Innovation has three faces
Design is solving meaningful problems in meaningful ways ensuring the solution has an emotional connection to the people it’s intended to benefit, and secondarily, if it is necessary for distribution of the solution, to also be commercially viable.
Design > Creativity
Design is often relegated to being creativity, but in practice they focus on different outcomes. While both shape ideas into reality, design is focused on finding ways to address other people’s problems. While creativity is focused on expression, curiosity, or the pure joy of making something new, it isn’t necessarily driven by practical need.
One reason they are often conflated is that they are both dependent on imagination, which is commonly understood to be one’s internal mental capacity to picture what is not present. But imagination is applied differently in design than in creativity.
In early development imagination is commonly triggered by play—allowing us to see a box as a ship and a rolled up sheet of paper as a spyglass, transmogrifying common objectives to things of wonder. Unfortunately, for most, play is sequestered to our early childhood, the word being redefined as soon as we start to “play” games with others, especially team sports. Then play becomes more about demonstrating your ability to follow the rules, support your teammates, and above all else winning.
At its foundation play is the removal of real-world consequences and rules, freeing the mind from thinking logically about things like survival and responsibilities to exploring the world of “what-ifs”.
In adults creativity is focused on simply making something new, expressive, and unburdened by consequence. Design on the other hand, with its focus on solving problems for others, requires the output of imagination to be filtered through the lens of problem solving, which includes logical thinking and responsibility. Design education includes developing the skills to maintain a state of imagination concurrently thinking about the realities of the problem.
Design ≠ Cosmetics
Solving the problem means making its solution self-evident, so yes, design includes how the solution looks and how it feels. But those are byproducts of the solution and they change to reflect how design solves the problem—there are always many ways to solve any given problem so there is never one fixed expression for the solution.
Good design doesn’t hide the solution behind ornamentation, it elevates the constituent parts that have earned their place in the solution. Masking complexity—or the lack of capabilities, behind aesthetics only defers the inevitable disappointment and frustration from using poorly designed products.
Great design adds emotion to make people desire it—even for SaaS platforms or warehouse tools great design is desirable. My father once told me, “If you fall in love with the tools you use, you will use them for the rest of your life.” He was talking about his carpentry and cabinetry tools, but the same applies to forklifts, smart phones, software, etc.
It is worth considering if emotional connections help decrease waste by extending the lifespan of the solution.
Design = Problem Solving
Design only considers a problem solved if the solution successfully addresses the needs of the people impacted by the problem. It also ensures those people have ready access to the solution. That requires both the technical feasibility and commercial viability be included in the design.
Feasibility frequently is focused on the technologies and materials used to fabricate the solution, ensuring they are both readily available and reliable. However, feasibility also includes making the solution’s durability and ability to function align with its intended context(s) of use by factoring in environmental, social, cultural, and planetary considerations.
Commercial viability should not be underestimated, nor should it be left to the product managers or sales team. Designers have a responsibility to ensure the solution can be readily obtained by the people who need it. A workable model for distribution must also be part of the solution to ensure it is attainable by the people it’s intended to assist.
Breaking down innovation
Most innovation lacks both novelty and relevance to the people it claims to serve. Most of what gets called “innovation” is a reflexive enhancement or a copy of a competitor's move. It doesn't fit the needs of the people it’s intended to benefit, nor does it fit their context use.
There are four well-established types of innovation (Christensen, Henderson & Clark, etc.):
Incremental Innovation improves an established solution. Low risk, low cost. (Yearly smartphone camera upgrades.)
Disruptive Innovation uses new technology to serve a niche market cheaply. (Netflix streaming killed video rental stores.)
Radical Innovation is closer to invention. New technology, new science, high risk, high cost. (The internet.)
Architectural Innovation takes an existing solution and applies it to a new market. (Tesla putting laptop battery technology into cars.)
None of these four types mention the people the innovation is meant to serve. They describe technology and financial risk. Nothing else.
Larry Keeley’s Ten Types of Innovation expands innovation beyond technology and the market to include the organization itself, from its business model to its ecosystem to the customer engagement.
Profit Model. Most businesses copy the standard model in their industry. Finding a different incentive, one closer to what the customer actually wants, is a real advantage.
Network. Partnering with another company's technology, process, or channel grows your reach without growing your investment.
Structure. Organizations need to continually enhance the alignment of their resources, talent, and incentives. Optimizing your cost structure improves your culture and employee engagement.
Process. AI didn't create the need to improve how work gets done, bad process gates growth and cultures wither under their weight.
Product Performance. Increasing value delivery through features, quality, pricing, ease-of-use, sustainability, etc. is what most people think of when they hear innovation. The four types above are a way to break down this area further.
Product System. It extends the network concept into your solution, interoperating with partners’ solutions/technologies, increasing the collective value you and your partners.
Service. Improving a customer’s post-sale experience (support, training, troubleshooting, etc.) can help retain customers and even upsell them to new offerings.
Channel. Where you meet your customer — a store, e-commerce, an influencer, a wholesaler — decides who you reach and how fast you grow.
Brand. Brand is the promise you've made the market, and whether people believe it. Visual design (advertising) historically carried that promise. Now the product and the leadership carry it instead.
Customer Engagement. How you go beyond the functionality to address your customers’ aspirations—mastery, identity, belonging. While engagement can’t improve the product, it can improve how people feel about the product.
Only two of these ten, profit model and product performance, actually change whether the solution meets the need. The rest — service, brand, channel, customer engagement — change how the customer feels about the solution, or how much the business extracts from them, without touching whether it works.
Three faces of innovation
Innovation starts with inception. Inception starts with inspiration—the trigger that sparks the idea in the first place.
Design is inspired by people and their needs. Engineers are inspired by materials, algorithms, and technology. Business is inspired by markets, profit, and growth. However our underlying motivations filter our inspirations. Engineering exploits what a technology can do. Business extracts what a market will pay. Design generates what people need.
Engineers build to demonstrate what new technology can do. That's why engineering skews toward radical and architectural innovation. Business spends as little capital as possible for the most revenue possible. That's why business skews toward incremental and disruptive innovation, new business models, and partnerships.
Design starts somewhere else: with people, and what they actually need — not what they say they need, which are rarely the same thing. Design has tools to close that gap, and tools to prototype fast, starting with pen and paper, to see how a solution changes its context and how that context changes the solution. Only once the problem is understood does design choose materials, technology, and fabrication — in partnership with engineering to find what's possible, and with business to shape the model, the brand, the network. Radical innovation is where design's 'what-if' thinking does the most work: it multiplies the number of solutions worth considering.
Conclusion
To be sure, design will leverage the latest technologies, and it is committed to maximizing the ROI and market share. But design seeks authentic innovation—innovation that means something. Meaning drives sustainable value. No technology—no matter how cool, no sales pitch—no matter polished, can deliver sustained value like meaningfulness.
Most innovation asks what technology allows or what a market will pay. Design asks what people need. That's the only question that produces something worth having.
