Legendary 3M inventor of the Post-it Note, Art Fry, shares his words of wisdom on innovation, creativity and getting disruptive products into the market. A wonderful read for all innovators, designers and entrepreneurs.

Q – Fact or fiction: Post-it® notes were an accident?

Art – A lot of people would like to think that you get something for nothing. A discovery might be an accident. But an innovation requires so much work. I use the analogy that we’re all working under a street light. We’re acquainted with what we see and work with day in and day out. But out there in the darkness there is so much stuff that we don’t know about that if we send somebody out and they feel around and find something and bring it back, we all have something we can work on. But sending those people out to look is not an accident.

Here are a few more notable quotes which showed how a disruptive innovation, something people do not understand, is made acceptable to consumers by going through a process of design thinking anchored by critical insight, observation and user centered research.

Q – The design of the Post-it® notes begs several questions. Why was canary yellow the original color?

Art – …the distributors and dealers said, “We don’t believe that stuff is going to sell. We’re not going to give you all that shelf space. We’re going to give you just enough shelf space for one color and two sizes.” So what size? We didn’t want it to be pink or blue and step on anybody’s toes as far as male and female preferences. Yellow seemed to be a very natural one because it was cheerful and the eye can see black on yellow with very low distortion.

Q – When they were introduced in 1980, Post-it® notes came in two sizes – three inches by five inches and one-and-a-half inch by two inches. What was the thinking behind these sizes?

Art – We wanted a small note that didn’t take a lot of space for people that just wanted them for a bookmark or a flag to get people’s attention. And, then, for those who wanted to write a little bit more, something bigger – a 3×5. Now there was a lot of pressure in the beginning to make them in 4×6. That was the size of scratch paper folders that were on the desks of most executives. But you couldn’t stick a 4×6 note in your pocket. The 3×5 would go in. So we wanted the large one and a small one. After we’d been selling the product a few years and the sales had built up to the point where now we could have more sizes in our line, we added a 3×3. It’s one of the most popular sizes.

Q –So the size can be traced back to convenience?

Art –Again, it’s designing it for a customer need. In the beginning there also was a lot of pressure on me to make it in roll form. Because nobody knew how to make sticky sheets in a pad. Can you imagine how inconvenient it would be to have a roll of notes in your pocket? For the customer, we clearly needed a pad. No one knew how to do it. But that’s the direction we took and we learned how to do it.

Q – You’ve said that most everybody in 3M management, marketing and sales initially thought “sticky notes” was a dumb idea that was too expensive and wouldn’t sell. What kept you going in the face of strong opposition?

Art – That’s part of the game. I was in new product development for 20 years previous to that. I knew that when you have something that’s new to the world, it takes a lot of convincing. People don’t see it right away. That’s almost a good thing. If it were easy, somebody else would be doing it. So the challenge is something that keeps people like me going. And, then, I just knew better. I knew that folks that were using the pads were using between seven and 20 pads per year around 3M. Well, that was enormous compared to the Magic™ tape that was the cash cow for our division. They were using one roll of Magic™ tape per year. So when I said this was going to be seven to 20 times bigger than Magic™ tape, people were incredulous. They wouldn’t believe it. They thought, “Go back to the lab; you don’t know anything about marketing.” But I knew people’s addictions to the sticky note when I gave them samples.

This proves that having a great idea is only a small fraction of the entire process. And if we look at what Art had to go through, it was a long and laborious process indeed!

Q – In reading the history of Post-it® notes, it’s clear that the Marketing department was boring some of those holes?

Art – Because they were measuring according to what their reaction was and also according to market research that was done that said there were only three-quarters of a million dollars total sales. Now, market research for products that have been in the market for awhile – where you are just making a small tweak or change in the product – is very accurate. Market research for pioneering products is never found to be accurate. Because there’s no market. And if you just ask a group of people how much they would use of a product that they have never used and don’t even understand yet, you can’t get good data. So Marketing believed that. And our office supply dealers that would be selling it for us didn’t think it would sell. They thought it was too expensive. I had access to the research that 3M was doing – new technologies that nobody else had. And so I looked at customers and what they were doing and asked, “How can we do those things in ways that they would never ask for?”

This interview really reminds me of our earlier discussion that User Centered Innovation is Dead. What a really interesting set of real life examples of when User Centered processes should come in and when it was a mistake or a hindrance.

Art made a lot more interesting and notable points, especially on the work culture at 3M and allowing their employees to spend 15% of their work time on free play, in the full interview at Eastman Innovation Lab. Enjoy it with a cup of coffee as it is a quite a long read!

Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin (Amazon link), reinvents work by challenging everyone to be an “Artist” now! (Check out the Linchpin manifesto graphic above for a gist!) This is something most designers should already do well, and then again for some of you maybe do better?

Now, if the man on the street is encouraged to work with passion and artistry, how is a designer, whose work is about passion and artistry, going to do one better?

In a recent interview on the local Chinese CCTV, Chen Dongliang, Director of the Beijing Industrial Design Center, has highlighted the tremendous economic value of Industrial Design to China’s economy.

