Ideas on making innovation work
Practical thinking on product innovation, commercialisation, design and the teams behind them.
‘Stylists’ versus manufacturing
9/10/26
One of the things that still flabbergasts me in product development is how often the 'Stylists' come up with something wonderful and then chuck it over the wall at Manufacturing with a message that basically says:
“Make this.”
The course I went on at the Royal College of Art (Industrial Design Engineering) was set up back in 1980 largely to tackle exactly this problem and run jointly with Imperial College.
And it’s pretty much been my mission ever since.
Because good product development doesn’t come from trying to remove all the constraints.
It comes from getting them all on the table early enough.
How are we going to make it? What’s it going to cost? What processes are available?
What tolerances can we hold? How is it assembled? What does the customer actually need? What does Sales think they can sell?
A lot of designers hate constraints but I rather like them because constraints force you to find a real answer.
It may make the job harder. It may mean more thinking and more iteration. But at least when you get to the end, you’ve got something that has a fighting chance of actually delivering value for the business.
So the solution to “Can’t make it, mate” is actually pretty simple.
Don’t wait until the design is finished before asking Manufacturing.
Get the designers sitting down with the manufacturing engineers as soon as the first sketches start appearing on paper.
And then keep them there.
Through prototypes. Tooling. Trials. First-off parts. Assembly.
Preferably with the designers getting their hands dirty behind the machines.
Because good product development isn’t Design handing something over to Manufacturing.
It’s designing the product and the way it gets made at the same time.
cute or canny?
30/9/26
Does Spot look like a dog because that’s the best shape for the job, or because we’re more comfortable with things that look like dogs?
I was at the International Security Expo in London yesterday and came across Boston Dynamics’ Spot.
Standing there watching it move, that was the question that struck me.
I asked the MD of the company operating it, and he pointed out that Spot’s origins go back to the idea of a robotic pack mule for the US military, something capable of carrying loads over rough ground.
And in that sense, perhaps it isn’t surprising that it ended up looking vaguely animal-like. Nature has had hundreds of millions of years to work out how to move effectively over difficult terrain.
So maybe the form really did follow the function.
But there’s another side to it.
It reminded me of some of the discussion around Meta’s new Muse Charm, and the idea of making increasingly capable technology look cute, friendly and familiar.
Because when something looks like a dog, or a little character, we tend to relate to it differently. We lower our guard. We walk over. We smile at it. Some people probably want to stroke it.
And yet the thing standing in front of you may actually be an extremely capable piece of surveillance, security or autonomous technology.
Personally, I wouldn’t stroke it.
Which leaves quite an interesting form versus function question.
When technology looks familiar and friendly because that genuinely is the best form for the job, that’s good design.
But when we deliberately make powerful technology look cute because it makes people less wary of it, is that still good design?
Or are we starting to use design to make people trust things they probably ought to think about a little more carefully?
Is your innovation moving at a snail’s pace?
22/9/26
There are lots of different reasons why innovation moves slowly in businesses. And, despite the picture, “walking home and squashing snails” probably isn’t the answer.
Although, strangely enough, one of the best ways I’ve found to get a stalled project moving again is to try and kill it.
Because suddenly people engage. People who haven’t really had much to say for weeks or months suddenly get very interested in the fact that the project might actually stop.
And quite often that tells you what the problem was in the first place.
It’s not necessarily that the design team are slow. It’s that, although everyone understands innovation cuts across sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing and the rest of the business, during the actual development process the project tends to spend most of its time with the people doing the designing.
Other departments may have agreed the brief, signed off the forecast and sat in the early meetings, but maintaining genuine involvement as the product develops is much harder.
Then eventually the project lands properly on someone else’s desk and suddenly they engage.
Which is when you get one of those deeply irritating moments every designer knows:
“Ah. We can’t sell that. It’s the wrong colour.”
The answer, of course, isn’t to keep threatening to kill projects. It’s to keep people genuinely involved while decisions are still being made.
Give people clear opportunities to contribute. Give them actual decisions to make. Put a timescale around those decisions.
And make the rules clear.
If you want to be involved, get involved. If you don’t make the decision, somebody else will make it for you.
And then you have to live with it.
apex relaunched
I don’t know what you do, but I think I may have finally figured out what it is that I do.
And, to be honest, I’m a bit fed up with pretending to be something I’m not.
So with the relaunch of Apex Ideas, I’ve decided to just focus on the thing I’m actually good at.
It’s a tiny corner of modern product development. Probably a tiny corner of business full stop.
But it’s the bit where, at the heart of it, there’s something physical.
Something that moves. Something that has to actually do something useful. And ideally, look good while it’s doing it.
That’s really where I sit. Somewhere between mechanical engineering and industrial design, inventing stuff on demand, working out how to manufacture it, protect it, and turn it into something people might actually want to buy.
18/9/26