Kaleidoscope - Innovation-Driven Product Development

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Kaleidoscope selected as IDEA finalist

Kaleidoscope's LINC phone concept was selected as a finalist in the IDSA/Businessweek-sponsored IDEA awards. We're proud to have made the cut, and to be in the company of so many excellent competitors.

Check out the rest of the IDEA awards here, and read more about the LINC concept at The Greener Grass.

Labels: press

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Kaleidoscope at the Greener By Design conference

Kaleidoscope's Chris Hammond, along with Eric Wilmot from Frog Design, Aiden Petrie from Item Group and Clark Schaffy from IDEO, led the final panel at June's Greener By Design conference in Arlington, VA. From Greener Design's coverage:

After Eric Wilmot laid out the reasoning behind asking clients to consider the waste from products they're requesting, Makower paraphrased the idea to "You may have to change more than you think ... or else you may not be here," and which Wilmot shortened to "Do you have the guts to go through with this?" and Chris Hammond likened to the pioneer's saying for addressing a world of scarcity: "Fix it up, wear it out, make do or do without."

...

Chris Hammond aptly summed up the importance of sustainability in design: "What used to be a nice-to-have feature is now going to be your ticket to the dance, and if you don't have it, you'll be left out in the cold."

Labels: press, sustainability

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

PartnerUp interviews Demetrius Romanos

Megan Dorn at PartnerUp recently interviewed Kaleidoscope's Demetrius Romanos on how to develop and design new products. It's a nice overview on how we work as design consultants to help our clients bring a new product to market.

Q: Once your customers come to you, where does the process go from there?
A: This depends on where we’re engaged, but the primary point of entry is that a client needs to enter a market with a product. We’ll do research and strategy to define the consumer needs, positioning and business opportunities, with the outcome driving design concepts. We’ll then start broad then focus in on the design and engineer of those concepts, working our way down to the direction for manufacturing. At that point we may even assist in selecting the appropriate vendors and may serve as a liaison during the manufacturing process to maintain design integrity.

Thanks to the PartnerUp team for their support. Check out the whole interview here.

Labels: press, product development

Thursday, May 22, 2008

6 Standards for Good Design Strategy & Research

One of the issues facing the design world is a lack of standardized vocabulary found in other professions. "Innovation" is perhaps the most obvious example, but "research" and "strategy" are two others. To some people "research" means going to the store and looking at products on the shelves, to others it means exhaustive qualitative and quantitative studies that take months. In my opinion, both could be valid in certain contexts, and the right way to judge their validity is through a set of universal, context-free criteria.

To that end, I came across Harold Kincaid's set of standards for good science that also apply very well to design research & strategy (as presented in Philosophy of Social Sciences, by Robert C Bishop, page 349):

Falsifiability
Hypotheses and theories must be capable of standing before the court of experience and being proven wrong. (See Karl Popper's work)

Predictive Success
Empirically adequate theories exhibit both a high quantity and high quality of predictions borne out of observation and testing.

Scope
Theories should predict and explain a wide variety of phenomena.

Coherence
Good theories exhibit logical consistency as well as cohering with the best information available from other sciences.

Fruitfulness
Theories should lead to new insights and developments, suggest new avenues for research and guide experimental investigation among other results.

Objectivity
Our best theories should reflect the way the world is, not the way we want it to be.

Labels: innovation, research, strategy

Monday, March 10, 2008

The Four Stages of a Lifestyle Brand

We define a lifestyle brand as one that differentiates itself based on the collective values, ideas and beliefs of the people that buy it. This is in contrast to brands based on value, performance, or other price/feature-based differentiators. In other words, you buy a lifestyle brand because you feel like you belong to the same tribe. Value, performance, and other considerations matter, but they aren't dealbreakers or dealmakers.

Good examples of lifestyle brands are things like fashion, sports, cars, and other categories where people have a deep emotional connection to the product. Most lifestyle brands are built on self-expression. In theory anything can be a lifestyle brand, but in practice it's difficult to build a lifestyle brand around a category that people not inclined to think of as a means of self-expression like paper towels, house paint, or ceiling fans.

In any case, lifestyle brands follow a four-stage evolution during their lifecycle that we've outlined below. Click the image to view it larger, or download a PDF here.

