Last year I started this blog with a brief piece on the most common models of innovation: market pull, technology push and design driven innovation. Today I would like to add a new missing piece to this scenario: frugal innovation.
The inspiration for this post comes from an article written by C.K. Prahalad and R.A Mashelkar titled “Innovation’s Holy Grail” and a chance but lucky encounter with Aparna Piramal Raje, an Indian journalist and entrepreneur.

Frugal Innovation is a typical phenomenon of countries like China and India that in the last couple of decades have seen  an unprecedented growth of their middle class. While in 1990, it made up only 21% of the population of the developing Asian countries, by 2008 it doubled reaching the 56% (Homi Kharas, The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries, OECD Development Centre, 2010). Billions of first-time consumers who can afford only the cheapest products. Affordability becomes a big driver, at the same time however we see a growing interest and attention to sustainability issues especially from the younger generations. As Prahalad and Mashelkar stress in their article “Affordability and sustainability, not premium pricing and abundance, should drive innovation today.”

Doing more with less. Anyone with an interest in design will not struggle to connect their argument with the 10 principles of good design by Dieter Rams, “Good Design is as little design as possible – Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity”.

There is a word in Hindi that describes this phenomenon: jugaad, overcoming harsh constraints developing alternatives, improvising a solution using limited resources. Historically however, this word has the connotation of compromising on quality. For this reason Prahalad and Mashelkar prefer the definition of Gandhian Innovation. After studying Indian companies and organisations for many years, the authors argue that this model of innovation is mainly affected by two variables: the source of technologies involved and the organisation’s capabilities (competencies, knowledge and skills). At one end of this spectrum companies can disrupt business models using existing capabilities at a lower cost. On the other side of the spectrum they can create completely new capabilities, while in the middle they find the ability of modifying those capabilities. This framework gives birth to three models of Gandhian Innovation.

I was curious to know how design thinking would fit in such a framework, what is the current role of design in driving or shaping this radical revolution? When I met Aparna for the first time in London, a few months ago, I asked her to tell me her personal view on this subject and she introduced me to her theory of design for plurality. Innovate fast, cheaply but customised. She told me to take as example Mumbai’s taxis, there is no single taxi that looks like another. In a country of 1.2 billion people, customisation is a must. So yes frugal innovation is at the core of India’s innovation model revolution, but is not the only element.

In her view companies are starting to realise the powerful role of design in their approach to new models of innovation, although there is still a long way to go. In one of her articles for Livemint on the the growing role of product design in Indian industry, she argues that “A handful of Indian companies are already adopting product design as a potent weapon to fend off competitors and integrating the discipline into their business strategies.” A fantastic example is Mahindra’s Scorpio, an affordable and sustainable utility vehicle, the company’s single biggest investment in a new product at the time. According to Aparna’s article, fortified by Scorpio’s success (over 200,000 pieces sold) Mahindra is building “a new, purpose-built facility in Chennai that will accommodate a 1,500-strong, multidisciplinary product development team, with specialists in design, engineering, sourcing and manufacturing.”

Another interesting phenomenon is the rise of a new generation of Indian design entrepreneurs who work on a wide spectrum of projects, “ranging from researching how rural vaccines are delivered to learning more about farmers to design a specific mobile phone services platform,” she says. Desmania, Elephant, Design Directions and CKS are some of the names, interesting expressions of a new Indian culture of design worth to follow.

Let’s face it. Mankind does not like to work. Since Adam and Eve were ejected from Big Father house and had to work every day they probably tried to devise ways to sweat less and gain more.

Actually, every creature in the world if it had the choice between working and fighting for food or having it for free it would very likely choose the latter. Inventing the wheel, just to get one example was not out of spiritual enlightenment or to show off the latest gadget to the inventor’s neighbor but to accomplish the same if not more amount of work with less fatigue. So it goes for all the other invention/discoveries that mankind has adorned itself with: cars, washing machines, engines, electricity, nuclear power, the sailboat etc etc. Great inventions have thus come out of an inherent laziness mixed with a mind able to make lateral connections.

But.

Why is it, then, that laziness and all our attempts to work less and have more fun are worldwide considered with disdain, contempt and almost at the same level as one of the cardinal sins? How is it possible that a mental state with such a powerful and creative force is so frowned upon? Perhaps laziness is confused with apathy and apathy etymologically means lack of emotions, which is like saying lack of life. So perhaps when people frown upon laziness they just see a lack of purpose in ones life, a state close to death but cannot imagine that behind that apparently indolent state, embers might be glowing with passions and ideas might being smelted to produce a new wheel, a new project, a new state of collective consciousness.

