I was pointed at this blog post the other day by tommylee on Twitter it's from a blog called 'counternotions' by a blogger called 'Kontra':
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
Here's an extract;
It’s quite easy and fun to dig up “concept products” that really have no hope of turning into real, shipping products. Why then do commercial entities bother to produce them often at great expense?
Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.
As a test, it’s hard to remember a single groundbreaking or even a moderately inspiring product that actually shipped during Nathan Myrvold’s long reign as the head of research at Microsoft. That hasn’t apparently dampened the adulation he gets as a billionaire genius jetting among the world’s glitterati today. But there does appear to be a weak correlation between a company’s ability to churn out concept products and its ability to design, manufacture and profitably sell products based on those. So why bother indeed?
I started writing a comment on the comment thread, but when I got to about 500 words, realised this post had obviously got to me... The observation that this blog post presented was set out as 'Kontra's Law':
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.
There were a number of things wrong here...
But first... let's talk about innovation.
Innovation comes in many forms. Some small, some large. Some obvious, some not so obvious. What they all do though is create something. Whether it's wealth for the inventor, time in a user's life through increased reliability or better efficiency, or even simply a sense of pleasure.
What we know for a fact is that companies that innovate do well. Companies that stop innovating eventually grind to a halt.
We also know that there's a delicate balancing act between being market pioneers and first to market with every innovation under the sun, to being a successful market follower who brings products to market after that market has been driven by a competitor.
What is clear though, is that like IBM, who transformed from a typewriter company to a computer company, you have to innovate constantly to survive. This is an imperative that is even more vital in times of potential recession. You'll see soon why we believe this, as we've had a really good look at what it is that helps companies thrive in times of recession and we'll be telling you towards the end of the summer.
Exactly how you 'do' innovation is therefore pretty important to the success of this, and big companies are realising this. A fact borne out by the fact that I know more 'Innovation Managers' of heads of innovations for major UK and European companies today than I've ever known. Some have really successful innovation programmes and others are struggling.
We'll save the 'magic formula' conversation on how to do successful innovation for another day - but in the meantime, back to Kontra's blog.
So, just a small point of order;
Microsoft Surface was lumped in on this blog as a 'concept' product alongside some of GM's masterful concept cars and other such things that haven't seen the light of day. This was just a miscalculation on Kontra's part... Surface is a beta product. I should know.. I've read and signed the SDK Licence agreement and I wouldn't do that for a concept!
Second is that many of the commenters and the blog-writer confuse different stages in the product development pipeline and miss the fact that the 'concept' is where pretty much every product starts - whether that concept is seen in public or not.
We said above that Surface is a Beta Product. This is a stage in the product pipeline way beyond 'concept' where it is released to people like us to work with and to find commercial applications for before it goes into full production. It's experimental still, with some enhancements still to be made and kinks to be ironed out. Microsoft went public with Surface when it was a prototype - a stage beyond concept where you're trying to make it work in the constraints of the materials and technologies you have to hand in order to try to solve some of the feasibility and viability issues you have.
The first stage you would think is 'concept' - but there are even a number of stages of 'concept'. There's total dreaming, where you haven't even really considered the 'how' and you really are just being a futurologist - a 'dabbler' as Kontra puts it I guess. Then there's a more reasoned concept where many of the 'hows' have been answered i.e. you have looked at some of the viability and feasibility issues of the concept, and have probably identified a number of issues where you believe there to be an answer, but you just don't know what it is... yet. To get to this stage, you have to be cognisant in the challenges of developing the actual product. You have to be familiar with the materials, the science, the manufacturing process... in short, you have to be a good technical designer to produce a 'napkin sketch' like this one:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalflyer
This was one of several concepts that Burt Rutan drew before eventually building Steve Fossett's Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer aircraft. This sketch is one he photocopied from his desk, before signing and giving it to me by the way... (name drop, name drop!) so I have talked to him about how he goes about the process of designing some unbelievable aircraft, that when you look at them you might think were 'only concepts' - but the difference is he made them all fly. There are an awful lot of clues actually in what makes a good innovation company in the way that Burt and his company Scaled Composites operates... but that's for another day also.
Of course, for every concept that he built and ended up looking quite like the original sketch, there are hundreds of sketches that never made it. Either because a client didn't have the kind of money to develop it, or there were just too many issues to overcome in the rest of the product lifecycle.
Interestingly, Burt's company worked on a GM concept car - the point of this car, was to show how there might be a better way to build cars that makes them much more fuel efficient. The use of composite materials would be key to this in lowering the weight of the car, and what Scaled Composites delivered was a body shell and frame that was indeed a feasible alternative to a traditional metal frame and skin. So actually, this was more a 'proof of concept' I guess, as the car was capable of 88mpg and Scaled Composites had helped GM prove how this was feasible with composite materials.
So that brings me around to a thought echoed by a number of commenters on the aforementioned blog, about internal and external concepts.
