Be More Innovative

Lessons from my Wisconsin Digital Symposium keynote on building digital systems that actually work.

Looking to move beyond incremental product tweaks? This article breaks down the three key enablers of step-change innovation—especially in complex environments shaped by new technology, regulation, and shifting organizational priorities.

Early-stage product innovation is full of ambiguity. This article shows how to bring structure to that uncertainty—so your team can identify the right opportunity, align faster, and reduce downstream risk. Learn practical methods for clarifying vague challenges—and why that clarity is essential for successful product development.

AI can accelerate product development—but only if it’s applied strategically. In this article, you’ll learn 19 real ways AI can support insights, design, and engineering work—plus what to watch for when integrating it into your team’s workflow.

Launching a product is just the beginning. In this article, you’ll learn why lasting innovation depends on how you plan for what comes next—from evolving user needs to version 2 improvements and system-level decisions. If your team is thinking past the launch, this article offers strategic considerations for sustaining momentum—and making smarter product decisions over time.

Are usability and innovation inherently at odds? Here are three ways to resolve the tension.

At Delve, our design philosophy seeks emotional outcomes through rational thinking. As with all things, our slant remains pragmatic as we gain more experience with multisensory design.

We're committed to sharing our favorite design principles. Here is part 3 from Delve's strategists, researchers, designers, and engineers.

Here are ten more of our favorite design principles, explained.

These are principles we’ve been curious about at some point during the course of our careers, and we thought others might be interested in learning more about them, too.

What could biology possibly have to teach engineers and designers?

Remember the Coolest Cooler? The most popular Kickstarter product of all time when it launched in 2018, the connected cooler was a perfect example of what happens when a hardware startup underestimates development and manufacturing costs.

Brands that push their products mostly via ad campaigns, websites, and packaging are missing an important opportunity: the point of connection.

We’ve compiled some essentials for product designers and companies who want to get started developing their own sustainable product design process.

To fight startup failure, practice product testing early and often.

We see startups encountering the same set of roadblocks over and over again. Here are the three biggest sore spots and our advice on how to get around them.

Entrepreneurs going into hardware face a hefty learning curve, and missteps can end up costing them later in development.

Silicon Valley really speaks to us as interaction designers, user researchers, a mechanical engineers, and software engineers. There have been many times we wanted to jump into the screen and right the ship.

More and more, people are conditioned to interact with their objects. Products developed according to a siloed industrial design process have little chance of fulfilling these new expectations.

If your brand helps consumers solve a problem or achieve a goal as only your brand can, you have a product experience that will create a brand evangelist.

Moments of inspiration aren’t unusual at all; practically any product innovation you can name has benefited from several. And if they seem to happen out of the blue, it’s because that genius was primed.

Brainstorming can be very effective - if we don’t get lazy. At Delve, We subscribe to the notion of “more brain; less storm.”

The short answer: Empathic design makes us better designers.

The world is better when healthcare meets people where they are. As the home evolves into a central hub of healthcare, how can we design for it in a way that delivers safe and effective healthcare for all?

Whether I’m validating a medical device or working on the next big thing in VR technology, I always rely on five anthropological principles.

ICUs need a more integrated source of relevant information to help physicians make better decisions and fewer mistakes.

Outsourcing your engineering needs can be the answer—if you do it right.

Everyone has his own opinion regarding if and how brainstorming should be done. We use it frequently, but we’ve developed our own technique that is more structured than “stormed.”

Successful hardware innovators need confidence, foresight, and consideration to do something genuinely innovative.

At Delve, we don’t focus on design thinking for its own sake, but rather, on design thinking and doing. What does action-oriented design thinking look like?

Why are LEGOs so awesome? Because you can mix and match them to create an endless variety of new things. The process is analogous to typical front-end innovation.

As many as 95% of new products fail. To improve the odds in your favor, put users at the center of the design process and conduct user research early and often.

There are several methodologies available to speed up the development process. Which best fits your needs?

Features that would be impossible to pull off using conventional manufacturing methods are made feasible with 3D printing.

Today we have the ability to set up and interact with a VR-simulated prototype. As the technology continues to grow more accessible, can leverage it for product design, easily translating to faster turnaround and cheaper development costs.

Today’s users of medical devices expect a consumer-level experience. How can medtech firms make the shift?

Delve helps clients develop innovative organizations, teams, and leaders. How can you tell if your business needs Innovation Enablement?

Together, we can design a better world. Let’s start by leveraging our unique skillsets as change agents.

How can you help your team think differently?

What if you could plot your impact potential in real-time over the course of your project, allowing you to make necessary changes when it matters most?

A multidisciplinary team has the edge in creating innovative, well-rounded solutions that meet the needs of all stakeholders.