To the readers of this blog the task to supply further answers.

Innovation relies on a greater part on this aspect. Lots of the most mentioned disruptive innovations rely on a new way of experiencing a concept, service or product. Easy examples are the Nintendo Wii or M-PESA.

The Nintendo Wii works on a technology called MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) accelerometers, which allow the console to sense the speed and orientation of the controller.  It wasn’t a new technology when Nintendo decided to apply it to one of their new products. It was indeed already used in the automotive and PC industry, but Nintendo managed to use it to disrupt the whole gaming concept, from an individual experience for young tech savvy to a family experience for everyone. They managed to deliver a new experience based on a new way of interaction.

M-PESA is a service released by Safaricom that allows people in Kenya to use mobile phones to send money to relatives without opening a bank account. Safaricom is using an old telecommunication device to disrupt the banking industry, delivering a completely new experience to people living in Kenya.

Under this light the past week served as inspirational catalyst for new ideas and a new approach. At the end of the day “the experience” is what people are going to remember, neither the technology behind it, nor the complex selling strategy developed from your marketing department.

The clear shift that is happening is from products to services, systems and experiences. Understanding the pace of change, understanding where needs are hidden to develop meaningful new experiences.

All this brings us back to a conversation we had here on the new role of designers, that today more than ever need to be able to provide a holistic view of the system “Problem – Idea – Solution” being involved on each of those 3 key steps. This also brings us back to the conversation John started here on education. How these new designers will be trained, how these skills will be mastered? Is our education system ready for this new challenge?

Innovation and technology have become associated, and this is a weakness within our current models of innovation. The process of innovation is about ideas. Technology may serve a role in the service of those ideas but the presence of technology is not a mandate. A second weakness is manifest when innovation results in the replacement of older systems. Landfills the world over are testaments to this flaw. With little exception, modern innovation results in an older solution absent a future purpose. And, so, the question: What if the current models of innovation are flawed?

Both of these weaknesses may need to be considered as innovation is applied to one particular discipline: education. Brilliant techniques for capturing attention, and technical devices designed for the same purpose certainly seem to be desirable. It is likely that they will prove valuable. But, will they be realized without the replacement of the preceding systems? Simply, not everything is within the capacity of already strained budgets. Will we trade band instruments for touch-sensitive displays? Will media-based lessons, stories of film quality, result in more illustrators, but fewer sculptors?

There are moments in our current education systems which provide Genesis moments of artistic epiphany. These deserve our consideration before we apply innovation which may result in their loss. And, before statements are made about how much fuller the creative experience will be using the new technologies, of the millions of available “apps”, not one provides the tactile realities of hands on clay. How will the loss of these experiences, in addition to an increased focus on left-brain competencies, impact architecture, music and literature?

It is unlikely that the vox populi will suddenly change mantras: currently, consumerism reigns. Among the few solutions available are likely to be these: first, whether it is instruments, art brushes, or clay, it is ultimately we parents and grandparents who will need to place these things within our children’s grasp. Second, perhaps this is one way in which we must rely on the interaction between design and innovation. How else, conceivably, may a new education system be created to include moments of classic artistic epiphany, equally or more effective?

Last week I’ve been invited as part of the Future of Work team to attend the “2025 Industry Outlook: Global Forces Shaping the Future” hosted by London Business School. The day brought together business leaders from several industries sharing ideas on the major trends that are forming the industry landscape. Very interesting data and conversation on a range of key areas as demography, society, technology and resources. High focus not only on the challenges but also on who is supposed to address those challenges, therefore the future role of governments, companies and individuals.

The picture at the end of the day was quite bleak, we are leaving in a complex world where trends in different areas interject creating unprecedented challenges, governments are not ready to act fast enough especially when global agreements are required and in this volatile framework only agile companies will be able to survive. Those companies that will be ready to reinvent themselves as fast as possible when facing a new challenge. Innovation was the word of the day.

The reason why I’m bringing this to the table today is that the day left all the attendees with one belief: the future needs highly creative people with unconventional skills. Professionals able to rapidly change structure and focus, with the ability to recognize need for change and to understand the direction to undertake. This requires organizations to rethink their organizational structure in order to incorporate all those people able to react promptly with a vision for the business.

