Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean |  | Author: Roberto Verganti
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $21.65
as of 7/30/2010 09:59 CDT details
You Save: $13.35 (38%)
New (32) Used (8) from $21.65
Seller: supermoviedeals
Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 22810
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 1422124827
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.514
EAN: 9781422124826
ASIN: 1422124827
Publication Date: August 3, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781422124826 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Until now, the literature on innovation has focused either on radical innovation pushed by technology or incremental innovation pulled by the market. In Design-Driven Innovation: How to Compete by Radically Innovating the Meaning of Products, Roberto Verganti introduces a third strategy, a radical shift in perspective that introduces a bold new way of competing. Design-driven innovations do not come from the market; they create new markets. They don't push new technologies; they push new meanings.
It's about having a vision, and taking that vision to your customers. Think of game-changers like Nintendo's Wii or Apple's iPod. They overturned our understanding of what a video game means and how we listen to music. Customers had not asked for these new meanings, but once they experienced them, it was love at first sight.
But where does the vision come from? With fascinating examples from leading European and American companies, Verganti shows that for truly breakthrough products and services, we must look beyond customers and users to those he calls "interpreters" - the experts who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in.
Design-Driven Innovation offers a provocative new view of innovation thinking and practice.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
 How to make the innovation process more innovative August 27, 2009
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Does design drive innovation or does innovation drive design. The answer is "Yes." The success of each approach depends almost entirely on what Roberto Verganti characterizes as "radical research" and those who either conduct it or support those who do. In his introductory Letter to the Reader, Verganti explains that this is a book on management. More specifically, "it's about how to manage innovation that customers do not expect but eventually love. It shows how executives can realize an innovation strategy that leads to products and services that have a radical new meaning: those that convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them. Their meanings are so distinct from those that dominate the market that they might take people by surprise, but they are so inevitable that they convert people and make them passionate." Or what Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba describe as "customer evangelists."
Verganti calls this strategy "design-driven innovation" because design, in its etymological sense, means "making sense of things." Therefore, think of design-driven innovation as the R&D process for meanings. This book shows "how companies can manage this process to radically overturn dominant meanings in an industry before their competitors so and therefore rule the competitors." Throughout his lively narrative, Verganti responds to questions such as these:
1. How to innovate by making sense of things?
2. How to integrate design-driven innovation with an organization's strategy?
3. How to initiative and then sustain productive interplay between "technology-push" and design-driven innovation?
4. Why do some companies invest in design-driven innovation and others don't?
Note: Verganti's comments in response to this question will be of great value to readers now determining whether or not design-driven innovation is appropriate to their organization's needs, objectives, and resources.
5. What are "interpreters" and what is their role in the design-driven innovation process?
6. How to locate and then attract key interpreters?
7. How can an organization develop its own vision?
8. How to leverage the "seductive power" of the interpreters?
9. When establishing what Verganti calls the "Design-Driven Lab," where to begin?
10. What is the "key role" of an organization's senior managers and their influence on the organization's culture?
However those involved are identified (e.g. "interpreters") and their functions are defined, whatever a given organization's goals and resources may be, questions such as these suggest critically important issues that must be addressed by its business leaders. If I understand Verganti's core thesis, it is that the process by which to do that must itself be design-driven. That is to say, a competitive advantage can be achieved and then sustained only by innovative thinking about innovation. Only then can those who are involved "make sense" of what to do and how to do it for their customers.
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Mark Gottfredson and Herman Saenz's The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results, Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson. HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside In co-authored by Dave Ulrich, Justin Allen, Wayne Brockbank, Jon Younger, and Mark Nyman.
The powerful advantage that comes from changing the meaning of a product August 19, 2009
John Caddell (Camp Hill, PA USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
One of the best books of the year is undoubtedly "Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean," by Roberto Verganti. In it Verganti, a favorite of this blog, attacks one of the central mysteries of innovation-how can a company successfully create a product that is a radical break from the past, and which shows the way to a new future?
