An enterprise’s most vital assets lie in its design and other creative capabilities.
— Kun-Hee Lee

We marvel at its clean lines, powerful processing, incredible connectivity and the wide variety of apps available to give it added utility, uniqueness and value. The iPad has become a global icon of Apple’s domination of innovation in computing, manufacturing and design. Business moguls the world over are currently starting to map Apple’s path to becoming the first trillion dollar (USD) company in the world. Zachary Karabell a contributing editor for Newsweek and the coauthor of Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World  comments:

Apple is a triumph of design, marketing, and dreams. It is a next-wave company based on ideas and tapping into some mysterious collective meme.

Apple’s employee roster tops out at about 60,000 full-time workers around the world. Apple is currently a $600 billion company and growing. How did a corporation on the verge of total collapse in the 1990’s become the global juggernaut it now is? Having profits that surpass the GDP of so many countries including Jamaica’s.

There are many factors that the wise business historian will consider. Chief among them will be the impact Steve Jobs had on Apple’s founding, its historic recovery in the 90’s and current growth. One of the things Jobs recognized he needed to focus on was, the impact of design on a product and its ability to add meaning and create a more human experience in what was accepted as a relatively cold, inhuman, Terminator-esque, code-driven world. For example, in its recovery Apple ditched the beige on beige color scheme with the introduction of the first iMac. Customers eyes popped as they awed over the multiple hues available to them. The next critical design that Apple introduced was the iPod. It took the lowly mp3 player to dizzying heights of design that no other company could replicate. And so this relatively small company in Palo Alto, California started a revolution in how we interact and have since deeply integrated beautifully designed products into our everyday life. Of course it will be argued that Apple’s success is not merely design. What about the innovative manufacturing processes it has developed, the sleek global supply chain that spans multiple time zones, of course its industry topping customer service and not to mention their unforgettable ads and product launches? Agreed, all important to any global business’ success but none of which would have been necessary if the demand for the products were not driven by jaw-dropping hardware and software design.

Apple isn’t the only technology company using design to increase product value and to drive profits for their business. Google and Facebook are investing unprecedented amounts of capital into the design of their products. Note the recent redesign of Google’s social network Google Plus on the heels of Facebook’s redesign and continuous evolution. In less than 12 months, Facebook’s design staff has grown from 20 to 90. A simple metric that says so much about  how much they value design. It’s very important to note that it’s not only the global conglomerates with enormous budgets that are leveraging design for an edge. There are startups and small companies like Pebble Technology that designs watches to wirelessly connect with the smartphones of their owners. They have since raised over $7 million dollars in pursuit of bringing their latest project to market. All based on a design that not only connects with iPhones but has connected with over 44,000 micro-funders from all over the world. Might I add, their initial goal was to raise a paltry $100,000.

But design’s impact is not relegated to merely products and interfaces. Design is also a strategy, a process. A way of thinking that can be used to solve a wide variety of problems. There is even a new field of study called design thinking. Note its definition on Wikipedia.

Design Thinking refers to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge, and positing solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context. While design thinking has become part of the popular lexicon in contemporary design and engineering practice, as well as business and management, its broader use in describing a particular style of creative thinking-in-action is having an increasing influence on twenty-first century education across disciplines.

Essentially design thinking is: a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results. Design thinking has been used to revolutionize the delivery of services in a wide variety of fields from restaurants to hospitals. It is this very kind of problem solving approach that has helped Apple to be the leader it is. The ability to gather all the available information, process it, then present the ideas. Rinse and repeat until the best possible solution is ready for market. The following story is legend in the hallowed halls of One Infinite Loop…..

Just over a month before the first iPhone was to be released in 2007, a frustrated Steve Jobs summoned his senior team. Steve had been using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, carrying it around in his pocket. When his lieutenants were assembled, he pulled the prototype out of his pocket and pointed angrily to dozens of scratches on its plastic screen. People would carry their phones in their pockets, Steve said. They would also carry other things in their pockets–like keys. And those things would scratch the screen. And then, with Apple just about to ramp up iPhone production, Steve demanded that the iPhone’s screen be replaced with unscratchable glass. “I want a glass screen,” Steve is quoted as saying. “And I want it perfect in six weeks.”

Creating the next BIG thing is a natural outcome of design thinking. Simply put, design thinking is the operating system for innovation. The ability to rapidly experiment, prototype and repeat this process until the ideal outcome is achieved. This is at the core of what it means to create a superior product that connects with its user and sells faster than anything in it’s category. The forward thinking business seeds innovation into its daily practice by promoting design thinking as their daily modus operandi. If a company can do it, so can a country.

How pervasive is this new field? It is now a major at Stanford University  (the d.school) and a few other U.S. tertiary level institutions. As one university in the United Kingdom described it in their course description: Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century. As a country we need to create a critical mass of design thinkers. Not only at the university level but also from primary school stage. Introduce children to this way of thought through classes that allow them to build and design models in LEGO for example. Allow them to create and fail, and rapidly repeat this process. It will re-wire their neurons to be problem solvers, creators and innovators regardless of the field of study they finally choose. While we are working on the helping our children we must tackle the current crop of entrepreneurs and business owners that need direction in not only solving their everyday problems but also to develop, design and create new ways of delivering their service or product. How to out-innovate their competitors. The world is flat, the leaders and outliers in this new normal are the ones who innovate because it is the only way they know how to do business.

Our current preoccupation about the cost to manufacture is important but distracting. We are thinking from the wrong end of the equation. In today’s world, making or distributing a product are commodities easily traded and shifted from column to column on a balance sheet. Where true value lies is in the original idea. How it is harnessed from the mind and presented for consumption in the form of the first prototype. Savings in manufacturing, labour and distribution are shorter levers of dominance than they once were (ask Michael Dell, he’ll give you an earful).The company that relentlessly innovates and gets that innovation sold is the company that will win.

Every . single . time.

So how do we make a better nation by design with all we now know?

Design here, build there, sell everywhere.

That is the mantra of the 21st century global corporation. Thanks to a vastly connected world and a rapidly forming global monoculture where we laugh at the same jokes, eat the same foods and drive the same cars. It is becoming easier and easier to market a certain class of product to almost every person on the planet. The success of Usain Bolt, layered on top of the global reach of Bob Marley and reggae music coupled with the vast array of intelligentsia available to us in right here in Jamaica and the wider diaspora,  further proves that we have the raw material to out innovate even the mighty Apple. Why not?

The next Steve Jobs can emerge from Mumbai or Mobay, Kazakhstan or Kingston. As Ed Conard,  Managing director of Bain Capital on CNN’s GPS said, we need one million Steve Jobs. Let’s start unearthing the talent that exists so that we CAN design here, build there and sell anywhere. Lets make design thinking a priority in all schools of thought. Whether medicine, business or the liberal arts. Let’s teach our children how to rapidly prototype an idea, break it down and build it back again better than before. Let’s talk to Malcolm Gladwell to help us teach more of our children to become “outliers”. More nuggets of brilliance across the length and breadth of our island. Innovation has as its seed in the design mind. Ask any great inventor who had to repeatedly, invent, test, improve and then get that product sold before his competitor. The history of this world is speckled by these men and women who drove an idea into the ground and resurrected it into a sparkling solution that made us all think…..”Why didn’t I think of that?” or “WOW! Where was this product all along?

Let us remember; the speed of Usain was born here, the wit and wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell has its roots here, the mystical and ethereal icon of global revolution popularly known as reggae emerged from this land of wood and water. The next great innovative, globe-rocking product can come from this little rock in the Caribbean sea will you be the one to design it?