Want innovation? Get designers, not inventors

This essay is part of the “Managing Innovation” essay series that starts with “Innovation isn’t what you think it is.”

For years, my Alphabet business card said “Director of Rapid Evaluation and Mad Science.” With my name on over 70 issued US patents and titles like Engineering Director and CTO under my belt, you might expect that I would center my “bubbling test tube and sparking Jacob’s ladder” inventive contributions to the innovation process. I don’t. In fact, I credit my skills as a designer — communications design, product design, solutions design — as among my greatest strengths as an innovation leader. To be a great innovator, you must harness the power of great design.

So, what does design have to do with successful innovation? Nearly everything, as it turns out. But too often we emphasize the role of invention when we think about the innovation process.

In previous essays, I stripped away the buzzword, marketing fluff of “innovation” to define the hallmark traits of true innovation: massive impact and an upending of the status quo via creative destruction. But I left some key questions unanswered, namely, “how does one go about creating innovation in the first place?” and “how important is invention vs. design in the innovation process?”

When we fixate on invention as a means to innovation, we’re doing it wrong. In my decades of experience as an innovation leader, I’ve found that the high-impact innovations that stick are built on the same…