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Design, innovation, agility
Bruce Archer
This paper was prepared as the opening address
to the Design Research Society’s conference,
Quantum Leap—Managing New Product Inno-
vation, held at the University of Central England
in Birmingham, September 1998. Professor Bruce
Archer is President of the Design Research Society.
I
n welcoming you to this Conference, let me
try to interpret its title for a moment. In their
Introduction to the preprint papers, the Con-
ference organisers, Bob Jerrard, Myfanwy True-
man and Roger Newport equate the term ‘Quan-
tum Leap’ with the term ‘a breakthrough in
product development’. They ask the Conference
to address questions such as: ‘How do successful
companies use design in order to reduce risk and
uncertainty in developing innovative new pro-
ducts?’ and ‘To what extent can design be used
creatively to make a major breakthrough or
quantum leap in successful innovation practice?’
These questions clearly lie in the domain of
design practice and design management practice.
Let me, in my role as President of the Design
Research Society, also try to place them in the
context of Design Research, and in the climate
of ultra-fast moving product development. I
hasten to add that Bob, Myfanwy and Roger are
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
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PII: S0142-694X(99)00025-3
 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain
also very active members of the Design
Research Society, so that what I am about to say
is as familiar to them as it is to me.
1 Quantum leap
The term Quantum Leap, borrowed from par-
ticle physics, implies, for me, a jump to a higher
energy level. It also contains something of the
notion of a ‘Paradigm Shift’ as described by
Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The structure
of scientific revolutions, published in 1962. I
shall be saying more about paradigm shifts as
my argument develops. The second part of the
title of this conference—Managing New Product
Innovation—indicates the field in which this
Quantum Leap, or paradigm shift, has to occur
or is occurring. Actually, the term New in the
title is tautological. Robert L Charpie defined the
term ‘Innovation’ for the US Department of
Commerce in his influential report Technologi-
cal innovation: Its environment and manage-
ment in 1967, as ‘The successful bringing to
market of new or improved products, processes
or services’. So the term ‘New’ is contained
within the term ‘Innovation’. Thus, we are asked
to address the issues in the management of the
task of bringing about paradigm shifts in the
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design and marketing of new or improved pro-
ducts. This is the very stuff of the Design
Methods and Design Research movements. Let
us remind ourselves of the way in which it has
developed.
The first Design Methods Conference was
held in London in 1962, thirty-six years ago.
The second was held here, in Birmingham, three
years later, in 1965. Unusually, the Organising
Committee of the 1962 conference, under the
chairmanship of John Page, then of the Depart-
ment of Architecture, Sheffield University, and
the secretaryship of Peter Slann of the Depart-
ment of Aeronautics at Imperial College Lon-
don, remained in being for several years after
the 1962 Conference had finished. It was this
1962 Organising Committee that announced in
March 1966 a decision to form a Design
Research Society. We called a First Meeting of
Founder Members for 2 February 1966, later
postponing it to 27 April 1966. So the Design
Research Society was formally founded on 27
April 1966. The list of the names of the 167
Founder Members reads like a roll call of the
great and the good of the design methods move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s.
2 The systems approach
The interesting thing about the membership of
the Design Research Society, then as now, is the
eclecticism of its composition. It included, and
includes today, architects, computer scientists,
engineers, ergonomists, industrial designers,
planners, cognitive psychologists and systems
analysts. Its membership was then, and is now,
drawn from industries as diverse as advertising,
aerospace, building construction, civil engineer-
ing, computing, consumer products, health care,
ship building and textiles. The driving idea
behind the formation of the Society was an inter-
est in the things these practitioners had in com-
mon, rather than the things that distinguished
between them. We felt that the cognitive pro-
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cesses of matching a perceived need with a pro-
posed configuration were the same, or similar,
whatever the field of application. This notion in
1966 was, in part, a reflection of the intense
interest that had been generated during the late
’50s and early ’60s by the release of historical
details about the successes and failures of cross-
disciplinary teamwork in war-time enterprises of
the Second World War. The optimisation of
food production and distribution; the develop-
ment of weapons systems; the search for means
of defence against the enemy’s weapon systems;
the development of new materials; the formu-
lation of new approaches to war-time logistics,
notably the organisation of convoys of shipping
across the oceans and the hunt for U-boats; the
development of computer systems; even the
search for strategies for the conduct of military
operations: these had resulted in the evolution
of a new discipline, Operational Research, orig-
inated on this side of the Atlantic by Professor
P M S Blackett, who was Chief Scientific
Adviser to the government of the day in 1941.
