Finding new interpretors.

I spent my lunch hour today listening to Roberto Verganti – professor at Politecnico di Milano – as he spoke about "Design Driven Innovation" at HDK design school in Göteborg. To be honest, I was a bit distracted during his speech – I am quite preoccupied by thinking about my own company and it's offerings at the moment – but some of the things he spoke of caught my attention.

His main topic discussed the fact that lots of companies today use design as an advantage in driving innovation, which makes it no advantage at all anymore (everybody is doing it). The challenge is instead to give meaning or significance to the products we make, in order to create an advantage. This is something I can relate to in my world of brands where the brand core is not about what a company does but how.

Roberto went on to speak about the importance new interpretors of a product/concept when working with innovation. He used Apple as an example (not very unique but a good example indeed) and how the company not only appointed Ken Segall as Creative Director, but also worked with designers who had never designed computers before. The outcome in 1998: The iMac, looking nothing like our idea of a computer (and the name was long debated too before "i" became the most used prefix in the world of technical devices), and the device "Think different" (it was dreamed up by an art director, Craig Tanimoto). The computer was a radical proposal on a market filled with grey boxes, but became a success, by fitting very well in a home environment, at a time when the Internet was exploding and people started surfing from home. (Read more about the birth of the iMac here.)

Roberto's final call to action was to find the new interpretors to create the advantage. Something to think about in the world of branding indeed.

Read more about Roberto and his new book "Design Driven Innovation" here and here.

The book by Roberto Verganti