To understand the critical importance of user research and strategy for businesses, it's helpful to look at real-world examples.

Business leaders need to make product decisions based on real data about their target market, instead of simply relying on best guesses or gut feel.

Medical device manufacturers need to design for a new kind of user. This has big implications not just for the devices they design but also for how they do business.

Empowered healthcare consumers bring to medical devices the high expectations formed from their experiences with highly intuitive consumer products—as well as greater risk.

Within every organization, innovation wants to thrive. Here’s what it looks like when organizations dismantle the obstacles that stand in the way.

Here are nine examples across different sectors of how data science and machine learning can help unlock the power of your data.

Companies tend to become less agile and innovative as they grow. This outcome is so common that it feels inevitable. Good news: It isn’t.

Whenever your needs require you to conduct user research remotely, these strategies will allow you to answer the same fundamental questions as in-person methods.

Too many times design thinking projects fall victim to the trappings of innovation theater. Here's how not to let that happen.

The JOC method lets you move into ideation confident that you're working from something more than a hunch.

Being home more in 2020 meant a little more down time, including more time for books and audio books.

We can always count on the market to push change, whether the players in the market like it or not. Failure to adapt quickly to changing market forces will eventually come back to bite you.

STEEPLE analysis is a tool for scanning your external environment. It helps teams understand phenomena and imagine new opportunities.

For our Delve Talks podcast, Dave Franchino and I had the opportunity to interview a dozen people from various industries, all of whom share a common interest, desire and occupation that involves innovation, creativity and culture building. You can find the whole series here.

For our Delve Talks podcast, Dave Franchino and I had the opportunity to interview a dozen people from various industries, all of whom share a common interest, desire and occupation that involves innovation, creativity, and culture building. You can find the whole series here

Sometimes having a breakthrough idea is the easy part of innovation. Navigating the organization and turning that idea into reality is often the hardest part. That's why you need design strategy.

(Any Day But) Tuesday… If it was Tuesday, you could guarantee there was no electricity. You couldn’t iron your clothes, watch TV or turn on the lights. You’d do anything to have a portable fan blast air on your face on a crushing summer afternoon, but you couldn’t.

I have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about the spectrum of successes and failures related to the open-source maker movement and its contributions to addressing the COVID crisis.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been asked by clients and my team has thought a lot about the question, “Should we be doing research now?” We’ve also had to think about, “Can we do research now? How?”

Before starting on an innovation strategy, decide which type you're chasing: Incremental, disruptive, or radical innovation. Each requires a unique approach.

Over the years, there have been designers still young in their careers that have come to me looking for advice and ideas of what to do next. They’ve all told me their tales of woe about how design is just not respected or understood where they work. And this, of course, coincides with their (and design’s) struggle to find a solid footing within the organization.

Generating good ideas is usually not the problem. The process of choosing one good idea and getting it through your organization is usually the hard part.

Apparently, unicorns just went extinct in Silicon Valley. That’s sad news for the small group of tech entrepreneurs who hope to cash in on the latest gold rush and build a company with a $1 billion-plus valuation.

This article is part two of a series about the advantages of an improvisation (improv) mindset on workplace teams. Read part one here.

This article is part one of a two-part series about the advantages of an improvisation mindset on workplace teams.

You’re probably already looking up the word “strategy” to see if it’s a noun or a verb. Spoiler alert: it’s a noun.

I recently hosted a discussion on a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Failure. Specifically, the role of failure in innovation.

Have you ever been given a physical tool to help you complete a task when what you really needed was information or support?

Most design processes start with empathy or insights and jump right into design research methods – forgetting to acknowledge how crucial framing and scoping can be.

Having a foundational understanding of your problem space is necessary for any design process. You wouldn’t hire someone who has never seen the ocean to design a ship, would you?

The common message spoken and implied by the many purpose-driven speakers we listened to: Find an organizing principle for your company, your project, product or community to move the needle.

A very common mantra in product development and specifically Design Thinking is to “fail early and often.”

If the numbers don’t add up, great design isn’t sustainable — no matter how thoughtful it is. Design must ultimately serve the needs of the business as well as the user.

If you are innovating by practicing customer-centered design, it may be the reason you aren’t getting the results you need.

Pharmaceutical companies are in a unique position to simplify the drug reimbursement process.

From a '90s novelty to an exciting design tool, virtual reality offers client-facing opportunities for design immersion.

Designing appliances increasingly involves and interaction design component. How do you integrate this skill into your development process effectively?

Co-creation means inviting users into your creative process. Users, instead of being subjects of study, gain agency and become active participants in the design process.

I have a confession to make. My co-worker Stefanie used to drive me nuts.