Operational Research, we learned, was charac-
terised by the cross-disciplinary collaboration of
teams of scientists, engineers and others, of sur-
prisingly diverse backgrounds, in attempts to
solve pressing, practical wartime problems.
Importantly, the experience of the Operational
Research teams also consolidated a new
approach, the Systems Approach, to the analysis
of problems.
The systems idea is usually credited to Lud-
wig von Bertalanffy, a biologist, who published
a book The organism considered as a physical
system in 1940. He later went on to publish
another book, General systems theory, in 1956,
but many later systems analysts had misgivings
about this attempt at postulating a generalisable
theory of systems. Ken Boulding tried to do bet-
ter in his General systems theory—the skeleton
of a science, also published in 1956, but was not
until people such as Herbert Simon published,
Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999
for example, The new science of management
decision in 1960, that it was generally accepted
that systems analysis was not so much an
explanatory theory as a useful methodology. C
West Churchman put it all in a nutshell in The
systems approach, 1968. The Design Methods
Movement was a child of the post-Operational
Research era, and systems analysis dominated
our early thinking.
3 Conjectures and refutations
But if operational research was the mother of
Design Research, Karl Popper (spiritually, at
least) was its father. In 1959, just when the
Design Methods Movement was beginning to
establish itself, Karl Popper’s seminal book The
logic of scientific discovery was translated into
English and published in London. The original
had been written in German. This was followed
in 1963, the year after the first Design Methods
Conference, with his even more influential book,
written originally in English this time, entitled
Conjectures and refutations. The essence of
Karl Popper’s message in Conjectures and refu-
tations was that we should reject the old Bacon-
ian principle that the true scientist should arrive
at a scientific theory through inductive reason-
ing. He argued that we must accept, instead, that
most, if not all, scientific discovery is based on
the positing of an insightful tentative expla-
nation about the meaning of the evidence. This,
said Popper, was followed by an exploration of
the implications of such an explanation. But
most importantly, argued Popper, this had to
take the form of serious, comprehensive, sys-
tematic attempts to find any flaws in the theory
posited. You can spring from your bath shouting
‘Eureka!’, or wake up in the morning with a
conception of relativity, or visualise the struc-
ture of the double helix. You do not, said Pop-
per, have to prove whence these conceptions
came. What you do have to do, is apply every
test you can think of to discover any flaws in, or
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limitations to, your proposition. Hence Popper’s
title Conjectures and refutations. Or, to put it
more precisely, real science proceeds by the
postulating of informed conjectures, followed by
systematic attempts at the refutation of these
conjectures. The impact on the infant discipline
of Design Methodology was immense. Conjec-
ture, exploration and refutation (or, more popu-
larly, proposition, development and test) is
exactly what designers do! Design activity was
scientifically respectable! More than that, in the
light of the Popperian revolution, we can assert
that research can just as properly be conducted
through the medium of design activity itself, as
it could by orthodox scientific enquiry! The
Design Methods Movement had matured into
the new discipline of Design Research.
4 Paradigm shift
Both this new insight into the nature and status
of design activity, and the Popperian revolution
concerning the nature and status of scientific
activity which brought it about, are examples of
‘Paradigm Shifts’ as described by Thomas Kuhn
in The structure of scientific revolutions pub-
lished, not at all coincidentally, in 1962, the year
in which the first Design Methods conference
was held. In The structure of scientific revol-
utions Kuhn acknowledged that throughout the
history of science the great majority of workers
in any field accepted that, if they were to be
taken seriously by their peers, they had to
present their evidence and conduct their argu-
ments in ways that were considered respectable
according to the canons of their time. But Kuhn
also pointed out that, every now and again,
someone would publish a serious scientific
account that offered a new and revolutionary
explanation for existing phenomena. Or perhaps
the new explanation would demonstrate a new
manner of reasoning. In such an event, scientists
everywhere would look again at their own data,
and test the consequences of using this new
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manner of reasoning. If it seemed to work, then
soon everyone would recognise this as a new
canon of good practice. Kuhn called this a ‘para-
digm shift’. Darwin’s The origin of species
caused such a paradigm shift, as did Newton’s
Laws of mechanics before him and Einstein’s
Theory of relativity after him.
