“Good” Disruptive Design (Diapers.com) vs. “Bad” Predatory Design (Amazon.com)

and here's how it's done. When firms and individuals with true disruptive designs, by definition, "a product or service designed for a new [non previously purchasing] set of customers" are ready to sell innovations they have created, free market economics dictates the sale goes to highest bidder. Unless of course other mechanisms, something every 1st year MBA student learns about, are used to effect pricing. Enter the cut-throat landscape via How Jeff Bezos Crushed Diapers.com So Amazon Could Buy Diapers.com and we see how in the post Google age, no longer are the innovators the creators of value, rather aggregates of opinion are.

Competitors who don't have enough users saying a product, service, innovation or disruptive design is worthy, purchase opinion makers, aggregate users who instantly communicate via the new digital news-makers: Google, Yahoo, Bing and now fully funded image based news marauders Cheezburger who recieved 30M from Andreesen Horowitz . Need 10,000 "news" intenret indexible articles talking about a product or service that is amazing, valuable, popular? Then use Bezos's Diapers Gambit via his purchase of Diapers.com or loose that revenue stream to Walmart, by not acquiring opinion. Bezos's actions however not the way disruptive design was intended to create economic benefit for end users.

Bezos's "design process" of the Diaper Gambit unfortunately is not based on Clay Christensen's 1995 coined term "Disruptive Design"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation nor the progenator of the word "innovation" Joseph Schumpeter who defined how to create economic value through creating "the new" in his 1908 economic text "Methodological Individualism"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter#Schumpeter_and_innovation also ignored by robotics engineer Joseph F. Engelberger who asserted that innovations require only three things: 1) A recognized need, 2) Competent people with relevant technology, and 3) Financial support. Bezos's Diaper Gambit focuses on when product design, company innocation or new product development design isn't enough, it's opinion (real or imagined) that determines outcome - something every innovator and design disruptor firm must not ignore: free market economics vs. free market predators.

Apple 'got' design for $2.5M in 1982 and by a Frog. Here's how Steve did it.

Ever wonder how Apple 'got' design? Like Gates bought DOS, Steve bought design for $2.5M/yr in 1982. Here's how Steve did it and not as Fast Company says: 

Even Fast Company scrubs the data & history but not as Christopher Mims @ Quartz magazine reports it and described here. Like any market advantage, a competitive advantage starts well before personal popular culture (read advertising and 'news') has us believe or is even aware of the advantage itself. Microsoft exists because Gates bought DOS for $50K and turned it into Windows for IBM. AC and DC were fought after by Thomas Edison who developed the opposing format to thwart competitors and performed hundreds of experiments on filaments with a whole team of researchers not inventing the lightbulb, Ive's didn't usher design into the entire culture of Apple: I've's entire group was the prodigy of a Frog - the son of Hartmut Esslinger.

It isn't often that we stop to may homage to the firms whose shoulders that we here at iGNITIATE stand on top of, but after years of knowing Hartmut and the folks at Frog, and the recent articles on design at Apple being always there from the beginning, we thought to jump in on the "correction" of the marketing machine that is Apple, Issacshons book, and Ashton's movie on the late, great Steve. However in the beginning, there was Hartmut and his firm Frog and fact that Apple bought design, brought it right into the boardroom and did it all for $1m/yr in 1982 or $2.5M 2013 dollars and the article How I Taught Steve Jobs To Put Design First tells all.

Hartmut goes on to describe how From Phones To Tablets: 26 Apple Designs That Never Came To Be and How to Innovate, Step by Step which Hartmut know exactly what he is talking about. To learn how to get true competitive advantage from design, the above is how it's done and how we do it here at iGNITIATE. 

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Designers Gather & Organize. Founders Hunt & Retrieve. Want both? Use 3D Soup. Here's how:

Wired Magazine knows founders & now designers but why so few - design founders? Designers Gather & Organize. Founders Hunt & Retrieve. Want both? Use 3D Soup. Here's how:

First let's be clear: Technologists are designers who gather, organize & clarifying visions, confined to a specific domain and via tools turn it into product - vegetables to soups with knives and a stove. Classically designers are not engineers or technologists because software designers don't cook as sketching screens and interactions minus "back of the house" is still just a well written kitchen order - cooks prepare the dish.

Technologists as founders are bankable: months of soup trials before an amazing dish is ready to sell. Founders who hunt and retrieve, sketch back of the napkin and pre-sell possibilities of what they have uncovered hunting have also not made soup. What's the tipping point? Speed to soup and founders who cook quickly understand ROI interest. Now this is the norm for 21st century designers - ROI based mentalities focusing on generating not a supply of ideas but hot soup in the bowl. Why? 3D Soup.

Enter crowsourcing and crowdfunding and a visual demand for finalized product via prototyping. How? 3D Printing. Sketching comes out as fast as code once did. Paper to code to prototype is shifted and "designers" become engineers, technologists and founders or so says the recent article "Why aren't there more design founders" however what is more important is "How to make Hardware Startups More than just a Fad" so here's the concatenation:

1) Problem-solving: slick designs without manufacturing capabilities don't cut it. See the amazing example of the Element Tables Tokujin Yoshioka as it clearly looks like it does not work yet is on sale today.
2) Design is process: engineers iterate based on rules of engineering, definitive can and can't work models where as design is the act of trying many many routes to define 1st uniqueness and then build it as simply, there is no math to fashion but there are a million different cars that have been mass produced
3) Design is a Service Industry: there are only a few ways to make a nuclear reactor as the technology is highly specific, however there are a million ways to engineer earphones (engineering thinking) however if designed well, (design thinking) they will always be in high demand, eg., Beats headphones
4) Founders Lead: because they are always hunting & that means they can't cook at the same time. A designer and sketches and leads is not the same designer who does 3D and prototypes hence two words for Founders and Technologists vs. one word for designers.
5) Design only trumps engineering when the engineering is actually done: if you don't start with design, aesthetics, interaction, etc., you can't build it in later however if you start with it and can't complete it, it is useless - full chicken and the egg issue.
6) MVP just does not cut it with physical goods: Software allows you to start, and iterate versions as fast as you can code and bug test and physical goods don't work this way until the day 3D printers are as fast as injection molding machines so "With hardware, you can’t get away with a minimum viable product that sucks." as Marc Barros states

