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.

                                

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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.

                                

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Infographics - Your Savior in New Product Launches

It has happened to every designer,  entrepreneur & product developer & it even happens to international firms launching new services - the launch black hole. How is it that designers of new products, businesses and even services miss what's out there? The solution: not utilizing design & market infographics. How do world class companies do it? They do it here:

And, as shown in this infographic of every kitchen utensil made, by type the playing field is defined. More, there are any number of similar examples for every other product and even service out there. A quick look, the 10,000 meter view is what separates innovators from the also rans. How does your firm stack up in the way it looks for new opportunities?

                                

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Design Leaders – How to Make Them

Is there a delineation between designers and managers and can there be a back and forth training? Yes and no. 

In Delineating Design Leaders we see the clear identification and breakdown of the way that design and design managers are utilized. Can there be a difference in the way that these groups operate and the way they are able to encourage each other as a mechanism for further creative output? Yes. The key is content and creation. As evidence clearly uncovers, it is design leaders, who relentlessly focus on product and operate as a profoundly design-centric function involving a ‘hands-on’ approach. These individuals provide the vision that is catalyzed by actively leading designers and broader team members to produce differentiation and rapid change in response to demanding environmental factors [ibid].

  

                    

   

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Symbols Things Actions Thoughts – Designs New Embodiment

What is the point of design and design thinking clients often ask. Permanence. From here the only question is how that is turned into profit for those firms involved in such an investment. Here’s how.

With typical academic fervor in Design Research and the New Learning it becomes clear the mechanisms of how firms can embody the clarity of turning Symbols Things Actions Thoughts into ROI for design thinking centric projects and clients.

                                

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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. 

                                

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