This idea perfectly fits the conversation I started few months ago on the new role of designers, but this time I would like to move this conversation towards the role of emerging economies in the Creative Economy.

I spent a few weeks in India in January, having the chance, as part of the Future of Work team, to work with members from 7 companies: TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Mahindra Mahindra, Standard Charted, Unilever and Airtel. Apart from the big face to face event hosted by TCS in Mumbai, we have been invited for a tour of Wipro and Infosys campuses in Bangalore. This has been an highly valuable chance to understand what is really happening in the “Indian Silicon Valley”.

We already know that India is the world’s outsourcing centre, the world’s second-largest software industry. Its tech outsourcing accounts for more than half of the $300 billion global industry. We know all these things, so it wasn’t a surprise to find highly advanced centers, beautifully organized massive areas specialized in “information technology systems integrators”.

What I didn’t know however, was the existence of a rising indian creative class. All these centers have areas dedicated to design and creativity. Hubs for disruptive new ideas and innovation. India is starting to compete in the Creative Economy. Yes, India was known in the creative world for cinema (Bollywood makes over 900 films a year, making it the world’s largest filmmaking centre), music, game and animation industry. Creativity is part of India’s DNA. But here what struck me most was realizing big investments and focus on advertising, graphic design, product design and most of all design thinking practices.

In a world that is rapidly moving from an industrial economy to a creative one, where the industry screams for highly creative talents able to understand change and rapidly respond to it, where western organizations struggle to adapt their old architecture to this new need and open to new practices and unconventional talent, India seems to be on the right track. This new economy created highly agile organizations able to rapidly understand change and immediately adapt to it. Innovation is about speed after all.

The two main challenges that I see here, that clearly came from the conversations I had with people that work for those organizations, are firstly that innovation and economic growth in India are highly concentrated in three main city-regions: Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi. Secondly the lack of foreign human capital, India is not yet a magnet for talent from around the world. Challenges that India is currently facing and working on. It will be very interesting to see how India will evolve in order to face those challenges and most of all what will be the outcome of it. This visit showed me that India is one of the most exiting places right now in the world where to be, to build, create, explore, invent and innovate.

I was at the RIBA last Tuesday to attend a workshop organised by KTN Creative Industries on “Bridging the Digital and Physical Worlds.” The aim of the workshop was to explore what value does the designer / architect have in a world where customers are also creators, where the barriers to market have been erased and where the skills needed in digital creation are available to all, for free. Here the user is generator of content but most of all, he knows what he wants and he is able to make it happen or to push organisations to do so. Those that followed my blog since the beginning will easily realise how uncomfortable I felt in that situation.
I’ve alway found myself questioning the greater importance that organisations and innovation management literature gives to the “user.”

Tim Brown in his “Change by Design” argues that at the core of a successful innovation strategy there are three fundamental steps: insight, observation and empathy. The first starting point is “to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences” (Brown, 2009, p 45), he then continues asserting that people actual behaviors can and do provide invaluable information regarding unmet needs.
My argument on the other side is that getting too close to the user, will relegate the designer in the incremental innovation field. It will be extremely unlikely that designers will question or redefine dominant meanings or trends, they will only understand them for better satisfy them.
Prof. Verganti in his “Design-Driven Innovation” analyses the role of the user within user-centred design and design driven innovation theories.

Verganti, 2009, p.118

User centred design considers the user in its current context of use. The observation of the user in this space will provide valuable insight on unmet needs or an understanding of products and services that are in need of improvement, to better satisfy those needs. By definition this is the field of sustaining innovation that Christensen defines as “improvements to existing products on dimensions historically valued by customers” (Christensen, 2004, p. xvi). On the other side Design-Driven Innovation considers the user in an envisioned context of life, the vision that the firm and the designer created as result of a dialogue with all those interpreters that play a role in shaping the current design discourses. This will unquestionably build the path to breakthrough ideas, to radical innovation, that in Christensen words “…introduce a new value proposition. They either create new markets or reshape existing markets”.

I’ve been immersed in this conversation in the last few weeks during my traveling across India and Singapore where I had the chance to visit and open a conversation with organisations such as Uniliver and Kraft. I was astonished by the fact the every time the conversation was moving towards design-driven innovation practices, the words “understanding the user” were the first to be pronounced. Actively involving the user in the concept creation, understanding their needs, what the costumers want. Every time that conversation started, the words of Alberto Alessi came as a prophecy to my mind, here an extract of an interview that you can view in full here.

