design and innovation gone wrong

It's not often that design especially in the European market goes wrong as the connection between design, art and innovation have such a tight link. It is even less often that we comment on this, but in the case of M&S London, it has not been more apparent.

In their recent Shwopping installation profiled here: capability for design is missed, the capability for art is ignored and a media and marketing opportunity is lost. Why? Design is ignored. Construction is minimal and execution is quick and dirty. Only in the photo above where clothes are laid out in a green color combination is there even the slightest indication of possibilities. What could have been? Anything depending on the designer / design team called in.

ROI oriented? Certainly not.

PR possibilities ignored? Certainly so.

A canvas for any number of designers to show M&S's commitment to design: Clearly.

great ideas come in pairs, innovations come in processes? no.

The question is always the same, are "innovations" and better than ideas? only if they make it to market. Is there a formula? Well, in 2004 Leslie Martinich in Commercializing and Managing Innovations suggests there is a correlation and specifically based on capabilities of the internal team. Very natural. But what of the validity of the external design itself? David Lavenda in Why Great Ideas Come In Pairs suggests where there is one there is another. And in this Non-European, non artisan model the question is therefore ignored: Have Western companies still not quantified the mentality of design value?


Oddly CNN got it correct recently when an interviewee was quoted as saying, "It seems that only It is odd for me to represent design thinking and process in the debate when my education and training is as a scientist and MBA. The reason I hang around so many smart designers is that I don't think the old tricks alone will enable the business model innovation and system change we need. We need to borrow from both approaches to pave a new way. It is messy but necessary. Lets bring together the mad scientists and mad designers and see what happens."

The "innovation nation" is finally catching up with the rest of the world. 

design, innovation, commercialization: PARC?

The story has has always been the same: Xerox PARC, the labs where the basic building blocks of the modern day computing devices were born: Ethernet, WSYIWYG editors, laser printing, postscript, Small Talk, e-paper, and so many others, has notoriously been associated with bobbling the ball: failing to innovate. But not any longer. Why?

PARC is a standalone - it survives or dies on the technology  it creates.  How? Focus on the Business Models and the products will follow. A very US centric model, but non-the less, it keeps PARC going. read more....