For the last few years, innovation has been a big topic in conversation about business management. A small industry fuels the conversation with articles, books, and conferences. Designers, too, are involved. Prominent product design firms offer workshops and other services promising innovation. Leading design schools promote “design thinking” as a path to innovation. But despite all the conversation, there is little consensus on what innovation is and how to get it. The current conversation about innovation is similar to an earlier conversation about quality. As recently as the late 1980s, quality was something businesses actively sought but had trouble defining. Today, statistical process control, TQM, Kaizen, and Six-Sigma management are common tools in businesses around the world.
As businesses have become good at managing quality, quality has become a sort of commodity - “table stakes,” necessary but not sufficient to ensure success. When everyone offers quality, quality no longer stands out. Businesses must look elsewhere for differentiation. The next arena for competition has become innovation. The question becomes: Can innovation be “tamed” as quality was?
- Click here to read about the development of Hugh's model of innovation.
- Click here to download Hugh Dubberly's model of innovation as a large, printable poster
Click to read or download the entire article in the ACM Digital Library (Subscription Required - Learn more)
[…] of rich intellectual content, and embodied primarily in "old school design diagrams" (the same style Hugh Dubberly has helped popularize and that I always […]
[…] Dubberly is a design planner and teacher who has worked for Apple and Times Mirror. In an article in the January/February issue of Interactions, he proposes a model for […]
[…] the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of ACM’s “interactions”, Hugh Dubberly created a model of innovation. While the model covers the many ways innovations can occur (bug-listing, testing, needfinding, […]
[…] Interactions Magazine (published by the Association for Computing Machinery), Hugh Dubberly offers A Model of Innovation that explores a lot of these parameters. The introduction to the article states: As businesses have […]
[…] Steve Portigal on Personas, Elizabeth Churchill on “Idioms, Metaphors and Design”, and Hugh Dubberly on Innovation. Expect full articles to be posted […]
[…] - Towards a model of innovation For the last few years, innovation has been a big topic in conversation about business management. […]
[…] Magazine has just put up a post about a poster designed by Hugh Dubberly in collaboration with our friend and colleague, Paul Pangaro, which plots […]
Hugh’s map is wonderful, but it is his framing article which I find most provocative. Is Innovation the new Quality? Certainly Innovation seems to have inherited Quality’s tiara in the what-industry-is-buzzing-about pagent. Certainly it has been a wonderful tool for designers to use to sell the value of their services to the captains of industry. But I question Hugh’s assertion that quality is a solved problem, and I worry about what this implies for Innovation.
My objections to Hugh’s pronouncements may be terminological: I don’t agree that quality is largely about improving efficiency. Quality is largely about delivering good, and it is the early steps of “quality management”–identifying goals, values and metrics–which are critical to that process, not the later efficiency steps. What good is it to make cars with flawless paint jobs, if what the consumer is concerned about is fuel efficiency or cabin space? On this front, of identifying the right issues to address, I think our understanding of how to deliver quality is still a work in progress.
I worry for Innovation, that it may similarly fall victim to the fate that has befallen Quality. I worry that people will define it reductively, address its issues cursively, and declare it a problem solved–and move on. I worry that Innovation as a catchphrase will lose its marquee value, and fall by the wayside. It would be terrible if we never came any closer to addressing the challenge of finding comprehensive responses to the needs people have, to the problems people face… but merely went on conducting business as usual.