The importance of taking risk, to get close to the borderline, to make unique propositions to people that comes from a vision that only a designer, with his sets of skills and imagination can produce. The courage of radical innovation.
In a world were globalisation broke the boundaries, where there will always be somebody somewhere else to produce what you want for less money, in a world of frugal innovation, where the equation “I work – To earn money – To buy things” does not work anymore, where people look more and more for experiences rather than for just another product, user centred design cannot be a competitive advantage anymore.

During my visit at the Wipro campus in Bangalore, somebody said that at this point in time is more and more difficult for blue-chip companies to come up with radical proposals. It’s much easier for small, flexible, agile, new enterprises to come up with radical innovations that are then sold to big corporations. A clear example of this practice can be easily found in the pharmaceutical world. This is due to the excessive legacy corporations bring along and to the old organisational structure system that doesn’t enable the circulation and growth of innovative, most of the time risky ideas, that get killed across the infinite organisational layers, in the daily routine to get things done as soon as possible.

So under this light, what is the role of organisations in respect of Radical Innovations today? What shall it be in the future? What the role of designers in this process? Alberto Alessi talks about a process in place in a design company, can this process and way of thinking be scaled and applied within organisations that apparently have nothing to do with design but that are in desperate need for radical visions and opportunities?

“Thoughts without content are empty;

intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason A51 B75

It seems that much of the recent exhortations for business to value design thinking may have a tendency to promote the sort of emptiness that the same writers charge the purely analytic focus of MBAs. Any sort of thinking without material content leads only to vacuousness, as Immanuel Kant says; and this is as true of design thinking as it is of (dare I say it) philosophical, or any other thinking. How might we critique this emptying of a discipline?

While the exhortation may be necessary to get notions of creativity to participate in the discourses of value that predominate in business at best, or to get a peek into the value space at worst, there is a danger that participation on its own just reinforces an empty discourse. Thinking is of value, design thinks, therefore design is of value. But surely if the practices, processes or principles of designing are to be of any value, they can—indeed must—perform a critique of the very discourses that are being asked to value them. Before we consider how we might reinvigorate an empty design thinking, it might be worth wondering what constitutes design thinking not as it is currently lionised, but as it is practiced.

There are discussions of the epistemological in design—investigating the issues of what it is that designers know and how do they know it: particularly the work of Nigel Cross and Bryan Lawson. Lawson, however, in his How Designers Think (4^th ed., 2006) states that, for him, investigating what designers know is a response to how they think. Nevertheless, when Lawson considers the question of how designers think, what he is actually doing is to “demistify” the “design process” (as stated in his book’s subtitle). When he gets onto the chapter about ‘Types and styles of thinking’ (pp.129-44), he says that we now need “to turn our attention to the thought processes which are required to identify and understand those design problems and create design solutions” (p.129). There is a sense in which thinking can be seen insofar as it is expressed through action. A Spinozistic move: thinking and doing are the same, you see whichever one you are looking for; design thinking is design doing. All we need to do is to participate in design processes and practices and the thinking will occur simultaneously.

Thomas Lockwood, in the foreword to the Design Management Institute’s collection of essays called Design Thinking (2010) says:

Design thinking is essentially a human-centred process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. … The term design thinking is generally referred to as applying a designer’s sensibility and methods to problem solving, no matter what the problem is. It is not a substitute for professional design or the art and craft of designing, but rather a methodology for innovation and enablement (p.xi).

Here we begin with some ideas of the value, in-itself, of design thinking (i.e. that it is not valued by being part of another value system or discourse) and this value comes from key moments in its process, its external activites: largely its human-centredness. The value of design thinking comes from what it values. Next we have the sense that the value of design thinking relates to the (peculiar) ways in which a designer is constituted: sensibility and perspective. It comes from how a designer is wired. However, this wiring can be mapped and followed, or at least copied. Which is the last moment of interest in this quotation. Those of us who are not designers can learn to unhinge our sensibilities from their ‘normal’ ways of working and see things differently. The designer’s method can lead to a methodology we can adopt.

This is, of course, a bit too simplistic. What if we dislocated design thinking from its validation through thought and refocussed on what such an idea is meant to reference: the practice itself? So, not design thinking but designing. Designing is of value for all of the reasons that Lockwood notes above: following a process can give us an insight not only into the ways that designers engage with the world and their practice, but also into the world itself. (If this was not the case, then designing could not be taught in the first place.) Take the emptiness out of the equation and see what made designing so full of promise in the first place.

