Innovation @ Merage - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : Book Reviews, Technology

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:30:00 GMT

By: Robert Brunner and Stewart Emory, FT Press (2009).

If you know anyone in love with an iPhone, you may understand the feelings that Brunner and Emery describe. According to them, this fierce devotion extends past the product to the company, and enables Apple to charge higher prices and be forgiven for any mistakes.

Does this apply to companies that don’t make the latest must-have gadget? Only if you concentrate on designing the customer experience as carefully as Apple has designed the entire experience of an iPhone purchase: the meticulous product design, the anticipation, the storytelling, the retail stores full of techies to answer questions, the exquisite packaging, the intuitive interface, the geniuses who do the set up, the follow-up emails, and the easy (and often free) downloading of thousands of apps you never realized you wanted.

If, and only if, you create a company that is focused on creating better-than-expected customer experiences, you can reap the benefits. That means top-down permission to play, no cutting corners, no incremental changes substituting for innovation (think Razr phones), quick prototyping, and even quicker response to the market (think GM).

While the recommendations are easier to apply to a product-focused company, they will apply to services. If you’re in charge of a small company that needs to innovate, or in charge of design and need to sell your ideas company-wide, this would be a good book to use.
I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL innovation meter—not a lot of new insight, but a persuasive argument.

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks

admin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:34:00 GMT

By C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan; McGraw Hill 2008

At the Merage School, we think of strategic innovation as a way to drive sustained growth, and we use collaboration, analytics and IT as tools. Four years after we formed this framework, Prahalad and Krishnan have written this tactical manual based on the same strategy.

They use two formulas to describe the theory. N = 1 is their shorthand for selling unique products to individual customers, pretty much the opposite of Ford’s Model T that came in any color so long as it was black. R = G is the way they describe resources as global, from the component parts to assembling the talent to create, manufacture and sell products around the world.

They use current examples, like Li & Fung and Facebook, to explain their very detailed gameplans. In fact, if you want a template for how to restructure in a global economy, they’ve detailed it down to specs for IT systems and review councils. For the most part, they emphasize incremental innovation and focus on huge multi-nationals.

While there are really no new insights, if you’re a manager trying to restructure in a constantly-evolving competitive world, this could give you the structure and many of the working details you’d need. For me, it was a bit wonky—an 8.0 on the LL innovation meter.

Lynda Lawrence is an innovation consultant with Ideaworks Consulting. She teaches Strategic Innovation and Design Management at the Merage School at UCI, and is an advisor to the Beall Center.