Design, Innovation and Organizational Systems

I was back at Imperial College in London in the last week of February.  I gave several seminars and held a number of meetings, but the main reason for my visit was to once more participate in a STIR lecture sponsored by Design London. 

Design London is an initiative launched about two years ago between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.  It aims to bring together the disciplines of design, engineering, technology and business to address jointly the challenges of innovation in an increasingly global, competitive economy.  As part of its many research and educational activities, Design London offers the STIR (Simulator, Teach, Incubate, Research) lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects from widely different personal experiences and points of view.

Our STIR lecture - CROSS OVER:  how a new approach to architecture is inspiring a new architecture for business - aimed to “explore not only how a radical approach to design has inspired a new genre in the built environment, but also how this approach can be applied to designing a new architecture for business.”

There were two speakers, Max Fordham, founder of the consulting engineering firm that bears his name, and I.  We were later joined on stage for a wide ranging discussion and dialogue with the audience by David Gann, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Imperial College Business School, and Nick Leon, Director of Design London.

Max Fordham spoke first about his firm’s philosophy toward smart, environmentally aware architecture.  He founded Max Fordham Consulting Engineers forty years ago “with the aim of designing building services that are integral to the building rather than separate, specialist installations.  This approach requires a good understanding of buildings as well as engineering.”

“Our design process is based on a strong commitment to sustainability using passive means by considering building form and how it conditions the environment within.  We design services to make buildings comfortable using heat, light and ventilation and aim to deliver systems that are simple and efficient, with robust detailing, good maintenance access and low running costs.”

It is impressive how far ahead of the rest of the world Max was in advocating the design of energy efficient, environmentally friendly, holistic buildings which are in harmony with all the various services that are part of a working, living building, as well as with the wider environment.  In recognition of his pioneering work, he received the 2008 Prince Philip Design Prize, the major annual award given by the UK Design Council.

Max applies his philosophy of holistic, harmonious architectures not only to the buildings his company designs, but to the company itself.  In his talk, he explained that in order to encourage everyone at all levels of the organization to make their maximum contribution to the practice’s success, everyone is offered the opportunity to become a full partner after a period of employment.  He believes that “As a unified partnership we can maintain the participatory ethos of the practice and offer greater efficiency and better service for our clients.”

I followed Max Fordham, and talked about Innovation in Business and other Social Organizations in the 21st Century. 

I first discussed the market environment that organizations are presently facing at the dawn of the knowledge economy along three dimensions.  Companies are operating in a world that is increasingly global and integrated.  Much of the differentiation from competitors will come less from technologies and products, which are becoming increasingly commoditized, but from market facing innovations like business models and customer service.  And, when you combine globalization and integration with fast changing markets and customer demands you get a business environment which is much more complex and unpredictable than anything we had before.

In such an environment, innovation is absolutely critical to be able to adapt to, let alone survive fast changing market conditions and intense competition.  Incremental improvements by themselves will not do.  Those companies, whether a brand new one being just founded or an existing one that has been around for years, that are able to understand the new market environments and meet them head on with innovative new products and services will emerge as leaders in their industries and regions.   Companies unable to adapt will likely not make it.

How do you this?  How do you apply radical approaches in design to a company?  What does it mean to architect a business? 

When designing physical things there is a long tradition that every so often you must take a radical approach.  Think of changes in the visual arts and fashion over the years.  Think of advances in engineering and the whole new ways of envisioning bridges, cars, microprocessors, phones and music players through the ages.  Think of the innovations in the architecture of buildings and urban environments that Max Fordham so eloquently talked about.

But, we have not quite thought this way when it comes to innovations in organizations - be it a company, government agency, educational institution or health care system.  In fact, the problem may very well be that we have not thought of an organization as a holistic system at all, but rather as a collection of people, services, buildings, processes, information and so on that somehow come together and do whatever they are supposed to do, with no one really in charge of the overall architecture or its evolution into the future.

This is all changing right in front of our eyes.  We have all kinds of new technologies that will help us design, analyze, model, simulate and visualize organizational systems, much as we have been able to do for decades with physically engineered systems.  We have new social networking platforms that will enable us to handle such sophisticated, complex designs in a collaborative way, including all the appropriate people in the organization and beyond.  We have the ability to gather and analyze lots of real-time information to help us understand how well the organization is functioning, as well as to anticipate major changes over the horizon so we can better prepare for them.

But, we still don’t know how to best apply these new technologies and capabilities to better architect and design businesses and other social organizations.  It is all too new.  This will take radical, disruptive innovations on the part of companies, academic institutions and governments.  It takes a while for us humans to embrace such radical innovations, often a generation or two to enable new leaders and managers not stuck in the old ways of doing things to rise up the ranks

But, without a doubt, learning to apply the principles of holistic, harmonious, adaptable and sustainable design to organizational systems is one of the most exciting challenges and opportunities in our emerging knowledge economy.  As we told the students attending the STIR lecture, they are really lucky to be going out into the world in such interesting times.  We all need their innovation and creativity more than ever.

Comments

[Chris Ward]

Lucky in a sense; but also strained a lot.

I believe the UK currently has no microprocessor manufacturing capability. IBM has capability; but it's in New York and Vermont.

So there's a 'resource specialisation' going on. Countries are short of technology items ... for the UK I think of the microprocessor manufacturing, also of the engineering capability to renew civil infrastructure such as bulk electricity distribution, and sewerage. Vertically-integrated corporations have the resources, somewhere in the world, and they are deployable on command of the corporation. Not of the country.

I was at Southampton University's Engineering Week event http://www.soton.ac.uk/schoolsandcolleges/activities/scienceweek/index.html today; the guy behind http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/ (an attempt to get to 1000mph in a land vehicle) was sending rocket-powered model cars around the campus, and telling us how he thinks he has lined up the funding (about $15M over 3 years) for the record attempt. But he says it's really being done for the spinoffs, the proposition that this will involve UK schools in science-technology-engineering-math opportunities.

The western world has a long way to climb out of its hole. What's the timescale for the corporation ? This quarter's sales figures, or survival over a timescale of a decade or more ?

It affects what the corporations should do for the next generation.

[dblwyo]

This is a very thought provoking article on several levels.

IMHO re-thinking institutions is THE challenge for a long-time to come whether it's businesses or the organizations that deliver education, healthcare, energy, etc. Or really get big picture and talk about re-regulating markets, Social Security, etc.

Having spent some time wrestling with these issues I just took a shot at pulling them together into an "on-going" work (as your latest post would have it) and would also suggest that the magnitude of the re-architecting is, if anything, much bigger and more urgent than you're putting.

Taking a whole enterprise perspective is a vital part of this effort but not something that management seems to take too naturally.

Tried to trackback this post but that didn't work so here's the url for my post if you don't mind:
http://llinlithgow.com/bizzX/2009/03/disruption_vs_innovation_chang.html

You may find some food for thought on the enterprise and industry and beyond levels.