Let us look at some of the paradigm shifts
that have occurred in the short history of Design
Research. We have already come across the sys-
tems approach, which galvanised and transfor-
med the academic side of the Design Methods
Movement in its earliest years. In reality, this
only became a practicable aid for professional
design activity when Peter Checkland published
his Techniques in ‘soft systems’ practice in
1979. Another, lesser, paradigm shift came with
the growing recognition in the scientific world
of ‘Action Research’, usefully summarised by M
Foster in An introduction to the theory and prac-
tice of action research in 1972. Action Research
recognises that sometimes it is impracticable for
the investigator to maintain the traditional stance
of objectivity and non-intervention. In some cir-
cumstances, the investigator (say, a surgeon)
may of necessity be an actor in the situation (a
need for surgical intervention in an unusual
case) under investigation. In Action Research
the investigator takes some action in and on the
real-world in order to change something and
thereby to learn something about it. A great deal
of real-world design activity takes the form of
Action Research and this experience represents
a useful bridge between design practice and
design scholarship.
5 Quality assurance
There was an even more significant paradigm
shift that also occurred in the 1970s. After the
end of the Second World War, the US govern-
ment of the day adopted a far-sighted and mag-
nanimous policy, known as the Marshall Plan,
calculated to help rebuild the economies of the
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war-ravaged countries of Europe and the Pacific.
As elsewhere, Japanese manufacturing industry
was offered the opportunity to nominate any
expert advice they chose to receive. It is hard to
remember that before the Second World War,
Japanese goods were famous for being shoddy.
Not surprisingly under those circumstances, the
Japanese industry bosses therefore asked,
amongst other things, for expert advice on pro-
duct quality control. The army generals and the
civil servants who were running the Marshall
Plan turned to the American academic world to
recommend a quality control expert. They were
offered the name of the American production
engineering theorist, Professor W Edwards
Deming.
What the generals and civil servants did not
appreciate was that to a production engineer the
word quality has a meaning different from that
to which the man in the street is accustomed. To
a production engineer, the word quality means
the degree of adherence of an item to its speci-
fication. Or more precisely, the amount of vari-
ation between one exemplar of the item and the
next. Thus high quality means there is very, very
little variation between successive items. This
has little to do with the specification level of the
item concerned. In quality control terms, one can
choose to manufacture high quality (that is, very
highly consistent) exemplars of a product,
whether that product is at a high, luxury specifi-
cation or at a low, cheap and nasty specification.
Similarly, one can choose to manufacture low
quality (that is, very variable) exemplars of a
product, regardless of whether it is at a luxury
specification or at a cheap and nasty specifi-
cation. Deming’s pet theory was that, contrary to
the beliefs then current world-wide in industrial
practice, overall manufacturing costs could be
reduced rather than increased by working to
closer and closer dimensional and materials tol-
erances. No one in manufacturing industry
believed him. As a budding young mechanical
Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999
engineer, I was certainly brought up in the Ford–
Taylor tradition that, for the sake of economy,
one should work to the coarsest tolerances one
could reasonably get away with. The first piece
of writing I ever had published, in 1957 I think
it was, extolled the advantages of specifying
coarse tolerances. In Deming’s revolutionary
view, if all parts production was geared to the
closest possible tolerances, and if all parts were
thus guaranteed to be very highly consistent,
there was much money to be saved by omitting
interprocess inspection, reducing inter-process
piece-part stocks and eventually by automating
assembly processes. Not only that, according to
Deming, one could then guarantee the perform-
ance and durability of the assembled finished
product.
The Japanese industrialists of the time were
predisposed to believe him. It chimed with the
Japanese approach to the arts. Consequently,
within the framework of the Marshall Plan, one
Japanese industry after another adopted the
Deming Quality Assurance principles and found
that his theories did indeed deliver lower costs
and better performance. Then, with Deming’s
direct assistance, Japanese firms pushed Quality
Assurance downstream to the component sup-
plier phase, to achieve yet more cost savings and
yet shorter lead-times. This combination of
price, quality and speed of delivery revolution-
ised Japan’s position in world markets, and very
nearly wiped out whole industries in the West.