We should not, therefore, valorise only the practical: we would then be in danger of blinding practice by removing thinking. Gilles Deleuze said in a set of correspondences with Michel Foucault, “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall” (1972). Designing, then, would be vectoral, a constant moving out of rest through theoretical and practical points, but ending at (placing final value) on neither of them.

I’ll come back to the question of what this means for innovation, for business (and other disciplines), for T- or π-shapedness another time. But for now, let’s reword Kant to say: “Design thinking without doing is empty; practice without theory is blind.”

References

Deleuze, G. & Foucault, M. (1972) ‘Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’ (Accessed: 14/12/2010). <http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze>

Kant, I. (1933) The Critique of Pure Reason [1787], translated by Norman Kemp Smith, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan Press

Lawson, B. (2006) How Designers Think. The Design Process Demystified, 4^th edition, Oxford, Burlington MA, The Architectural Press/Elsevier

Lockwood, T. (ed.) (2010) Design Thinking, New York, Design Management Institute/Allworth Press

In so many ways this ought to be a piece of cake:  A technology-centric company handles new inventions as a matter-of-course.  Moreover, large IT companies like mine are in the business of inventing and filing many patents every year, and there’s a long history of translating those patents into viable applications.

So what’s the problem?  Well in my experience all such companies face some of the following challenges, to a greater or lesser degree, despite the defences they might voice …

1. “But, we’re always offering new technologies to our clients!”

With all this focus on technology research and development, we easily fall into thinking of “innovation” as a technology play.  When a client calls for “innovation”, some IT services companies still occupy time in pitching technology offerings.  The audience might comprise the client’s technology leaders (interested, but not buyers) or to the client’s business leaders (ready to buy, but only solutions to a specific business problems).

Far better to understand the client’s environment: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats etc. then ONLY pitch on relevant applied technologies.

2. “But, we spend millions on R&D!”

In extreme situations, if the pendulum swings right across to “R&D for its own sake” then the will to push our technologies at the market can even start to disintegrate.  Selling is hard, and its outcomes are not entirely in our control, so perhaps we’ll just run back to the lab.

3. “But, we’re continuously improving!”

Another weakness for some services companies can be the emphasis on continuous service improvement.  It’s widely-accepted now that the most mature providers should use some method to forever incrementally advance their service quality (TQM? Six Sigma? Lean?)  Advocates of these practices will naturally think of themselves as innovating all the time.  I agree, but I also think they’ll overlook opportunities to make more substantially changes which could lead to much more significant benefits.

4. “We don’t take our own medicine”

Finally, although these companies only exist to provide professional services to their clients, their own internal operations are significant and worthy of attention in their own right.  Perhaps they can make significant strides by applying innovation inside their own organisations, and thereby get ahead of the competition, at the same time producing case studies to help them sell innovation services externally.

I’m lucky that my current employer recognises and addresses these questions.  It’s “innovate or die” in our markets at the moment, and some unlucky companies will act only after it’s too late!

Two days ago I delivered, as part of a team from the Hot Spots Movement, a workshop on the Future of Work for the board of one of the biggest UK retailers. It was a one day workshop whose goal was to present the current trends that will affect the way we will be working in 2020, the way this forces will interject and an overview of the key areas to look at to be sure the company is ready to enter the future of work, to make sure the company is future proofed. We have been looking till 2040 presenting scenarios, building future timelines of change, trying to make them interact with unusual concepts, bringing them to think from a different point of view. This was the intention but something unusual happened that day.
Few days before the workshop a snow storm hit most of UK, causing several problems to the business. People were not leaving home to go shopping, they were ordering on-line but with the roads blocked by the snow the company was struggling delivering the orders and the profit of the week was at that time 30% less of what expected for the period. Not a good day to run a workshop on the future of work, everyone was very anxious, focused on the emergency, very difficult to bring their minds to 2040 that morning.
The reason I’m telling this story is that I would like to use it to start talking today about leadership and innovation.
They were focused on the short term current emergency, not being enable to see at a first glance the importance and power to look at a long term one. When after few hours we managed to bring their minds to look at the future, to look at those issues that at a first glance looked so far and unimportant that morning, they realized how close those issues were and how correlated to that emergency those discourses were. It might sound like a victory. That was the moment in which they asked for the recipes, for the answer, the solution. They realized the problem, they understood we were proposing a system, but a system takes time and effort to be put in place. So the easiest way around it was asking for the ready made answer. Not the first time that this happens to me, actually almost every time I talk or work with teams on radical innovation, future of work or design driven innovation this question tends to pop up at one point.
Top leaders like recipes. They like recipes because they are safer. Radical innovation is a very risky field and recipes help to feel safer. The missing point is that radical innovation doesn’t have any recipes by definition. Something so cutting edge as the Future of Work cannot have formulas, as they are easy to  replicate soon loosing their competitive advantage. Our role there was simply to give executives all the data, insights and interpretation they needed to build their own vision, their own blueprint.