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Want Full Eco(control) Design? Design Physical & Digital Products

Investors don't like physical products? Why? Physicality costs & yet, Digital is as fleeting as haute couture. Are there options? Yes. Think like Gillette for the 21st century - physical + digital design. Here's how:

Wired Labs has a good starting point: Bundling Digital and Physical but that is just the beginning as the investigation is where the juice comes out: 

1) Ask why do it at all and what is this new thing that people are going to carry around?

2) See who's done it, so many have: Jawbone, UP, Brawn Electric Shavers w/skin sensors, naturally MP3 players, but there are others: Swifter, Roomba, Canary, etc. - we've examined these before.

3) How's it going to expand over time as if it isn't a platform and it can't learn or adapt what's the point? 

4) Planned obsolescence for alternative purposes: you've still got your old laptop around somewhere using it for other purposes? There are whole companies dedicated to recycling - yet another part of the ecosystem that your firm should be owning

And these are just a few of the ways. 

Naturally through disruptive design, there are a host more. 

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When Kliner Perkins hires designers it's official: 7 Tips From Leading Design Entrepreneurs

When Silicon Valley's most prestigious VC in Q4 2012 sets up the Kliner Perkins Design Fellowship, and a National Design Award is given due to a designer's design entrepreneurial work you know the US is finally catching on. But what are the secrets to design breakthroughs? Here's a starting point: 

                                           

1) Learn to code and understand web analytics: because in the beginning you can't afford a full web development effort and you will have to sell your goods online - there is no more door to door anymore and if you can't push the BUY button because there is no system to make that happen, your project is not going to make it.
2) Never underestimate how important design is: if your product looks bad, if your site does not work on tablet and smart phones it's all over. Customers know 1st impressions mean everything and now almost as much as the product itself.
3) Don’t allow design to damage your focus: if your not Steve himself, then you may have to work with someone that is and in that, be flexible as your design might not be your own
4) Keep a side project: Google allows 20% of time to employees own projects. Use this as your guiding principle as you can't "design" all day many times your building what has already been designed
5) Read everything. Listen To everything. Experience as much new as possible: design inspiration is the key to disruptive design and zigging when others are zagging - the point to "winning" new clients in a sea of also-rans
6) A prototype is worth 1000 words: this is an absolute must. Prototype fast and Prototype often. The faster you and clients can see what is going on the faster you get to the endpoint
7) Think like a student as that is what a designer is: if you can't think outside the box you just created you can't innovate. The tighter the rules the harder it is to be "different" and different can sometimes be disruptive or even fully "innovative" by Schumpeters definition.

And there are many more, but with these your products will be that much further ahead of the competition.

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A new disruptive market: Canary (security) in a coal mine? No your home!

Start with the (light) light-bulb  the (clothes) washing machine, (entertainment)TV, (games)Atari, (temperature)Nest and now (security)Canary. What have each disrupted? Your home. Now comes Canary - and she's a beautiful bird who protects like a hawk. 

If you want to ignite an entire product ecosystem, there is always going to be some ashes. Could Canary a room based home security ecosystem that monitors: temperature, humidity and air quality via high level sensor such as an HD video camera with a wide-angle lens & night vision, backed up by a beefy microphone, &  3-axis accelerometer do this? Considering that Canary is the invitation of big brother right into the home and your smartphone, anything is possible. 

Now the question is what ELSE can be done with Canary? Naturally a full and beautifully designed interface is part of the product design as well as the physical look of Canary itself. The hack and 3rd part developer possibilities are also fully abundant, and so with a strong computing core capable of other functionalities Canary is also a platform. The sustainability of the business platform is the now the variable to watch however from 1st look, Canary has tremendous possible wingspan. 

McKinsey doesn't get it, but Google Does: Design Sprints

Design can be a trip to the Caribbean or a battle with Somali Pirates & that's been our last week here at iGNITIATE. How did we focus our clients? Ignoring McKinsey and embracing Google: Google Design Sprints in fact.

Google Ventures has been focusing on design, design thinking surrounding physical products like Google Glass and the Google Phone designed by Mike & Maaike as well as service design and UI design. Google has now started  publishing much of their design thinking models via the Google Design Labs. An overview of their process can be found here, and in typical sillicon valley fashion, design and even a disruptive design model - one we particularly are interested in. Want to know how they do it? Here's the summary:

1) PICK A BIG FIGHT - and when the problem is too simple expand it. Design thinking especially disruptive design thinking means looking at the whole picture?
2) GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE - and that means eyes and ears you don't normally bring around. Sing the same song all the time and you will never create Nirvana
3) SCHEDULE THE USER STUDY BEFORE YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO TEST - however this is where we disagree for in some situations and especially with expressive design, analysis paralysis is guaranteed the more exponential questions you ask
4)  FIND A FACILITATOR - necessary as an advocate in law situations yet sometimes limiting for true artistic or design art "breakthroughs"
5) PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR - keeping track is again against the design ethos of the design artists however for corporate "user centric" and "co-creation" better known as customer centric design this keeps things moving and people accountable
6) GATHER THE INGREDIENTS - paper, pencils, etc., and this is more for those managing as design artists can make it all happen with a crayon and newsprint if that's all there is

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .