Demand Satisfaction!

An article in the NYTimes today asks whether all the hype over product co-creation and consumer directed design misses something essential–that big innovations still come from highly controlled, top-down organizations and processes. The piece, “In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down” by G. Pascal Zachary, also makes the point that many of the most innovative products like the iPod aren’t even customizable, and fundamentally exclude the role of democracy in their design. The suggestion is that new technology is so complex that it could only be created by “corporate or government initiatives overseen by elites.”

Zachary tries to manufacture controversy by pitting “elitists” such as Thomas P. Hughes (”New technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development”) against new schoolers like Eric Wilhelm of Instructables (”If innovation isn’t tailored to [customers], they expect to be able to tailor it to themselves”). But where’s the conflict? The iPhone is a phenomenon that is Apple doing what Apple is best at (i.e. elite design), but there are thousands of developers hacking away at its hardware, operating system and applications. And as Eric von Hippel (the MIT evangelist for user-led innovation) would point out, this is where most democratic contributions are made, at the edges of the maker’s business. If history is a guide, we can expect some of these apps and hacks from users to end up influencing Apple engineers or being integrated wholesale into its products.

Many of us are attracted to this notion of ivory tower-based innovation, but it’s largely mythical. Many of us know that Thomas Edison, the original icon of the elite genius generating invention after brilliant invention, owed much of his success to raw opportunism and the willingness to crush superior technologies that threatened his business. The technology his famed Menlo Park lab produced often relied on the work of outsiders, usually mavericks and hobbyists. For instance, Edison famously took credit for the early motion picture projector known as the Vitascope, which had been invented by a couple of kids trying to distinguish themselves in trade school.

And Apple, that most singular modern epicenter of technology innovation, owes much of its success to the innovations that came from outside its hallowed walls. The early Mac was a refined set of innovations from Xerox Parc and Douglas Englebart (with design help from folks like my alma mater, Frogdesign). The resurgence of the Mac with OS X is due in part to the fact that it’s based on freeBSD, an open source UNIX system built with contributions from many scattered developers.

And the iPod, the iPod! Not at all the pure creation of isolated genius within the company that Zachary implies in his article. The iPod chip came from PortalPlayer, its interface designed in part by third-party firm Pixo, and even the iPod name was coined by a freelance copywriter.

But one thing’s for certain. Apple will never be able to farm out its MacWorld keynote presentations. There are some things that only Steve Jobs can do.