Burt and Scaled Composites certainly don't publicise their concepts. Why not? Because they don't need to, I guess. Burt Rutan is the most famed aviation designer of his day (if not ever) so he certainly doesn't need to enhance his reputation for being an innovator. In fact, he might give away an idea he later uses on something else. He mentioned several times to me that he would think of something for one project, only to use it years later on something else. So if he put all these out in public, he'd lose his edge and some of his better ideas potentially.
Is this the same reason Apple don't release their concepts?
No. I think they set about turning around their reputation when Jobs came back to the company by retrenching into the R&D labs and inventing something that they could get into the market that would do that for them.
What made them successful in this was focus. They stopped everything else, and thought about a limited number of things, and set out to do those really well. In short, they had focus on those things and didn't get distracted by other stuff.
They stopped chasing the market and decided to use the old Wayne Gretzky maxim. Wayne, one of the most famous ice hockey players is oft-quoted talking about the reason for his success like this:
"I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it's going to be".
So all their resources, their effort, their funding, went into developing their concepts, and bringing a small number of them to market. Limiting their investment in this way limited their risk. Although according to most, the risk they took was still pretty massive. To do that, you have to be pretty sure about what you're doing, and this is where good innovation processes come in, but again, that's for another day.
And this focus made them successful as innovators. Now - they are in the Burt Rutan position... they have the reputation for innovation, and don't need to get their future-thinking concepts out there to convince the world of this. They have the luxury of being able to hold on to them in case they're useful later.
Whereas someone like Microsoft gets bad press all the time about this. Even when they release a product like Surface (albeit late), then they still get criticised for it, and it gets called a 'concept'. So no wonder they put effort into trying to improve this image through future-thinking and trying show what their technology 'might' do in a few years.
However, there is also huge value in having a vision...
We all need a goal. We need to set standards that are beyond what we can do today, and beyond the realms of what we deem to be feasible or viable for whatever reason.
The challenge is to set that vision far enough out that it is challenging, yet close enough that we know it should be feasible if we work hard enough (or wait long enough of course, but we try to make it a challenge rather than a demotivator!).
The timeframe we use is anywhere between 3 and 5 years for a vision that can be realised by a series of projects over that time frame, each lasting 9-18 months.
However, when we use this, it is generally something that is internalised inside a company. It is a part of its most secret strategy and business roadmap. It is not a 45 second TV ad. It is instead part of our Experience Planning process that the boards of companies like Barclays, Virgin Atlantic and others buy into and helps inform their strategies not only for digital channels.
So, what having this kind of vision gives companies is somewhere to go, and a focus for their current roadmap of product development. It is something you present to a company's board and ask them:
- Do you want to be here? Do you want digital products that do this, and drive this value?
- Do you believe we can get here within X years?
- Will you give priority to projects and developments that allow us to get here in X years time?
That vision then serves as a test for everything that follows. Does project Y move us closer to our vision? If the answer is no, then should we be doing it?
The key thing though is never to hit your vision, and always to keep it believable and challenging and one step ahead. We can look and laugh at concept cars that have microwave ovens in them and you should never have a current vision that can be laughed at.
So you have to revisit it every year, take the things that actually should now be hygiene factors and up them a level. Take away the things that we really have discovered in the last year are not going to be feasible within our timeframe. In short, make the vision always believable, and always tantalisingly just out of reach like the proverbial carrot in front of the donkey.
When you do this, it motivates people. It keeps them on track. It helps prioritise business spending and resource. It helps keep the customer in mind - always. It stops you from having to play 'catch-up'.
So that was a bit of a side-bar, but important, because you could consider some of our vision work to be 'conceptual' and sometimes our clients do choose to release aspects of it publicly.
So, to re-cap on "Kontra's law":
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.
Well, let's look at what "ability to innovate" means, but leaving that aside for the moment - we may have an observation of a perceived relationship between these two things. But we don't have a causal link. If you don't get this concept, read Freakonomics - or watch out for it in my upcoming "5 books you should have read but probably haven't" presentation at Conferences around Europe!
It may be a true observation, but is a company's reluctance to release conceptual work what actually makes them successful in innovation? No. It's other things, as outlined above... mainly focus, and process.
I think what maddened me most about this blog post though, was not the stuff above, but it was the definition of 'innovation'.
Kontra's blog outlined all sorts of innovation that they personally admired. Most were highly visible user interactions, form-factors that were attractive in the aesthetic sense, and of course useful in some way.
However, couldn't you equally argue that putting affordable, reliable mobile telecommunications in the hands of the masses, is an equally innovative and worthy set of innovations as a multi-touch screen.
It's the latter that Nokia has achieved. But that doesn't seem to merit a mention. Neither the way they have driven the solid state market over the last 20 or so years, to develop ever-smaller and more efficient transceivers and other processors that make not only their phones work, but Apple's too.
Now I'm as guilty as the next man at talking up the 'sexy' innovations. But it's very easy to overlook the less sexy ones that have actually made a much, much bigger impact on the world.
Here are a few of my favourites in this category:
- The plastic stacking chair - this radicalised how schools use their space, and instantly gave them a theatre, a concert hall and a gymnasium in the same place - thereby influencing and bettering the education of generations of school-children.
