Anthony Levels a Criticism

John

One ... point I wanted to make is that the glass babies are not some exotic piece. The design is simple, which puzzles me somewhat since you said the easier the design the less money you'll make...or something like that. But the glass baby lady is making $2mil a year. By the way, when she had the Chinese glass babies, she sold them for $20 each.


I don't believe the "innovation" of  a product has to be something extravagant, or earth shattering.  I often think about this with coffee mugs I see at starbucks.   The basic mug /cup has been around since the dawn of man. The functional design has never changed; mugs hold liquids.  Yet whenever I enter Starbucks, there is a new coffee mug design.  And so it was last week.  There, in Starbucks, were Italian coffee mugs.  Hand painted from Italy.   There was a picture of the craftsmen (probably Romanian immigrants) with little paint brushes painting the mug.  And of course the story to hype your special mug.  Buy a little piece of Italy for only $19.95.  And I bet Starbucks makes a mint off these mugs.

During your lecture, you list several innovations.  I wonder if this innovation stage intimidates your students.  You take them from, "I'm going to import handicrafts from the 3rd world.", to Oh my God, I have to come up with an idea!?  Just a thought.

Anthony


Anthony,

Good feedback...  especially as I am now encouraging peple to design in the area of ... medicine, space travel... etc... one might gett the impression one must have an earth-shattering impact to succeed.

I used to talk about BART (San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit) and perturbility rate in engineering... how something can only be 20% new, or it is too new to work. So engineers are careful not to design too much into a project, otherwise the unforeseen interactions of the new technologies will overwhelm the management of the resulting project.

This tendency to be careful and incremental has been derided as “planned obsolesence” in such areas as automodile manufacturing, when in fact it is only prudence. Note how people are careful in adopting a new generation computer or especially software.

So one theme I should stress more is “new, but not too new... “  It does not take much to get new enough... The Glass Babiesyou mention are a good example...  it's a shape we've all seen in glassware, what looks different is the thickness and color...  and yes, Waechtersbach came out with a line of mugs in the 70's that took the world by storm... color and glaze were the thing, now they are quite staid.

Off the shelf is the kiss of death.  Design does not take much...  so get designing... I should stress that again.

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