Innovation - Students of Products

PRODUCT TANK: Hey product tank here. In this series, I'm going to take you through the product design process, sharing with you some of the things I've learnt over the last 15 years to help you become a better designer and improve your projects. In this episode, I'm looking at innovation. Innovation in product design could come from a revolutionary idea, but revolution is almost as rare as rocking horse poop. What's this, maybe, oh, oh, no, false alarm. I would say 99.9% of innovation in product design is evolutionary, incrementally improving on what has gone before. Now this is a beautiful chair, it's perfectly functional, you could argue it can't be improved, but everything can be improved, depending on who's using it. There you go. But adding a cushion to a chair isn't innovation. Innovation is defined as a new method or idea. You can innovate every area of a products life through manufacture, storage, shipping, use, repair and part replacement to its end of life and recycling. I once spent a long time helping to reduce the part count in spray caps and pump actuators, because innovation is often about making things simpler by reducing parts.Saving just a tenth of a pence on one item won't mean much, but on an item that sells in its billions its significant and saving a few ounces on one item won't mean much either, but has a big impact on fuel costs when shipping thousands and not just economically, but also environmentally. So There are two sides to innovation, the innovation that the customer sees, that improves their experience and the innovation that they don't see, that improves the product behind the scenes. I think the greatest innovative advances in the future are going to be in materials and manufacturing, because many of the things we require and use in our daily lives are already so well established that their functionality can't be noticeably improved any further just by changing the form.As an example, look at tennis rackets. The form of the racket has hardly changed, but the materials have really advanced to make rackets stronger and lighter. So innovation can always be driven by advances in materials and manufacturing. To me, innovation is like running the 100 meters. There are a lot of teenagers who can run 100 meters between 12 to 15 seconds with no training. It takes quite a bit of training to be able to run sub 12 seconds and lots of dedication, effort and natural ability to run under 11 seconds. The amount of extra training you have to put in to run a fraction of a second faster is disproportionate to the amount of time you gain so you have to really want to do it and innovation is exactly the same, it does take a lot more hard work and time and often the improvement is fractional, so some people view innovation as risk. Now, there can be a strong argument for if it ain't broke don't try to fix it. But these days, most markets are so competitive that to not innovate and improve, especially in areas like consumer electronics, to keep doing the same thing over and over is far riskier.