Eventually, of course, European and North
American firms overcame their prejudices and
they, too, adopted the Quality Assurance prin-
ciple. In the meanwhile, flushed with their suc-
cess, Japanese manufacturers extended the
Deming theory by pushing Quality Assurance
principles upstream to the design phase, and
went on from there to develop a system of mar-
ket-led product innovation techniques that went
to the heart of delivering to consumers the pro-
duct attributes they really valued.
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6 Concurrent engineering
A means for achieving ever-shortening lead-
times was the introduction of the practice called
‘Concurrent Engineering’. Concurrent Engineer-
ing describes the compression of research,
design, development, production and marketing
processes by, as the term implies, conducting
them simultaneously, using mixed discipline
teams, often on the basis of a common computer
model of the emerging product requirements,
product form and manufacturing processes.
Before this, for much of my professional life-
time, the traditional way of conducting a product
development project was in the manner of a
relay-race. Market researchers produced
research reports and handed them to the design-
ers; designers prepared design concepts and
handed them to the development engineers;
development engineers produced piece-part
specifications and handed them to the jig and
tool designers, and so on. ‘Throwing the pack-
age over the wall to the next department’ is how
management commentators described it. We all
know the story. It would take several years to
get a new or improved product to the market.
By contrast, under the Concurrent Engineering
principle, a product development team of all the
relevant disciplines (research, design, develop-
ment, tooling, production, distribution, market-
ing and after-sales service) would work together
from the outset with a common goal. Dramatic
shrinking of lead-times resulted. Market compe-
tition expanded to a global scale. Oddly, the
implications of Concurrent Engineering have not
yet been fully appreciated in general design
practice and design education. Some industrial
design schools and engineering departments
remain unsure as to the knowledge bases their
students are expected to acquire, and the skills
they are expected to develop. Some schools, per-
haps unconsciously, still promote the role model
of the sole designer rather than the role of a
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member of a joint product development team. It
is one of the function of this Conference to clar-
ify such questions.
7 Agility
If the design schools have not yet fully come to
terms with the implications of Concurrent
Engineering, manufacturing industry and the
business schools have gone some way towards
clarifying the context. Towards the end of the
1980s, articles appeared in the general business
journals and on the business pages of the daily
press describing the turbulent state of the mar-
ket, the speed with which competitors were able
to bring new and improved products to market
and the implication for organisational change. In
1989, the Department for Trade and Industry
commissioned P A Consulting to prepare a
report, Manufacturing into the 1990s. They have
found that many firms had concluded that the
only answer to shrinking lead-times and global
marketing was the restructuring of corporate
organisation. Market and technological change
must be detected earlier, and product, process
and marketing responses must be introduced
sooner. In 1991, J D Blackburn published a book
in the United States under the title Time-based
competition, in which the term ‘responsiveness’
was attributed to companies who were able to
counter competition with speedy and appropri-
ate action.
It was not long before ‘responsive’ companies
were being described as ‘lean’ companies. The
term ‘lean’ has a deceptively docile ring about
it. In fact, it is intended to describe the leanness
of the panther: fast, agile and deadly. A ‘lean’
company has shed all its surplus fat. It has few
levels of command in its management. It does
not carry the burden of more fixed assets than
can be helped. To this end, it engages in wide-
spread subcontracting. It carries minimum
stocks. It ensures that both incoming materials
from subcontractors and outgoing finished pro-
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ducts to customers are Quality Assured and
delivered ‘just in time’. It expects to cover the
costs of any new product launch quickly.
