Teaching Startups How to Fish
Last month Apple announced fiscal year 2015 revenues totaling $234 Billion (a quarter of a trillion dollars), thanks in large part to the sale of 231 million of its newest iPhone. That Apple’s success is attributable to great design won’t come as news to anyone. What may come as a surprise though, is that the design we can touch and see is responsible for far less of that success than most people realize.
In fact, asking Apple design chief Jony Ive for a definition of design would reveal an expansive world encompassing tens of thousands of hours of research, feedback, observation and testing, all before a single interface or casing prototype sees the light of day — then tens of thousands of hours more after. For Apple, and a number of other highly successful businesses, design isn’t the outcome. It’s what makes the outcome possible. Looking at design through this lens — as a process that leads to great products like the iPhone — it becomes more understandable how Apple has managed to accumulate so many hit products, and such tremendous success as a company.
The greatest lesson we can learn from Apple may be that good design isn’t magic. It’s a learnable discipline which creates outcomes that work better for their purpose and resonate more deeply with an audience. And Apple isn’t alone. In the past decade, the world’s largest and most successful ventures, like IBM, General Electric, Target and others, have begun a tectonic shift toward embracing business models that start, rather than end, with design. They are joined by an assemblage of younger companies like Google, AirBnB, Warby Parker, Uber, Slack, and others that were born with design embedded in their DNA. According to a survey by the Design Management Institute, design-led companies outperformed the S&P500 by a staggering 228% over 10 years.
The philosophy at the center of this movement is best known as design thinking, or human-centered design. It’s a method for creating products, spaces, and services that begins with deep exploration into real human experiences, which uncovers the most effective, often unexpected solutions to problems.
None of this is a secret. The business world, technology companies in particular, is catching on. Design thinking has become the buzzword of the moment, with 2014–15 heralding the wholesale acquisition of established design practices across the country by companies eager to catch the wave. But this presents design’s greatest challenge. Grafting design onto an existing entity will only yield superficial results. In reality, the part of the equation that often goes unrecognized is that at the heart of companies creating strong and successful products, services and brands is an internalized sense of design — a foundational design culture.
This brings us to the real point of this post. More than the creation of beautiful products and great experiences, design is at its most valuable in the service of generating solutions to our most pressing global problems, including and perhaps especially what we are focused on at SuperCollider. We foster companies that leverage information technology to change the way humans interact with our planet’s natural resources.
On November 12th, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii — generally seen as the gold standard for atmospheric measurement worldwide — recorded an atmospheric carbon concentration of over 400 ppm that scientists believe will remain permanently above that level for the remainder of our lifetimes. This underscores the urgency of the moment, but perhaps more importantly the opportunity that deeply embedded design culture and the promise of human-centered design present. If design-led companies are creating some of our most successful and valuable products, then a generation of new purpose-driven companies armed with that same design foundation offer an excellent chance to create solutions that can not only address resource challenges, but do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a compromise. Rather, great products, services, and experiences that resonate with the same power (and bottom line) Apple has achieved with the iPhone.
Case in point: BlocPower, a startup created to facilitate energy efficiency upgrades for small commercial buildings in underserved communities has been using what is essentially a human-centered approach to iterate its product from an unscalable project-by-project enterprise to a scalable platform, employing sensors, sophisticated data, and automated software systems to accelerate the adoption of clean energy solutions. “Essentially human-centered” because they’ve rapidly transitioned from point A to point B by employing a listening and iteration process that is strikingly similar to that used in human-centered design — without intentionally using it. What if innovative, smart companies like BlocPower had the full range of tools made possible through HCD at their fingertips? Could that accelerate their progress even faster?
SuperCollider is designed to work with startups like BlocPower at an early stage, helping them not only integrate design thinking into their products and processes, but into their culture. This ensures that the kind of design found at the core of successful companies like Apple or AirBnB is infused into the DNA of ventures working to develop innovative solutions to some of our planet’s greatest challenges. The more these companies understand how to harness design as a central business tool the greater their chances of success, and that benefits all of us.