As a design team, we are constantly in search of ways to stay involved with the design community and shine light on upcoming talent

In the immediate aftermath of any newsworthy accident, we often hear the words "human error" or "user error".

Psychological safety can be the difference between innovative and just OK. Here are three easy ways to build psychological safety at your organization.

We have a tradition of using the humble whiteboard as a jumping off point for discussions both internally and with the community.

In medical product design, usability research was too often an afterthought. But you simply can’t expect something to look nice and assume patients and clinicians will know how to use it.

IoT makes sense for industrial applications where there are endless opportunities to monitor and automate.

Quality management systems get a bad rap for slowing down progress and squelching innovation. We developed our own QMS approach to meld rigorous standards and the flexibility to innovate.

One client. Three consulting partners and 100 team members. How do you hold such a massive project together. Here are three tips.

Slowing down and practicing mindfulness in design can lead to better products.

At the Health 2.0 to focus was on how to effectively use the troves of health data we already possess for prevention and better outcomes.

Addressing customer pain points is a great way to inspire design, but don’t miss opportunities to “amp up the good” by addressing the gains that users desire.

Julie Norvaisas from LinkedIn stopped by our offices to share tips on how they research User Experience to deliver the best products and services.

What does it mean when an Industrial Designer designs a "product?" Nowadays, it can get a little convoluted.

The mindful practice of yoga offers some valuable lessons for design research.

Business people and designers have the same goals — launching successful products — they just use different vocabularies.

A simple, if provocative, question can make all the difference to a project when it's asked at the right time.

Design Thinking and Lean Startup are two approaches that can co-exist with some creativity and flexibility to create a better result.

During our decision-making workshop at SXSW, we ran a little experiment in decision making that yielded some interesting results.

New technologies and processes help us work faster and smarter, but it's the quality of people we hire that makes those tools work for our clients.

A family trip around the world with two elementary school-aged children proved to be a meaningful lesson in leadership.

In the history of product innovation, there are famous successes – some arguably driven by new technology, and others that resulted from user research and insights.

There are several methodologies available to speed up the development process. Which best fits your needs?

Repairing the complicated carburator of a 1974 MGB convertible is a good reminder that multidisciplinary design produces better products.

What's an important step that many companies skip in setting up their Big Data initiatives? Knowing why they're collecting data in the first place.

Satisfaction with customer service hasn't improved since 1976. With increasingly complicated, sensor-laden products, who do consumers call for help?

Change brings excitement, anxiety and lots of questions. Here are five best practices for managing change in an organization.

User-centered design is great, but it if your competitors also invest in user research it may be time to do some contrarian exercises for stronger strategy.

Setting inclusive screening and recruitment criteria for design research projects can help yield the insights that will power your product design.

What are the odds a new product will still be around in two years’ time? And, how do we decide what to design today?

When it comes to innovation, it truly takes all types. Do you know if your team has all the perspectives it needs?

Is the IoT feeling overwhelmingly complex? Here's seven rules to extract simplicity from complex IoT product design projects.

An energizing day at a Microsoft Accelerator Day for entrepreneurs provides a good reminder that above all, know thy customer.

We noticed more discussion in general this year of user interface (UI) design, often in the context of smart devices. We anticipate UI becoming a stronger focus in upcoming HFES conferences as it continues to become clear that ineffective UIs represent the highest risk to safety and efficacy.

Instead of running away from uncertainty, maybe it's healthy to embrace it as fodder for innovation.

Enjoy this visual explanation of graphic recording and facilitation, which is a great approach to helping a meeting come alive.

A lesson in visualizing the target and aiming in squash is also a good reminder of how to design products.

Somewhere between a quick brainstorming session and rounds of frustrating debate, there's typically a sweet spot for naming a product.

Reviewing restaurants provides insight into what makes some businesses thrive while others falter.

Leading an after-school fashion design and sewing club reveals the truisms behind design thinking.

Do you know someone who can absorb a vast amount of complex information about a problem and combine it into a cohesive, elegant solution?

It's really interesting to see how companies choose to react when they’re under a ton of competitive pressure. It can be easy for companies to get conservative.

If your design requires a photorealistic image to show it is different from prior designs, it may not be innovative enough.

How about smaller companies who don’t have the budget for an innovation lab or the leeway to afford failed experiments? How can they get in on Design Thinking?

In my first two posts about the future of design I outlined a few ways product designers should set themselves up to thrive in their careers. In this last post I’ll step back for a broader view of some waves of change headed our way.

As design and manufacturing become more commoditized, strategy to inform product experiences will be valued higher than implementation. This is good news for product designers who love digging into upfront work.

As the emphasis in industrial design (ID) continues to shift from form toward user interface (UI) and other elements of human to computer interaction, industrial designers will need to figure out how to thrive in a digital environment.