Stage 1: Core
At this stage, the brand is by the core, for the core. It's small, but growing. It's relatively easy to create and manage a brand at this stage because the competition is so unsophisticated.
Core: Small group of passionate consumers who evangelize
Mainstream: Unaware
Market size: Very Small
Marketing: Word of mouth, events, online
Examples: Skateboarding in 1992

Stage 2: The Next Big Thing
This is the most critical stage, where lifestyle brands ultimately live or die. At this point, the brand is as big as it can get within the core, and needs to crossover in order to continue growing.
Core: Nearly universally popular among core consumers. Community rallies behind the brand to help it grow.
Mainstream: Early adopters and influencers start to spread the word, but still relatively unknown.
Market size: Small-Medium
Marketing: Word of mouth, specialty media
Examples: Ultimate Fighting Championship

Stage 3: Crossover Success
This is the sweet spot for a lifestyle brand. It mostly retains the credibility it had during Stage 1 and 2 while broadening its market substantially. Some loss of credibility is inevitable, though.
Core: Growing skepticism. Has mostly moved on to a new, core brand (Stage 1) that feels more authentic to them.
Mainstream: Enthusiastically embraces the brand. Feels like they're part of something new and cool.
Market size: Large
Marketing: Mass
Examples: Kevin Smith movies

Stage 4: Sellout (Optional!)
Most, but not all, lifestyle brands eventually end up as Sellouts. They've gotten too big, made too many compromises, and eroded their brand too much. It doesn’t have to happen, though!
Core: The brand is completely discredited with the core. They wouldn't buy it if their lives depended on it.
Mainstream: All but the slowest laggards have moved on to the next crossover (Stage 3) brand.
Market size: Small
Marketing: Mass, if any
Examples: Bam Margera

Labels: branding

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Kaldeidoscope in ME Magazine

ME Magazine, a mechanical engineering publication as the title suggests, spoke to our very own Chris Hammond recently for an article they published on user interface. Here's what he had to say:

Apple also did something else unusual. It kept the iPod controls simple. It included the commands necessary to play music, and it made them intuitive and obvious. (Later, it added equally intuitive commands to display photos and movies.)
This took enormous discipline, said Chris Hammond, design manager for the Cincinnati-based design shop Kaleidoscope. "Complex interfaces happen with consumer electronics all the time," he said. "You start with a sheet of features and you look at how many bullet points differentiate you from the competition, and try to include as many features as possible.
"But look at the iPod or the Blackberry personal digital assistant," Hammond said. "It's an integrated, rich experience that people become addicted to. Think about Apple's iPhone. You can access all those features and never use a single drop-down menu. Now, think about the clunky interfaces on your TV and VCR. They are among the most unintuitive products ever designed."

Read the full article here

Labels: links, press

Friday, February 01, 2008

McKinsey Quarterly: Shedding the B2B Commodity Mindset

The latest issue of McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent article on elevating B2B products above the commodity level:

Is the soap you buy really different from the competition? Probably not, though consumer goods companies know how to differentiate their products by building strong brands. By contrast, companies that sell things such as bulk chemicals and steel to businesses, burdened by the notion that these goods are commodities, churn out more and more product more and more cheaply and then sell as much as possible at the market price. Yet in many B2B markets, nonprice factors might be responsible for as much as two-thirds of a customer's buying decision.

The conventional wisdom is that price is the only real differentiator in B2B products, that nonprice and touchy-feely things like branding don't really matter, but as the article points out, that simply isn't the case.

For one data point that supports the article, I think back to my days in printing, where I dealt with a lot of paper suppliers. Most kinds of paper are without a doubt commodities, especially common versions like 20# white. You can get just about any kind of paper from just about any supplier, which I did when I placed my paper orders every day. I rarely bought from the cheapest place in town. Instead, I bought from the supplier that was most reliable, with better inventory management systems that meant they were almost never out of what I needed. I paid a higher price, but it was worth it to me because it meant one less round of phone calls I had to make everyday, which was worth a lot to me.

Check out the full article here. Free registration is required, but it's more than worth signing up.

Labels: innovation, product development