A company exhibiting such responsiveness is
described as ‘agile’. At the limit, the agile com-
pany almost disappears. In their book Agile com-
petitors and virtual organisations, 1996, Gol-
man, Nagel and Priess describe this as ‘the
disintegration of manufacturing’, and they ident-
ify many well-known brand suppliers as ‘virtual
manufacturers’. In 1997, the Management Best
Practice Directorate of the Department for Trade
and Industry sponsored a mission by a represen-
tative group of industrialists and academics to
the United States, with a view to visiting leading
manufacturers and business schools and to
bringing back intelligence of the most effective
corporate strategies. ‘Responsiveness’ was the
message and ‘Agility’ was the key. There are,
in fact, many agile companies and virtual manu-
facturers in Britain today. In a Workshop organ-
ised by the Institution of Electrical Engineers on
23 February 1998 at Savoy Place, a number of
such companies reported their progress. One of
them, Raleigh Industries, reported a reduction in
manufacturing lead-times from 42 days in 1987
to 4 days in 1997. Another, Van den Bergh
Foods Limited, reported a reduction from 3 or
4 days production lead-time to 15 hours!
8 Robust design
Why am I making such heavy weather of this?
Because it has a significant bearing on the two
questions with which we began: ‘To what extent
can design be used creatively to make a major
breakthrough or quantum leap in successful
innovation practice?’ and ‘How do designers
and design managers deal with the problems of
ultra-fast moving joint product development
teams?’
In respect of the first of these questions, ‘To
what extent can design be used creatively to
make a major breakthrough or quantum leap in
Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999
successful innovation practice?’ it becomes clear
that agile companies are far less constrained by
existing technologies and by investments in
plant than were their less agile counterparts of
the past. Since most of the manufacturing is sub-
contracted, then a design incorporating new
technology or which demands new manufactur-
ing processes is not ruled out by plant invest-
ment problems. Nor must it be obscured by limi-
tations in the knowledge and skills of the design
team. The design and development team must
be as versatile and agile as the company itself.
It must have at its fingertips a wide range of
knowledge about appropriate technologies, and
rapid access to a comprehensive database on
materials, processes and available ready-made
components. To a great extent, under these cir-
cumstances, as the Japanese example has shown,
the design driver must be inspired insights into
customers’ real needs and values. The com-
pany’s existing plant and technology count for
very little. What the customer perceives as
attractive count for everything.
This brings us to the second question with
which we began: ‘How do designers and design
managers deal with the problems of ultra-fast
moving joint product development teams?’ Not
every new product launch has to be radical. Cus-
tomers’ real needs and values are not always
answered by fundamentally new products.
‘Innovation’ includes ‘improved’ as well as
‘new’. In finding an ultra rapid answer to a com-
petitor’s move, the company will often decide
to take advantage of their existing position in
the market and in the supply chain by offering
a ‘new, improved’ model rather than a totally
new one. If this is to be easily achievable, exist-
ing designs have to be ‘Robust’.
9 Sub-system decoupling
A robust design is one that will accommodate
changes in user requirements, technology or
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market competition with minimum upset. A
robust design is one whose subsystems have
minimum interdependency, so that any subsys-
tem can be replaced with a revised version with-
out encountering knock-on effects in other sub-
systems. This is a design principle that is more
radical than it may sound at first hearing. For
generations of designers, it has been a matter of
fact that an integrated design is smaller, lighter,
cheaper than one which is composed of subsys-
tems bolted together. An unfortunate conse-
quence for consumers in past decades has been
that if anything has gone wrong with a product,
the whole thing has had to be thrown away.
Nevertheless, for the sake of cheapness, light-
ness, compactness, manufacturers have gone for
integrated designs and consumers have bought
them. The paradigm shift we are now addressing
will do little to change the experience of the con-
sumer. The decoupling of subsystem interdepen-
dency in design terms does not necessarily mean
bolt-together subsystems in manufacturing
terms, and does not make it any easier, per se,
to carry out repairs. It does, however, represent
a paradigm shift in the practice of design.
10 Flash of light
To return to our examination of the title of this
Conference, it appears to me that any Quantum
Leap in the management of new product inno-
vation is contingent upon recognition of the nat-
ure of corporate agility. Corporate agility has
major implications for interdisciplinary product
design teamwork, and requires a closer look at
the subtle nature of robust design. To my gener-
ation, in a certain sense, the advocation of robust
design looks like a quantum leap backwards. If
I remember rightly, in my second year introduc-
tion to quantum mechanics, I learned that a
return of a sub-atomic particle to a lower energy
level results in a brilliant, but fleeting, flash of
light. Let us all watch out for that flash of light
in the course of the next three days.
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