We've seen these products at work. The mobile phone is one. The personal computer is another. We know that you can't survey users to determine what these products will look like or what they should do. So how to create them (apart from cloning Steve Jobs, who seems to have a knack for the radical innovation)?
Most companies punt on this question and are satisfied to extend existing products into adjacent spaces, fix latent customer pain points, etc. These are fine tactics, but with the ease of imitating product features and the speed with which information and intelligence flows, extension is a less and less stable platform for growth (arguably, it is an unhealthy and unproductive basis for business - in Umair Haque's term, "thin value").
Besides, as Verganti points out, radical changes in meaning yield longer product life cycles and more profitability.
So what's the key to achieving this sort of innovation? Verganti writes that it is changing the meaning inherent in the product. The Wii changed the meaning of gaming from "passive immersion in a virtual world for young adults" to "active physical entertainment for everyone" (p.65). iPod/iTunes changed the meaning of a digital music player from a storage medium to a seamless platform for finding, buying, organizing, transporting and listening to music. The iPhone (not specifically discussed in the book) changed the meaning of a mobile phone from a voice device, with a few data applications attached, to a platform where data applications are the central focus of the product. The phone part is almost an afterthought! (I've noticed that iPhone customers are very tolerant of poor voice quality and dropped calls-deficiencies that would doom a plain mobile phone.)
In all the above cases, the changes of meaning opened up entire new markets, created hard-to-duplicate ecosystems and caused competitors to spend time and resources figuring out what the changes meant and how/whether to follow.
I highly recommend "Design-Driven Innovation."
A new meaning for design:fascinating! October 22, 2009
Francesca Passoni (Chicago, USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you want to be a real game changer and were highly disappointed by the homonymous book; and yet, if you are not a designer, but are eager to find out how design allows a breakthrough technology to disrupt an industry, then this book is certainly for you!
Professor Verganti takes you on an intriguing and never-want-to-stop reading that will introduce you to a new type of innovation...neither technology push nor market pull: it is what the brilliant author refers to as Design Driven Innovation, and through which you can create new meanings.
The book is very well articulated in two sections: the former focuses on products - taken from the Italian furniture landscape, the entertainment world, the watch and automotive industry, that Prof. Verganti uses as examples to get the reader familiar to this new concept of innovation. The latter, instead, becomes more theoretical as the author explains the Design Driven Innovation framework that will allow you to:
-Create a new meaning in the industry thus defining new rules of the game
-Overturn the competition with a sustainable advantage
-Create products with clear personality that stand apart
-Translate the uniqueness of the offering in higher profit margin per unit and product longevity
-Set new socio cultural models
The takeaway message is that, unfortunately, not anybody is suitable for implementing this type of innovation: you need to be bold, have a forward looking attitude and, more important, love the risk. Good luck with that!
Finally the truth about design process December 18, 2009
Scott Klinker (Bloomfield Hills, MI United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Roberto Verganti finally translates into business-speak what every designer knows in their gut: that an innovative design process requires intuition AND a rational, analytic view. Informed intuition beats user-centered research. Truly innovative design happens when enlightened manufacturers trust design 'interpreters' to create new positions within the culture - to make a new proposal for how we live. For designers, this distinguishes between design for incremental newness and design for radical cultural innovation. Verganti provides this fantastic bridge between theory and practice to illustrate how radical new ideas can transform the market by proposing new categories rather than catering to existing ones. The hard lesson for business is this: real innovation is propositional and risky, not researched and proven. Twenty years after Branzi's 'Learning from Milan' we get the business version....
A must have in your innovation library! August 11, 2009
ALEXANDER ORLANDO (Washington USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is targeted toward professionals people who are involved in some way with the innovation efforts in their organizations. I also find it relevant, useful, and clear to the point. A must have book if you are an innovation manager confronting the problem of selecting an innovation portfolio.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
|
|
|
