEO can grab a few new tricks from. While looking to the "experts" over and over again only proves to show that they did do it in the past, the film also takes quite a bit of time investigating and talking to those who are doing it now. Their fate is sealed as "successful" or "successors" it gives all the necessary value from a 2 minute trailer.