Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Intervention Design: Overcoming Stiff Resistance to a New, Disruptive Innovation

The September issue of the Harvard Business Review features a spotlight on The Evolution of Design Thinking.  With four articles on the subject, HBR’s overriding message is that design is no longer just for physical products, being increasingly applied to customer experiences, innovation, business strategy, and complex problem solving. 

Last week I discussed this expanded view of design thinking based on one of the articles, - Design Thinking Comes of Age.  I now want to turn my attention to a second article in the HBR issue, Design for Action, which applies design thinking not to the actual artifact being designed, - whether product, service, business strategy, or complex system, - but to a very different kind of problem: the introduction of the designed artifact into the world.

When first introduced, disruptive innovations are likely to encounter stiff resistance, both within one’s own organization and in the marketplace, - otherwise we wouldn’t call them disruptive.  The article argues that we should apply design thinking to the launch of the disruptive innovation itself - a process they call intervention design. 

Design for Action was co-written by Tim Brown and Roger Martin.  Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, - the firm most associated with this more general view of design.  Roger Martin is in the faculty of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he served as Dean from 1998 to 2013.  He’s a strategic advisor to CEOs around the world and the author of a number of books.

The Evolution of Design Thinking

Design Thinking is the featured topic in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review with four articles on the subject.  “It’s no longer just for products.  Executives are using this approach to devise strategy and manage change,” reads the tagline in its cover.

The application of design thinking beyond products, - in innovation, problem solving and business strategy, - isn’t new.  Nobel laureate Herbert Simon discussed the concept in his 1969 classic The Sciences of the Artificial.  IDEO, a firm best known for pioneering this expanded view of design, traces its roots back to 1978.  The School of Design in London’s Royal College of Art has long been pushing the boundaries of industrial design.  Stanford’s Institute of Design, aka the d.school, was founded a dozen years ago.  “But many companies still aren’t sure how it can improve their business,” notes Adi Ignatius, HBR’s editor-in-chief.

It’s not surprising that many companies don’t understand what is meant by design thinking, let alone its potential value to their business.  It’s much easier to appreciate the role of design when it comes to physical objects: cars, bridges, buildings, dresses, shoes, jewelry, smartphones, laptops, and so on.  But, it’s considerably harder to appreciate its importance when it comes to more abstract entities like systems, services, information and organizations.  Their very nature is vague.  You can’t touch them.  Yet, they account for the bulk of the growing complexity in our daily lives.

Capitalism and Social Issues in the 21st Century

A recent NY Times article, The Sunny Side of Greed by Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni, argues that corporations may well now be among the strongest socially progressive forces in the country.  In issue after issue, - e.g., marriage equality, the confederate flag,  immigration reform,  - the business community has supported what we generally think of as the more socially progressive position. 

“Are these companies acting in their own interests?,” asks Bruni. “Absolutely.  They’re trying to make sure that laws and local customs don’t prevent them from attracting and retaining the best work force.  They’re burnishing their brands in a manner that they hope will endear them to customers.  But those efforts, coupled with whatever genuine altruism and civic obligation some corporate leaders feel, have produced compelling recent examples of companies showing greater sensitivity to diversity, social justice and the changing tides of public sentiment than lawmakers often manage to.” 

While our politicians are paralyzed by ideological arguments and partisan bickering, corporations seem to have little trouble embracing the more pragmatic positions that seem to better reflect the overall mood of the country on social issues like immigration and same-sex marriage.  The reason isn’t all that difficult to understand.  Many politicians must respond to the wishes of a few big donors and of small, single-issue interest groups in their districts.  But companies, especially those with national and global brands, must be responsive to a much larger, diverse constituency, namely their customers.

Realizing the Potential of the Digital Economy

A few weeks ago I attended the 12th annual Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Poverty.  Organized by the Brookings Institution, the Blum Roundtable brings together policy and technical experts from government, academia, business, investors and NGOs from all over the world.  This year’s event, - Disrupting Development with Digital Technologies, - explored the impact of the digital economy on the ways business and development organizations now engage with emerging and developing countries.

In a pre-Roundtable blog, Kemal Derviş, - Brookings VP, Global Economy and Development, - identified three major trends with the potential to redefine global development over the next 10 years: the growing adoption of digital payments serving people everywhere with near-frictionless transactions; the spread of Internet connectivity and digital literacy; and the harnessing of data to better serve the poor and to generate new knowledge.

 Discussions were organized around six different sessions over three days.  Each session looked at the impact of digital technologies on economic development through a different lens, including electronic payments, access to information and the future of work.  Prior to the Roundtable, Brookings commissioned a policy brief for each session to help set the stage for the ensuing presentations and discussions.

Reflections on Linux and Mainframes

A year ago, McKinsey Quarterly published a special edition, Management: The next 50 year, to commemorate its 50th anniversary.  To illustrate how different the world was 50 years ago, its lead article characterized the 1964 environment with three key events: the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which was the first global telecast via satellite; the last of the baby-boomers were born that year; and IBM announced the new System/360 family of mainframes.  I was reminded of that third, distant event by IBM’s recent announcement of LinuxONE, its new Linux-only mainframes.

In 1964 I was a second year college student at the University of Chicago.  I was also working part-time at the university’s 2-year old computation center, and still remember attending a presentation on the new System 360 by a visiting IBM executive.  I later went on to graduate school in physics at the university, where I made extensive use of S/360 computers for my thesis research.  In IBM, which I joined after finishing my studies in 1970, major portions of my 37 year career involved mainframe architecture and strategy.

But it wasn’t only my long association with mainframes that this announcement reminded me of.  The Linux side of the announcement also brought to mind some more recent memories.