The Napoleon Effect

    Sometimes the most powerful products come in underwhelming packages.

    By David DeRemer

    Pull Quote: “We don’t have to invent something earth shattering to be successful innovators.”

    There is an overwhelming tendency in today’s business culture to think that we have to invent The Next Big Thing (if innovation consultancies had a nickel every time a client wanted the next iPhone….). This kind of tunnel vision has created a culture in which success can only be defined if our companies and our leaders are compared to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg. Is this necessary? Companies are basically putting massive pressure on themselves to climb to the apex of modern American innovation and take on the most powerful companies in a head-to-head cage match. The feeling is that doing anything less is a failure. Talk about high expectations.

    In the innovation community we may have the ambition to take on the most iconic technology firms or the most fascinating Web 2.0 startups (and there may be market pressures to do that), but we don’t have to. In fact, some of the most powerful innovations aren’t iPhone killers. They’re simple ideas that solve the most basic of needs and have a very real and meaningful impact.

    There are plenty of examples in history of simple innovations that have had tremendous impacts on human culture: the wheel, the hammer, and traffic lights come to mind. These inventions don’t compare to something as technically complex as a computer or mobile phone, but we should be careful not to disparage their simplicity. Innovations like these have had significant, enduring influence on the way we live our lives.

    If company executives are worried that the bottom line can only be bolstered by the elaborate, ornate, or complex, the story of Benjamin Eisenstadt should put them at ease. In the 1940’s, Eisenstadt decided that cleaning glass sugar dispensers was an annoying chore, and he endeavored to find a better way. Instead of redesigning the sugar dispenser, which is too often the reactionary response in the innovators workshop, he invented a game changer: the sugar packet. Brilliant in its simplicity, Eisenstadt’s product spawned a new sugar empire. While he failed to patent his idea with raw sugar, he ultimately patented paper packets of an artificial sweetener he invented called Sweet’N Low. Today Sweet’N Low is used 12 billion times per year, or roughly twice per person living on this planet. In aggregate, the American sweetener market is a $21 billion industry, and it owes some portion of its success to the simplest of inventions – the sugar packet.

    Another example of simple innovation isn’t technically innovation at all, but rather a return to basics. In 2008, the beer brewing industry made headlines when InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch for a whopping $52 billion. The art of brewing has been around for thousands of years, and it’s big business. For years, mega-breweries have been innovating to cut costs. They’ve found ways to use adjuncts (i.e., rice instead of barley), preservatives, and advanced computer systems to streamline the process and use cheaper ingredients. Now, however, a David is emerging among the Goliaths — craft breweries currently account for 6.2% of total brewing revenue.

    By definition, the more than 1400 craft brewery in the US each produce less than 2 million barrels of beer per year. Many of these companies are innovative precisely because they eschew the “advancements” made by the mega-breweries. Instead, craft brewers focus on producing high-quality beer using age-old methods along with the best, freshest, and costliest ingredients they can find. Their primary innovation was a return to basics with an emphasis on craft and quality. Craft breweries are now the fastest growing segment of the beer industry, seeing 36% growth over the last three years. Consumers seem to be responding to the idea of simple processes with good ingredients. And that’s because consumers understand simple. If an idea is simple enough, people will understand its value without any explanation. Most users of the iPhone don’t care about capacitive touch screens or motion sensors, but they do understand the intuitive experience these technologies enable.

    Design firms have often called out “simple” and “clean” as highly desirable elements of a successful and powerful design. This philosophy seems to transcend medium, form, technology, and purpose. Simple is not only good for comprehension of information, but also for usability of objects and technology. In addition, some of the most compelling insights that lead to wildly successful design choices are in retrospect the most obvious – they were there all along, but nobody noticed.

    Global innovation firm frog design has been creating meaningful design for four decades. The company has evolved to generate designs and innovations for some of the most competitive and intricate industries from health insurance to telecommunications. Yet, some of the favorite anecdotes and examples of good design showcase the most basic of innovations.

    Everyone has made toast, and everyone has burnt bread. Fancy toasters have hit the market with numerous buttons, LED displays, and settings – and still toast turns black. In the late 1990’s, Sunbeam engaged frog design to design a better toaster. The major innovation was simply a window that allowed the user to see the toast — a basic and obvious idea that no one had yet done. Today, a decade later, several fashionable toasters are made entirely of glass. In the end, the need was obvious, the solution was simple, and the design was elegant.

    On the other hand, in today’s technology focused world innovation efforts are rarely invested in something as elementary as a toaster. But even in the most complex of products, very simple design choices can make a major difference in usability. In 2005, frog worked with IPC, the maker of a specialized telephone known as a turret that’s used by stock market traders on the trading floor. This complex phone is the centerpiece of a trader’s desk and the hub of daily activity. frog developed numerous design innovations, including visual call priority cues, alerts, and the physical design language. One of the most interesting insights was the call release button. In the process of observing users, frog’s design researchers noticed that traders rarely hung up the phone by pressing the release button with their finger. Instead, they used the end of the phone handset. Armed with this knowledge, the product designers created an enlarged release button with a concave surface to make it easier to end the call with the phone receiver. Although it appeared superfluous, the design was a hit with traders and improved the usability experience drastically.

    In the end, sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we don’t have to invent something earth shattering to be a successful innovator, nor do we need to unseat a product at the pinnacle of technology.

    If it’s your business to build an iPhone-killer or even a new sugar dispenser, don’t focus on building a slightly better version (you can bet that Apple didn’t build the iPhone to be a RAZR-killer). Instead, find a simple way to do something different. It might not be as complicated as it seems.

    David DeRemer is a senior strategist in frog’s New York studio.