“Innovation” and “design” are two ways of describing a complicated process leading to a single goal – developing winning new products and services that deliver market value. As the boundaries between the two continue to blur, the conversation should be moving away from creating strict divisions and focus on creating sustainable processes for creating new product and service value. However, there is a strain of thinking that seems to value design at the expense of innovation. Gadi Amit argues in the Fast Company blog that we should “Just say no” to innovation. Writing from an industrial design perspective, Amit’s bottom line is:

“The innovation crowd makes a fundamental mistake: that a complex market problem can be solved by a good analytical design. If you build the “process” right, and put the right “validation” and “methodology” in place, using more technology with more investment in the “process”, you’ll get a better product–wrong!”

While good industrial design certainly plays a key role in the ultimate development of new products, I want to make the case that Amit (while making a good-faith effort to move the discussion forward) pushes too far by tipping the balance further and further towards nebulous “intuitive look and feel” design and away from a repeatable process.

1. “Intuitive design” doesn’t scale. If companies must rely only on the intuition of world-class designers, only a few companies will be able to do so. A clear example of design success is the iPod, which introduced no new features or technology but, with a healthy dose of marketing, became a wild success. (The iTunes Store, which was indeed an innovative business model, came later.) However, not all companies will be able to rely on such design genius. Amit writes: “If the issue is the reliability of this method, the answer is the designer’s track record in resolving such challenges.” But of course this reveals the central danger in relying on “intuitive” design super-geniuses – they eventually leave or retire, leaving companies and the business press that covers them to wonder what they’ll do next. By claiming that “look and feel” of a product is “intuitive to the knowledgeable and obtuse to the novice” Amit seems to be saying that only a small cadre of elite designers can bring winning new products to the market. For companies looking to launch new products or services regularly, there must be a more robust and reliable way.

2. Winning product specifications begin with the consumer. One doesn’t have to look too far to find examples of products or even concepts that have failed to live up to consumer need despite excellent “look and feel,” as Amit puts it. Products succeed when they solve problems. New product design specifications should come out of detailed consumer research. Winning design certainly takes creative license in translating consumer need into tangible prototypes and products, but that design is successful in large part because innovation teams have been able to fully understand and communicate detailed needs of the consumer.

3. A focus on intuition over process creates a “non-disprovable proposition.” The benefit of a staged innovation process is that new product/service concepts move through rounds of concept and later prototype-shaping. The key question at each stage must be “does this product solve a consumer need?” Amit argues that “success can not be resolved by analytical methods.” However, relying on creativity and intuition simply moves the analytical methods later in the development timeline. As an example, if Project A follows a rigorous process, at each step in the concept shaping and product development the project is rated against its ability to meet consumer need, assuring that the final product reaches the market ready to perform. However, Project B focuses on design intuition. Since in this approach analytics and metrics only stifle creativity, and further since those not initiated into the cadre of elite designers wouldn’t know excellent design when they saw it, the product continues to move forward. Difficulties in the design will ultimately be found not during concept testing or prototype development but in the market, where the price of failure is maximized.

Ultimately, design does play a critical role in innovation and new product development, but the “special sauce” is brought to bear after consumer needs are well-known. It is those needs which must drive a repeatable new product development process.