Okay below is just one fraction of what is being described in the posting from a blog. I am a designer that cares for the “process”, it does not have to be design driven, user driven, or technology driven. I personally feel people need to develop an understanding that everyone does process work but it is that spirit of committment to make the process real is what’s important. I strongly encourage others to read the posting (link is below), but if not just reallize these three kinds of innovation from the book – Roberto Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation
The Three Kinds of Innovation via Verganti
1. Technology Push (technology-based, instrumental adjustments, Moore’s Law, etc.) Often focused on searching for new markets for a technology without fulling appreciating the meanings of the new stuff.
“The effect is that when looking for potential applications, companies focus on technological substitutions: they use a new technology to supplant an old one, thus reinforcing the existing meaning. And if the technology cannot support the existing meaning, companies simply disregard it. Indeed, Microsoft and Sony did not search for how to apply MEMS because it was useless to passive players who use only thumbs. Nintendo invested in three-dimensional accelerometers because it wanted to overturn meaning.”
[p. 65-66]
2. Market pull User-centered perspectives yield an appreciation of what things mean to “users”. Improvements (”incremental change”) comes about by analysis of users’ needs. You pull the world forward, up a step, by understanding what your customers are doing.
A company looking for radical innovation of meaning does not get too close to users, because the meaning users give to things is bounded by the existing sociocultural regime. Instead, when investing in radical innovation of meaning, companies..take a step back and investigate the evolution of society, economy, culture, art, science, and technology.
This is not to say that they analyze trends: those are visible because they are already happening. These companies instead search for new possibilities that are consistent with the evolution of sociocultural phenomena but that are not there until a company transforms them into products and proposes them to people. They look for the seeds that they can cultivate into blossoms. They have a superior ability to understand, create and influence new product meanings.
This does not mean that they do not care about people’s needs. Rather, they carefully investigate how people give meaning to things. First..the company looks at people, not users. When a company gets very close to a user, it sees him changing a lightbulb and loses the cognitive and sociocultural context — the fact that he has children, a job, and, most of all, aspirations and dreams.
Second, the company looks at people within a changing sociocultural context. To understand possible new meanings, the company steps back and looks at the big picture to see what people could love in a yet-to-exist scenario and how they might receive new proposals.
3. Design driven innovation – creates new meanings. Rather than looking at what a new or improved technology can do, or looking at existing user needs, create new meanings or “proposals” through design. Companies propose to people “break-through visions” — things out of the realm of the ordinary.
We call the radical innovation of meanings design-driven innovation, or design push, because it is propelled by a firm’s vision about possible breakthrough meanings and product languages that people could love (retrospectively, people often seem to have been simply waiting for them). Design-driven innovation resembles the process of technology push more than that of market pull.
“Design driven innovation” is what Verganti is pitching as the route to distinction, differentiation, opportunity, etc. It is quite different from user-centered innovation, in his estimation. Instead of “..closely looking with a magnifying lens at how a person cuts cheese, [ask] ‘What meanings could family members search for when they are home and are going to have dinner?’ ”
Design-driven innovation steps back from users and looks at a different perspective — at the assemblage of possible interconnected meanings, exploring contexts that may be evolving and changing both “socioculturally” and “technically.” It is not about following trends, but exploring alternative scenarios and materializing designed contexts that are proposals to users — points of entry to quite new experiences, with new meanings, perhaps incompletely explored in the context of commercial activities. Design-driven innovation moves beyond the routine and quotidian into a new network of meanings. The meaning of things can be radically innovate just as technologies can.
via Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Innovation and Design.