Once upon a time there were some innovative farmers that developed a new hybrid crop that could satisfy the hunger of a growing population. This crop grew best in large farms which had to be situated far from where people lived. The food was so tasty and production could scale so quickly that it became necessary and possible to build a novel way to deliver this food to the population. The farmers built their own transportation network, which they called a “railway”.

In a sector where financial resources are relatively low, effective prototyping fills the innovation gap, reducing the risk of innovation practice and solving the problem of the innovation funding calls, which ask for detailed project proposals but often do not provide the guidance or tools needed to come up with the good idea that makes a great proposal.

The premise of the stock market today is therefore that being innovative in technology is meaningless. Innovations are valuable but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing then we could measure it and put a number of its value. Until then innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

Find me the people who actually invented anything at any famous company and you’ll find the language they use is very simple. [...] The fancy words mostly come from people who arrive well after the inventing and innovating is done, including innovation consultants.

I ran a session at FOO camp ’11 on Why Great Ideas Fail. It was chaotic, but my goal of leaving the room with a list of reasons was achieved – and here it is.

The crowd was tech and start-up heavy, so the list is shifted towards those pursuits. But this could be the start of a book project that more broadly explores the history of great ideas. Starting with fleshing out these categories better, and then finding good stories that illustrate ideas that failed for these reasons, as well as ideas that successfully overcame these challenges.

Meta-comment: Fascinating how many of these are opposite pairs of each other (e.g. gave up too soon, stayed with same idea for too long).

Follow up: If you were there, or not, and want to be updated if this project gets off the ground, leave a comment.

Why Great Ideas Fail:

Killed idea too soon
Stayed with idea for too long
Death (of person with the idea)
Not knowing target audience
Not Willing to experiment to find audience
Unwilling to change direction
Willful ignorance of economics
Overcoming organizational inertia
Not understanding the ecosystem the idea lives in
Inability to learn from microfailure
Fighting the last war
Giving up
Chindogu – solution causes more problems than it solves.
Randomness
Blamed marketing
Failed to pitch or communicate well
Not taking the idea far enough
Underestimating cultural limits
Underestimating dependencies
Balancing how world is vs. how world can be
Balancing Wants vs needs

Thanks to Val Aurora, I also got a list from attendees of personal reasons great ideas failed. Wide range of levels of specificity, but still interesting,

Specific failures people listed as their own:

Forcing something on people they don’t want
Not controlling distribution (e.g. Tivo vs. Comcast DVR)
Not doing post-mortems
Built an Airbnb before Airbnb, but didn’t see it through
Not eating our own dogfood
Building something ‘powerful’ but too complicate for the average user
Voice version of twitter circa 2005
Force change earlier. It won’t happen on its own.
Launching a product before it’s ready – unreliable performance
Not killing a project/startup faster (i.e. spinning wheels for an extra year instead of getting it out the door)
Trusting before researching
Not trusting my gut
Not considering political capital within a large organization
Trusting my gut too much
Juggling between being your greatest supporter and your greatest critic

Thanks to @jessykate for the photo of the whiteboard, from which these notes were transcribed.

Related posts:Why you should be weird
Where do your ideas die? (With a bad illustration)
Idea helpers: ways to grow ideas
Life and death of great ideas (Idea approval index)
Can you be a great man?

Experientia wins Italian National Prize for Innovation in Services, sponsored by the Italian government and Confcommercio.
The President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, awards the prize. 
Rome, Tuesday 14 June 2011

Today, the president of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, awarded Experientia srl with the prestigious National Prize for Innovation in Services, for their project Low2No, for having “planned a residential area in Finland with low CO2 emissions, using innovative methodologies devised in Italy.”

Experientia is an international experience design consultancy based in Turin, Italy, which helps international companies and organizations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first.

The winning project, Low2No (also known as C-Life), details Experientia’s role in the development and implementation of service offers for a low-to-no carbon emissions building development in Helsinki, involving user-centred service and participatory design methods. The entire construction project will be completed in 2013.

At the award ceremony at the Quirinale (the Italian presidential palace), Michele Visciola, the president of Experientia, accompanied by the CEO Pierpaolo Perotto, received the prize from President Napolitano.

“It is an honour for us to receive this prize from the hands of the President of the Republic,” Visciola declared, “It demonstrates that in Italy, we have young, quality businesses that can compete on an international level in terms of excellence.”

Jan-Christoph Zoels, the director of the service design project, highlighted the importance of the project by stating, “Beautiful and well-engineered, sustainable houses are not enough. Half of the contribution to a community’s carbon footprint is based on people’s lifestyles. We aim to support sustainable lifestyles and services during a building’s entire lifetime.”

