Research and Innovation

While I tend to be an advocate of research-based design, I also recognize that it is not a panacea.  In fact, there are some instances where too much devotion to market research can be harmful to design, and ultimately to the abdication of competitive advantage.

Research can be detrimental to innovation because, by its very nature, it is focused on “what is” and is blind to “what could be.”   It is not possible to research what does not exist, hence researchers focus on the known (the known needs of customers and the known needs by which they solve them) and is incapable of exploring the unknown (unidentified needs and undiscovered solutions).  Gaps and anomalies in research can indicate areas where the unknown might exist, but that is all.

Research can also be detrimental because it assumes that its subjects are knowledgeable.   Where there is any inefficient or ineffective mechanism, research asks the customer to identify a better solution – as if the customer is an expert.  An airline passenger may be acutely aware of a deficiency in his experience of air travel, but he does not have the domain knowledge to design a better airplane – and when asked to define one he will struggle to speculate and confabulate, and neither speculation nor confabulation is likely to yield a reliable solution.

And this is where innovation and research come into conflict: research seeks to understand what customers currently do whereas design seeks to provide capabilities to do something they are not already doing, and this may be something of which they are unaware and completely unable to conceive.   To innovate, one must set aside existing products and existing patterns of behavior and investigate what might be possible.

And again, this is not to advocate switching entirely from research-based design to innovative design, but to suggest that each has their purpose and should be used appropriately.   When innovating, a research-based approach is toxic; and when optimizing, a innovation-based approach can bear little fruit: it is a matter of having both tools at the ready, and choosing the right one for the job.