Campbell on Branding and Innovation

Toolkits

I keep a running document of great quotes that I’m constantly adding to (31 pages so far). It includes quotes on everything from business to life. I recently re-read this one from Roger Martin:

I see creativity as central to design strategy. For me, design is centrally about creating options or possibilities that do not currently exist, not choosing between or among options that currently do. So at its heart, it is about the creation of something new. This highlights the difference between business administration and business design. Business administration entails the intelligent selection from among existing known options and the taking of action on the selection in question. Business design entails the creative production of a new option that is superior to the existing options.

- Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

It got me thinking about a traditional business administration toolkit and a business design toolkit. I realize these aren’t absolutes, that there are MBAs taking design classes at places like Kellogg, and that designers use hard data as well. But, building off the above quote, I thought it would be an interesting exercise in the different approaches to uncovering problems and finding solutions.

Business Administration Toolkit vs. Business Design Toolkit
Focus groups vs. Ethnography
Statistically-valid surveys of hundreds of customers vs. Interviews of a handful of extreme non-customers
Free-for-all, unfocused brainstorms vs. Focused, calculated ideation sessions
Benchmarking your industry vs. Benchmarking unrelated industries
High-fidelity, functional prototypes shared with management vs. Down-and-dirty, iterative prototypes shared with end users
Mining of hard facts/data vs. Observation and uncovering of emotions and unarticulated needs

This is just a first pass but I’d love to build a thorough list of tools. What else do you think should be added or deleted?

McDonald's for lunch

Don't worry, there's enough material out in the world that I'm not resorting to listing my meals. It was actually because of my Prototyping Methods class. This is the last week of our "A" session so our class got to take a field trip. I love field trips!

My all-time favorite was a trip in 3rd or 4th grade to some predecessor of today's IMAX theaters out around State Fair Park in Dallas. Today's class trip probably topped that, although my elementary school crush, Patrice Surley, wasn't there this time.

Anyway, we visited McDonald's innovation center, including a tour by the operations manager and a Q&A at the end with Denis Weil, vice president of innovation and concept development. Denis is an ID alum and will be co-teaching a Service Design class I'm taking in "B" session.

It was an incredible opportunity and generated some great discussion around prototyping and design processes. I won't say more about the innards, lest my grade suffers next quarter, but it's a cool example of the kind of real-world experiences we get exposed to here.

And then to top it off, we got free lunch - I landed chicken selects, fries and a Diet Coke. It's getting around dinner time as I write this and I'm kinda wishing ID had an alum working innovation at Ruth's Chris right now.

Down and Dirty Prototyping underutilized?

I'm taking a class, Prototyping Methods, that covers the full range from paper to foamcore to digital, what the benefits are, etc. A usability expert from a big web site guest lectured and talked about the importance of prototyping new site features. I was surprised/shocked/fascinated that they often prototype site features and enhancements using sheets of paper with basic sketches. Every week they bring in users, sit them down at a desk and proceed to show them their new site upgrades hand drawn on plain printer paper.

The results are great with subjects really getting into it, using their pen as a mouse to tap on links, fill in text boxes and such. Every time a subject "clicks" on a link the "computer" (a research assistant) hands the subject a new sheet of paper representing the new page they're on. This is a great, simple and inexpensive way to get quick and valuable feedback.

Apparently this is fairly common in UI research but it was new to me (I am a student after all). This got me thinking about how simple prototyping can be for companies, regardless of what they sell. Often companies, especially ones with stylists, designers and big-time engineers, think of prototyping as blowing out fancy clay models, fully-functional sites and the like. Taking a prototype this far causes a couple of problems - 1) It's not easy to make rapid, iterative changes as you gain feedback from users and 2) People fall in love with them and start envisioning the blown-out prototype as a final product, or at least close to final.

But, if you're creating something down and dirty, you can avoid these problems and get debate and improvements on the idea going faster.

It's amazing how little down-and-dirty prototyping is used by a lot of companies, whether for a product, service or site. If a major web site uses sheets of paper to get feedback, certainly consumer durables companies can figure out how to throw something together to get discussion going. You just have to use your imagination and ask your users to do the same. Then the next time a user says, "I wish it had a button here" you can take a minute to make adjustments and turn back to them asking, "You mean like this?"