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People love trying to measure and quantify things, because then the incomprehensible seems like it makes sense. Psychologists try to measure anger; dating websites try to boil ethereal qualities into "match" numbers; and now Roberto Verganti and Claudio Dell'Era, researchers at Italy's Politecnico di Milano, are trying to measure "design innovation."
For their study, Verganti and Dell'Era focused on the Italian furniture industry, using a database (Webmobili.com) to classify 2,000 objects by shape, color, surface, and material. They also divided the corresponding sample of 100 manufacturers into innovators and imitators, identifying a company as an innovator if it had been selected for or received the coveted Compasso d'Oro, a prestigious international prize awarded to groundbreaking design products.
So what did they find? Firstly, they broke companies into three different philosophies in terms of releasing new products: Launch and See ("They're gonna love this"), See and Launch ("Our research says they're gonna love this"), and Wait and See ("Let's take some time to figure out what they're gonna love").
You would suspect that innovative companies would be in the first category, while the uninnovative would be damned within the third category. And you'd be wrong. Why? Read the whole thing here.
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Comments
This is useful language to guide clients in understanding what we can - and can't - get out of customer research. Too often they want to ask explicit questions in the hopes customers will "tell us what they want." To me, that's trying to get customers to do our job for us, instead of using research to gain insights that can feed into our own innovative solutions.