Experientia has worked on the planning and design of services, to create, within the Low2No project, a “Food Hub” (offering services related to the purchase, consumption and sharing of regional, organic food, an ethical and sustainable alternative to the products commonly offered in the Finnish market); an “Eco-laundry” (using highly efficient practices and detergents with a low environmental impact); and a communal, wood-fuelled sauna (an eco-friendly response to the presence of a private electric sauna in most Finnish homes).

During the day, at a separate event organised by the ConfCommercio and hosted by ConfCommerico president Carlo Sangalli, the representatives from Experientia, including senior partners Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken, and project team member Camilla Masala, met with the press and public. 

WHO IS EXPERIENTIA?

Experientia is an international experience design consultancy based in Turin, Italy, which helps international companies and organizations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first. Experientia puts people and their experiences, past and future, at the centre of strategic innovation, guiding the company’s processes of research, strategy development, solution creation, prototype design and testing. 

THE PRIZE

The National Prize for Innovation was founded by the Italian government as a key initiative of the National Day of Innovation, an annual event to raise citizens’ awareness of the theme of innovation. It is also an opportunity for the principle public and private actors to take stock of the state of innovation in the country and share identified strategic objectives within the European framework and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Through this prize, the government honours the best examples of creativity and innovation in the sectors of industry, design, university and public research, public administration and services, including financial services.

ConfCommercio, the Italian “Confederation of business, professional activities and autonomous work”, was responsible for the selection for the design section of the National Prize for Innovation in Services, which included “Innovation in Business”; “Innovation in Tourism”, “ICT and Service Design”. Experientia has won the prize for the ICT and Service Design category.

This year, the National Day of Innovation holds particular significance, not only because of the presence of the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, and the Minister for public administration and innovation Renato Brunetta, but because it coincides with the celebrations of 150 years of Italian Unity.  

THE PROJECT

The winning project, Low2No (also known as C-Life), aims to facilitate behavioural change for more sustainable lifestyles. Experientia has designed a service platform for the low-to-no carbon emissions building development in Helsinki, involving user-centred service and participatory design methods.

The Low2No service platform represents one of the principle points of contact with the soul and mission of the zone. It will contribute to making sustainability an integral part of the daily activities and lives of the residents and workers of the area. It will support locals in adopting the change and transformation of their usual habits, and give them the possibility to communicate and compare themselves with their peers, through the project’s elements of participation and socialisation.

The project is a collaborative effort between international engineering and planning firm Arup (London), architectural firm Sauerbruch Hutton (Berlin), and user experience design consultancy Experientia, on behalf of Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, the developer SRV and the housing agency VVO. Experientia’s dual role on the team involves the design of an advanced smart metering system (a digital energy-consumption metre) for residential households, and the design and implementation of a service platform for the entire zone.

Low2No is a mixed-use block. It comprises 14,000 square metres of mixed residential space (both rental and privately owned) with 6,500 square metres of office space and a business incubator and 1,800 square metres of commercial space.

The involvement of future residents and entrepreneurs in identifying their needs and generating shared ideas and solutions has a created a user-centric service platform, within which the client represents more than a simple final element of the chain, but becomes a key actor in the implementation and supply of the services themselves. 

CONTACT
Mark Vanderbeeken, Experientia srl, +39 011 812 9687, info at experientia dot com 

LINKS
- Experientia
- National Prize for Innovation (Italian only)
- National Prize for Innovation in Services (Italian only)
- National Day of Innovation (Italian only)
- Press kit of the winning project (English version)
- Low2No
- Sitra

All presentations from The Web and Beyond (TWAB) can now be viewed online.
TWAB is the bi-annual daylong conference organised by Chi Nederland and IOP-MMI for the user experience and interaction design community.

Here are some we like:

People as content [video | abstract + bio]
Anton Nijholt, University of Twente
Anton looks deeper into non-cooperative behaviour and its many uses from both the point of view of a smart environment, and that of human partners, users, or inhabitants of smart environments.

Playing well with others: design for augmented reality [video | abstract + bio]
Joe Lamantia
Joe reviews interaction design patterns common to augmented reality, suggest tools to improve the ‘social maturity’ of AR, and shares design principles for creating genuinely social augmented experiences.

Proximity wormholes: how the social web enables intimacy at scale [video | abstract + bio]
Lee Bryant, Headshift
Lee shows how proximity changes in the social web, and how we can adapt and cope with these changes, given that our own cognitive powers evolve more slowly than the tools we use to connect and communicate.

Social 3.0 [video | abstract + bio]
Steven Pemberton, CWI/W3C
Steven introduces new technologies that would allow us to arrange our social networks in different ways so that the data belongs to us. He’ll discuss how they affect our interactions online and how we can adopt such technologies.