- Teflon - a heatproof coating developed in the space programme (not my favourite hotbed of innovation), but then made widely available so we don't have to scrub our pans any more. That makes quite a big difference to my life!
- The infra-red remote control - which of you noticed the transition from ultrasonic remote controls to infra-red? No, the big deal for you was the remote control itself. But there were huge problems with ultrasonic. First, your cat might yawn or you might drop a handful of change on the counter, or use a slinky (yes remember those too!) and it would change the channel on the TV. So some day, some bright spark invented infra-red remote control, and quietly, remote controls could then be happily produced for all sorts of devices without regard for ambient noise of yawning cats. So arguably, the important one was infra-red as a control transport, but I don't remember seeing a blog about it... whereas....
The iPhone - well, there are a few blogs on that one aren't there?
An orange plastic chair isn't sexy though. Neither is the black inside of a saucepan, but both merit an awful lot of 'worth' as innovation in terms of the business they drove for the companies that invented them, and the benefit they gave to end users. More certainly than a click wheel, or a multi-touch mobile phone. And much more than that is something like Nokia bringing communications to a developing world that otherwise never would have had them.
Don't get me wrong. I love multi-touch. I loved it when Jeff Han showed it to us, I loved it on Microsoft Surface and again on the iPhone. I love it because natural interaction, through multi-touch, gesture recognition, etc. is very much the future. Actually, it's the now, but the future will put this in the main-stream, and I do find it a very sexy innovation, but it's not the only worthy innovation in the world...
What I certainly object to is an argument that says "Nokia, Microsoft, GM bad, Apple good" simply because the arguer prefers the nature of Apple's innovations.
Finally - I have to say I do know of a good reason why you might make concepts public.
Some of the best innovations are the result of two or more innovations coming together. What a product designer thinks should be feasible one day, but doesn't know how today - someone else might have already solved.
So when Nokia or Microsoft release a concept like a wrap-around mobile phone, or a media-room wall projection it's quite possible that another innovator somewhere in the world will call up Microsoft Research the next day saying that they have solved some of those issues and have a product of their own that would fit perfectly. Take the guy who invented a washable fabric with electrical contacts in it. A completely pointless invention until someone says "here's a concept for a ski jacket that means you don't have to take your gloves off or take ipod out of your pocket to control it" and suddenly you have a real product that people will find useful, that has fabric controls for an ipod built in to the sleeve (I've got one and it works).
As we said before, the iPhone is full of technology from other people who solved lots of little problems involved in building the iPhone. If they hadn't already got the tech to do it, Apple wouldn't have been able to pull the product together. Apple presumably went out privately to their partners and asked what tech they had that might help. So given a more radical product where you know you have some really big bits missing (like the technology to project on an uneven surface yet keep focus as the media room would require), why not get it out there and see if anyone pops up with a technology that might help (like pico projection, using lasers maybe... that would do it, although the scale seems a bit wrong).
So, there may even be good reasons to go public with concepts after all.
Oh, and I can't count the number of times someone has said to me the phrase "a Minority Report style interface" to describe touch-less interactions. I'm pretty certain that was a concept from a film designer or script writer, but that didn't stop it inspiring a generation of interaction designers...
So not only is there certainly no causal relationship between disclosing concepts publicly and 'innovation' - but I would say that GM, Microsoft, Nokia, etc. are certainly innovators. In addition, I guess this tells a story:
Nokia's annual revenue: $86bn
Apple's annual revenue: $24bn
(source: Wikipedia)
Thereby I refute 'Kontra's Law' and turn my mind to thinking about how a bank customer will use a Microsoft Surface device... yes, that's right, back to real life!
ADDENDUM:
Was just listening to Business Week's innovation podcast, on which they had an interview with Moshe Safdie, the architect who first broke on to the architecture scene with "Habitat 67" at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967, a radical new housing development.
This is the interior of the Salt Lake City Public Library for example, one of Moshe's projects.
What was interesting, and the topic of the podcast, was that he had set up what he called a Research Fellowship.
This was a team of architects on stipend, from outside of this practice, who had been in the industry for only a few short years.
The 'Fellowship' would work in concentrated bursts of activity inside Safdie's practice, and apply themselves to some real architectural problems. But ones wherein the pre-existing assumptions and constraints were removed.
For example, Safdie's practice has worked on a number of 'interface' buildings. Projects where transportation meets people; an airport for example.
He said that typically, most of the decisions in an airport build are made before the architect gets hold of the project. In this particular focus piece, the team went back to 'first principles' and re-worked out the design of airports. This he said opened the way to real innovation, as you leave tradition and legacy decisions behind.
What was different from an academic "conceptualisation" piece, was that these Fellows were working collaboratively with the main practice. Using all of its facilities and people, much in the vein of the apprentices of old.
In my view, it's the drawing on this real world experience, that means this isn't simply 'dabbling' as Kontra puts it, but rather unconstrained thinking.
Safdie talks openly about this conceptual work, and uses its output to re-educate the commissioners of airport buildings in order to challenge their conventions and assumptions.
And that doesn't hold him back from being a real innovator does it?