The first of these steps, is definitively accepting that change is needed. Organizations exist in a context of continuous flux, where small (snow) and big (economic crisis) things happen  in the environment and people respond (or not) to them, the “how” organizations respond to those challenges defines what an organization is and will be.  Quoting Peter Drucker: “Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes – it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm”.
So what is the role of executives in this framework? According to Professor Verganti they are three:

• They set the direction and ignite the process. Outcomes of course strongly depend on how the innovation strategy has been framed. This requires executives to be able to ask the right questions.
• Leaders have to directly participate in creating networks and ecosystems, both internal and external.
• Finally at the end of the process, executives need to be ready to select the solution among those that emerged. Choosing the vision, the radical new meaning.

I would add to this the capability to embed the new strategy in the organization’s culture, making it believable from all those involved in the process of delivering it.

What this is telling me is that innovation is about people, is about new meanings, is about fear and risk, is about courage. What’s the next step?

Yesterday I’ve attended a seminar hosted at the RIBA in London organised by Trends Union. Star of the event was Li Edelkoort renowned trend forecaster and, according to Time magazine, one of the world’s 25 most influential people in fashion. It was a beautiful room full of buyers and fashion experts that were looking for answers and inspirations. I was an outsider, I know very little about fashion but very curious to know more about the trends they had in mind this year. The main theme of the seminar, titled “Earth Matters”, was trends for summer 2012. The reason why I decided to talk about this for this week’s blog is not for the trends Li Edelkoort spotted but for the reasons that lie behind her choice. She starts the conversation showing a powerful video on climate change and natural disasters pointing out some very interesting facts: the global cost of natural disasters in 2010 is estimated to be $200 billion dollars, producing 315123 dead people and 5900110 homeless people. Starting from this shocking facts she continues presenting what can be considered an economic and societal analysis of our current situation. We abused of the earth and its resources, the earth now is responding violently, unleashing a scary strength. This was only the introduction that presented the main core of the seminar: change is needed. We need to change our current way of doing things as the current system in place is not sustainable anymore. She openly questions the whole fashion industry system that till now has been only looking at how to perform more instead of how to perform better. She continues then advocating that economic crisis are the best thing that can happen to us, as they force us to think creatively. Crisis enable us to look at systems with different eyes. “We should celebrate crisis” she says.  So what can fashion design do?

The room was full of people that were there to know what will be the next pink in summer 2012 (I discovered then that it will be yellow, “yellow is the new pink” they said. Whatever that means.) and instead she gave a lecture on innovation. The “old ways of doing things” she is talking about is what we defined to be Market Pull Innovation practices. Her vision on the other side is Design Driven Innovation. Her vision is questioning and redefining dominant meanings and it’s interesting to see that this need hasn’t be spotted by a business expert or an economy guru but from a fashion trend expert.

So going back to the question “what can fashion design do?”, she attempts some answers mentioning case studies from the american fashion industry. The solutions mentioned involve using biocotton, starting again to produce locally, using natural colors… interesting starting point although probably not enough.

At the end of the seminar she said something that stuck in my mind “Designers are able to detect beauty from disgusting stuff.” Does that mean that design is the solution from the difficult situation we are finding ourselves in? Could design be able to solve the causes and consequences of this economic crisis? If a fashion designer so clearly identified the problem, attempting solutions, why is it so difficult for business leaders to recognise the shift of need and thinking that is already happening? Why is it so difficult to convince organisations about the power and importance of experimenting with the unusual especially in difficult periods?
I have been meeting several business leaders and innovation directors from several big organisations lately discussing about design driven innovation and the importance of taking action in this direction and every time what comes clear is that you usually have few people within a company seeing this change happening looking for the answer to one single question “How can I persuade my organisation that this is the way to undertake?”