The human interface (Why products are people, too) [video | abstract + bio]
Christopher Fahey, Behavior
Chris explores diverse areas of non-digital human experience (language, storytelling, neurology and sociology) to frame and showcase some of the most exciting current and emerging user experience design practices on the web and other media.

UX research methods for ubiquitous computing [video | abstract + bio]
Stijn Nieuwendijk, valsplat
Ubiquitous computing challenges the field of usability research. Stijn talks about the evolution of the classic usability set-up and show new user experience research methods that valsplat is experimenting with.

In quasi tutti i sistemi fiscali i consumi di lusso sono scoraggiati con una tassazione più pesante rispetto a quelli ritenuti “normali”, qualsiasi cosa questo significhi. In qualunque corso introduttivo di scienza delle finanze vi diranno che ci sono due ragioni per questo. Una è che la domanda di questi beni è meno reattiva al prezzo di quella dei beni non di lusso. Quindi un aumento della tassazione si tradurrà in una riduzione della domanda (quindi in una diminuzione del PIL), ma essa sarà minore di quella che si sarebbe avuta tassando allo stesso modo beni non di lusso. L’altra ragione è che sono in genere i ricchi a consumare maggiormente questi beni, e gli economisti sono addestrati a considerare l’equità distributiva un valore. A parità di altre condizioni, meglio tassare i ricchi.

Queste argomentazioni sono valide in un modello statico e in equilibrio. Di equilibrio, perché si concentra su quella condizione ideale (e di fatto non verificabile nella realtà) in cui tutti i consumatori hanno massimizzato la loro utilità, e tutte le imprese il loro profitto. Statico, perché in esso manca il tempo. In particolare, manca il progresso tecnico. A parte le critiche alla nozione di equilibrio economico, vorrei sostenere che, se si prendono in considerazione il tempo e il progresso tecnico, vi è un terzo argomento per scoraggiare i consumi di lusso. Ed è questo: i beni di lusso non cambiano il mondo. Non l’hanno mai cambiato. Non creano nuovi sistemi di mercato, nuovi settori; non creano mobilità sociale e ricchezza diffusa. A cambiare il mondo sono i beni che costano poco. Non Bugatti o Rolls Royce, ma Ford Modello T e Fiat Seicento; non gli yacht da diporto ma le linee aeree low cost; non i telefoni satellitari degli yuppies anni 80 ma i cellulari GSM da 15 euro accessibili ai pastori e ai contadini africani; non i manoscritti meravigliosamente miniati dell’era pre-Gutenberg ma i tascabili di Aldo Manuzio; non il mainframe IBM ma l’Apple Macintosh. Gli oggetti di lusso sono spesso belli, ma quasi sempre incarnano un futuro che è la riproposizione del passato, con (banalizzo) le famiglie benestanti che allargano la loro collezione di gingilli, i figli come i padri; e le famiglie non benestanti relegate nel ruolo di ammiratori più o meno invidiosi.

Per questa ragione sono contrario al movimento Slow Food, e alla presenza sempre più invadente della filiera enogastronomica nel discorso italiano sullo sviluppo locale. Hai presente il gnocco fritto? Le mie zie a Reggio Emilia lo facevano a primavera per tutti i nipoti. Potevi mangiarlo in certe trattorie dell’appennino a prezzi ridicoli. Era buono ed economico. Era un sapore di casa. Si friggeva (obbligatorio) nello strutto. Si annaffiava con il lambrusco fatto in casa, con le bollicine che scrostano il grasso di maiale dallo stomaco. Bene, dimenticatelo. Da oggi il gnocco fritto si mangia nei ristoranti infighettati con finti strumenti musicali appesi alle pareti e l’adesivo del Gambero Rosso (“cus’ela?” avrebbe brontolato mia nonna, una vera esperta in materia). Si frigge nell’olio, addensato e agglutinato per dargl la consistenza dello strutto. Costa 35 euro a coperto, e non è affatto più buono di quando costava cinquemila lire vino compreso.

