Part 2: The Trouble With Originality – A Framework for True Innovation from the Art Underworld 

True innovation is a deep understanding and embodiment of a problem

However, this isn’t an approach exclusive to great forgers. This is the approach of all the great artists, designers and inventors, this is true innovation.

From left to right: Basel Woman Turned to the Left, Costume Study by Hans Holbein (1523), Saskia with a Child by Rembrandt (1636)

Rembrandt himself copied to learn. Here he studies fabric by copying parts of a Holbein sketch and employing it directly into a sketch of his own experiences of life around him, with his wife and son. The great forger Eric Hebborn, mysteriously murdered in 1996 after publishing a handbook on forgery methods, had this to say:

‘‘Rembrandt was one of those artists who continually took what he wanted from other artists to use for his own ends. So thoroughly did he absorb motifs from his sources that when we see him quoting from another’s work, unless we are as thoroughly acquainted with the originals as he was, we simply take it for his own invention… like all good draughtsmen, [Rembrandt].. was not an isolated talent but a link, a golden one, in the long chain of traditional draughtsmanship that began with our earliest ancestor’’.

And this is true of all innovation. In product development, real innovation is not through slavish copying of what has happened before. And it is not a confused mashup of features taken from other existing products, seeking to pass off as an original product in the name of innovation. True innovation effectively and elegantly solves problems. This happens by absorbing and deeply understanding the influences and solutions of the past, the current challenges, and the workarounds surrounding the customer’s life. In short, embodying the customer to create a product or service worthy of them.

How designers get it wrong

Had an inexperienced designer been tasked with the creation of a menu and filing system for the iPhone in 2006 (iPhone was first launched in 2007), they may have created a mashup of randomly selected features like the following:

My own mashup

We may laugh at this today, yet a ‘pastiche’ such as this was the ethos of the ill-fated Windows Mobile until as late as October 2010, a whole 3 years after iPhone’s launch.

A Toshiba Pocket PC running Windows Mobile, from mid to late 2000s

This lack of understanding of the user and the core challenges they face surprisingly makes its way all too often into modern architecture. In search of ‘true innovation’ architects often use a mashup of strange features that seem highly original and innovative on the surface, yet lack a deep concern for the desires and challenges the users of their buildings face.

On launch, Zaha Hadid’s ‘Vitra Fire Station’ in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was considered highly original, yet with its uncoordinated mishmash of shapes, sharp angles and cold materials it completely missed the brief. In fact, it is laughably terrible. Almost as soon as it was launched it was declassified as a fire station, its various sharp edges and angles considered too dangerous for firemen as they rushed to emergencies, the core challenge for a fireman. Its presence stands as a stark warning to all designers seeking to imprint their own ‘innovative’ original stamp.

Sadly, Hadid is in good company. The flat-roofed concrete ‘futuristic’ buildings of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the grandfathers of modernist architecture, are notorious for leaking in buckets and even rot. In fact, Lloyd Wright famously told one frustrated client:

‘‘If it didn’t leak, it wouldn’t be a roof’’

This arrogance is unacceptable. Innovation solves real problems by deeply absorbing and embodying the core challenge and questions. It delves into the life of the customer, the user. It does not seek originality, hashed together, for the pure sake of presenting something unseen before. So how can we develop a true innovation practice, taking on the lessons from the underworld of art?

A 5 Point Framework for True Innovation

You may already recognise the first three steps from our previous article, ‘You Don’t Know What Your Customer Wants Until You Become Them’.

1. Looking at your sales and usage figures, identify your:

• Lead customers
  These are expert users of your product and frequently find advanced workarounds or other uses for it that you may not have considered.
• Extreme customers
  These people use your product and service the most frequently and top the charts in usage minutes. They’ll have interesting insights into how well your product scales at its limits, and be able to identify and locate where break points are.
• Standard customers
  This is your majority. How does your product fit into their lives currently? How could this group start to use your product even more?
• Your outreach customers
  Those who may not use your product yet or don’t use it too often. Why aren’t they using it yet? What else is filling their needs? What can you learn from this group?

2. Visit the homes and offices of a selection of your lead, extreme, standard and outreach customers to explore and immerse yourself in their life

Interview for empathy – why might they be saying what they’re saying and doing what they’re doing? To do this, it helps to think about the following:

• Rather than use a structured questionnaire, explore their surroundings to develop a keen understanding of their context, from here build your questions organically.
• When questioning, create a Journey Map that shows point to point what potential snags and drop off points arise, and where workarounds appear
• Create an Empathy map that explores what this customer is thinking and feeling, hearing (who’s influencing them?), seeing, oblivious to, saying, keeping quiet about, doing and avoiding with the product in the context of their own home or office.
• How does this fit against their pains, gains and jobs to be done?

3. Collect and analyse these into personas

This is your straw man, your collection of notes from your home visit about each key customer type. In this you’ll want to collate the key ‘elements’ that make up a working model of your customer’s mind:

• Their core needs: jobs to be done, the gains and pains facing them
• Their context and environment that influences this
• Their constraints
• Their workarounds

4. Crunch down to the core problem and then reframe or flip it around to develop a vision plan with a one line concept.

• Ask the Five Why’s from every point in your personas until you finally get to the most basic need at heart.
• Flip the problem on its head and see it from several angles, useful questions to encourage creativity.
• Who benefits or stands to gain from the problem in its current state? Could this be used as an advantage if the problem is reframed as an advantage?

5. Brainstorming innovative product ideas through Lateral Industry Analysis

There are many creative exercises for developing innovative new ideas, one I like to start with is ‘Negative Brainstorming’:

• You and your team brainstorming seemingly bad solutions to the problems you’ve identified. This seems counterintuitive, yet it can often loosen creative muscles and can on occasion throw up some unexpected results.

However, when you’ve developed a good knowledge of your key challenges, a strong favourite of ours that really delivers results for our clients is a process we call ‘Lateral Industry Analysis’. In this creative exercise, we look to parallel industries for clues to quickly draw out new ideas. To do this:

• Look back to the core problem, the key experiences and pains from the body of research you’ve now developed, draw these out
• From each problem we look to another completely unrelated industry to see how they have solved that problem
• How does that solution apply back to your product’s challenge? What new ideas does this throw up for you?
• From here, only now do we begin thinking of the ‘features’ of your product

With patience and passion for your customer at all times, you’ll innovate, and forge your successful original solution.