The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.

That’s just in 2008! While the job definition of an Industrial Designer in China is pretty broad, even if we discount their statistics, it is still a lot of people and money.

What is more interesting is their next set of statistics.

The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output. This is on average. The contribution rates are different in different industries.”

Those are some impressive numbers! If we consider these statistics as ratios, we can get a good insight on the amount of value-add a design investment can give to a product.

In detail we have:

In the UK, Design’s output is $1 invested is to $2.25 British Pounds.

In China it is $1 to $13 Yuan.

Of cause these are averages and possibly skewed, and I believe when we start bringing in buying power and exchange rates the numbers start to change. Regardless, this is something to ponder about when you next have to convince a client if he or she should invest in design.

Anyone else have some good statistics on the how much ROI you can get from investing in design?

Our industrialized economy, founded on mass manufacturing and economies of scale spurred by consumerism, is the greatest enemy of remarkable products.

Of course many products will come close, in fact many will be hailed as fantastic or even great, but the truly remarkable will be few and far between.

People striving to create awesomely remarkable products can do so because it is actually quite straightforward. Unfortunately it rarely happens, as making remarkable products is a constant uphill battle against the basic machinery that makes it all happens.

Lets take a look and see why.

1) Manufacturing bland
The whole objective of mass manufacturing is to get economies of scale when you manufacture large volumes of product. So what does this means?

You build standardized products with as many common parts as possible. Or take this to the next level by making products with as many off the shelf components as possible. Take a look at the computer industry and you can see this glaring problem. Pretty much everything looks the same and differentiation ends up being very superficial.

2) Race to the bottom
One of the big advantages of economics of scale is a product made as cheap as possible by a repetitious and standardized process. Why is this important?

It is a big race to the bottom in terms of price. Contract manufacturers are pressured to reduce their cost by ensuring pricing efficiency and sufficiency. Products are built to a level of specification that most consumers are willing to pay. This is then balanced off with the cost and margin a brand is willing to accept.

This is to avoid situations, for example, where groups of people will not be interested to pay more for, say, a mobile phone with camera when all they need is a straight forward phone.

So in a product creation process like this, why then anyone go the extra mile for an awesome function or spec when it will be just considered a nice to have or not appeal to the market majority?

3) Products that do too much
On the other end of scale from the previous point, designers often get sucked into creating products, designs, forms, or shapes etc. that try to appeal to as many people as possible.

In essence, we end up with products that try to be everything and the kitchen sink. This is also often comes as a response to unfocused marketing stories that try to unsuccessfully satisfy as many consumers’ needs as possible.

4) We threw out the baby with the bath water

Gordan Ramsey said (via Contrast):

“It doesn’t matter how amazing the steak is, if it’s served on a cold plate it’s crap. If it’s served with a dull knife it’s crap. If the gravy isn’t piping hot, it’s crap. If you’re eating it on an uncomfortable chair, it’s crap. If it’s served by an ugly waiter who just came in from a smoke break, it’s crap. Because I care about the steak, I have to care about everything around it. “

These days it is getting extremely difficult for designers to manage the entire design development process because organizations decided (about 10+ years ago) not be vertically integrated and outsourced much of their (lower value) down stream development processes. This helped organizations reduce overheads, costs and increase efficiency, especially if the process moved outhouse was manufacturing.

The net effect of contract manufacturing or contract “everything” for that matter, is the loss of control. It is hard, not impossible, to regain this control and ensure the integrity of a design solution through out the development process, but you need extremely passionate, dedicated and persistent team that don’t come a dime a dozen

———-

So I hope we can now see that the environment we design products in, leans towards encouraging the creation of watered down products with little innovation and poor differentiation.

What do we do now?

I’m not asking you to go against industrialization or the contract manufacturing process as it has many benefits, what we need to change is our mindsets and decide if we are happy with acceptable products that just meets everyone’s requirements, or strive to create remarkable products that go beyond what people expect and accept that it will appeal to fewer people.

If you ever had a doubt about designing fewer, focused, but exceptional products. Check out this quote by Apple’s COO Tim Cook (via Seth Godin):

“This is the most focused company I know of, am aware of, or have any knowledge of… We say no to good ideas every day.” Cook then pointed out to analysts that every single product the company makes would fit on the single conference table in front of him. “And we had revenue last year of $40 billion.”

Ahh…is it not great how design can do so much more when design is doing less?

A Lifehacker reader, frustrated with every headphone wire management solution in the market, decided to design his own dead simple solution that I dare say rivals any professionally designed consumer solution! I do wonder why designers can’t seem to get away from reinterpreting the dog bone, fish bone or donut?

Charles Kim found that by reusing a vinyl badge clip, (found on those old conference badge tags) he could keep his headphone wires cleanly wrapped up, knot and tangle free. Furthermore, this metal clip also allows the device to be attached to objects like a shirt or bag, so that the wrapped headphones can be easily accessible if necessary.

What a wonderfully clean and simple solution to an age-old problem! Has it been that long since portable music players were introduced?

Via: Lifehacker and Instructables.