Ma c’è di peggio. I marchi di garanzia che proliferano nella nostra tanto decantata filiera del gusto vengono concessi agli alimenti che vengono prodotti rispettando dei protocolli chiamati disciplinari. Nei disciplinari c’è scritto non solo cosa, ma come devi produrre. E questo è decisivo, perché blocca l’innovazione. Se vuoi il marchio devi fare tutto esattamente come tutti gli altri che hanno quel marchio. La conclusione è che i grandi prodotti veramente buoni per definizione non possono avere marchi; i grandi vini, per esempio, non sono Doc, perché mischiano vitigni di provenienze diverse per ottenere prodotti di eccellenza. Paradossale? No, perché i marchi di garanzia mica servono a fare prodotti buoni: servono ad alzare i margini. Se un genio dell’agronomia riuscisse a fare uno spumante buono come il Veuve Cliquot, ma che costa come il Tavernello, o un formaggio buono come il parmigiano reggiano con latte di cammello a cinque euro al chilo, non troverebbe nessuno disposto a dargli un marchio. Il marchio garantisce i prodotti esistenti contro la concorrenza di quelli nuovi.

Conclusione: Slow Food, come buona parte della filiera del gusto, spinge verso il mondo del lusso prodotti buoni ed economici, inventati dai nostri nonni con poco denaro e molta inventiva, e riduce il loro potenziale di raggiungere le masse. In più, disincentiva l’innovazione, facendo investimenti di marketing su marchi che garantiscono il processo di produzione e non il prodotto. Un equivalente nel mondo della tecnologia potrebbe essere un marchio di qualità per i giornali scritti a macchina anziché al computer (Slow Writing); uno nelle pubbliche amministrazioni un ufficio anagrafe che non rilascia certificati online, ma solo allo sportello (Slow Service). A me sembra una perdita secca per la società, e credo che le politiche pubbliche dovrebbero scoraggiarla, ma magari sbaglio io.

Roberto Verganti's article in HBR, "User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable," discusses how focussing on what user's say they want isn't a strategy for innovation. Not news to you, but his take looks at what that means regarding innovation from a sustainability perspective. I found it thought-provoking in other ways as well. The main idea is this. Forward-looking designers and business or policy decision makers may have a greater role and influence regarding designing sustainability products than customers.

The article tells the story of the Toyota Prius, which emerged during a time when the SUV reigned supreme in the US, and customer desire reflected that interest more than any desire for small cars that had less of an impact on the environment. The proposal to produce that innovation came from a vision that started within company.

Verganti believes that decision makers "need to step back from current dominant needs and behaviors and envision new scenarios. They need to propose new unsolicited products and services that are both attractive, sustainable, and profitable." It's an interesting story from many perspectives, with environmental impact being only one.

To dumb the discussion down a little, because I feel more comfortable with my smaller ideas, I'll tell you a silly story from my youth. When I was a teenager, I used to hang out occasionally at this record shop to pick up vinyl. I, like countless male Filipinos in NJ could mix and would DJ now and then. This guy who owned the record shop, his name was Spike, would play whatever new stuff had come in that he thought I would want to play, or I would ask him if he had stuff that I wanted. He knew tracks that I would hum to him after hearing them in the city clubs I'd go to. He was like the reference librarian of the DJs to me.

In those needle drop sessions we would chat about what we had played and what the reaction was. One day I remember asking him what he did when people would ask for something he would refuse to play. As you can imagine, as a teenage boy, it's hard to ignore girls who come up to ask you to play something for them. His answer was this. "You play them what you decide they need to hear, not what they ask for. You're the dealer and they come to you because you know what's good for them." Or at least that's how I remember it. Not sure about the drug dealer analogy.

I laugh when I think about that story, mostly because it was funny. I thought, well that's what separates one type of DJ from another. But I based what I would play on that idea. A DJ is like a curator. Mixing ability is one thing, but it's nothing without taste and experience designing the vibe of the night. Or something like that.

So oddly enough, after reading this HBR article, I think back to this Spike story and think about the role of the designer and what we do with our user research. I think modeling products based on what we believe customers need to do is necessary. But somewhere in that process there's also this need to go on something else. Taste, authority, gut? It's something more like vision based on those things.

Although design and design thinking are having a positive impact on management practice and education, Youngjin Yoo, an associate professor at Temple University , doesn’t think that the current wave of design thinking will address the fundamental crisis that contemporary management is facing in this post-industrial economy.
“Design thinking, as it is currently popularized with the emphasis on human-centered product and service design, deals only with the problems from the separation of production and consumption, leaving other and possibly far more serious challenges that today’s management is facing. Many of these challenges arose as a result of separations of management and finance from production. For example, design thinking has little to say about the recent financial crisis that raised many fundamental questions about the continuing viability of the current form of capitalism and the role of management schools. [...]

My concern is that the current obsession with the design thinking can have unintended harmful consequences on the future of management in the long run. As it is currently being applied, design is seen as a quick fix of profitability problems, new product developments, and consumer satisfactions, rather than dealing with more systemic and serious issues. Indeed, it might lead us to the emergence of new form of capitalism, design capitalism, where creativity is separated from production and consumption.”

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