INTRODUCTION

Research and development (R&D) has long been the domain of scientists and engineers. R&D teams began to come into prominence in the US in the early 20th century to solve various technical problems faced by major companies like AT&T, GE, and Kodak (Usselman, 2013). But things are much different now and the landscape around us is changing everyday. Technologies are emerging not only in the heavily funded labs of corporate giants and university research facilities, but also in Silicon Valley garages and college dorm rooms. Businesses are being pressured to move faster and remain agile and the efficacy of R&D process of the past continues to drift further into inadequacy. Technological proliferation is forcing companies to react on a yearly, if not daily basis. This project and subsequent research hopes to explore the role of design in this new and constantly changing context, a context where the disruptive innovation in any given industry can radically change the face of all industries. And that change is happening faster than ever before.

“And as things speed up, that means more stuff gets changing out there, and organizations to prosper have to react to that. You can’t still do things the way you’ve done in the past and grab opportunities or avoid hazards that come at you. And organizations are not very good at changing (Kotter, 2011).”

Invention Vs. Innovation

Though these terms are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Inventions are typically things that earn patents, they are creations or ideas that have never been seen before. However, inventions do not imply “use”. This is where innovation comes in. Innovations are the applications of technologies and inventions in new contexts (Walker and Contributors, 2016). Many people often refer to how the “invention of the iPhone” changed the mobile computing industry. However, the iPhone is actually just the consolidation of a number of pre-existing technologies. Apple did not invent the touch screen interface. Skype did not invent VoIP. Uber didn’t invent GPS. Amazon didn’t invent the drone. What these companies all have in common is that they used inventions to innovate and disrupt or at least are attempting to. This research will look at how this happens and how designers can be useful in this process moving forward. Additionally, with more inventions being created and patents being filed than ever before, existing companies are now faced with a harder decision as to which technologies are worth the time and resources it takes to explore them.

Key Assumptions

The following chapters will present research which has been conducted to explore the hypothesis that experience designers are uniquely situated to help existing businesses react to emerging technology. This hypotheses rests on the 3 key assumptions that were tested along the way:

1. Designers are particularly effective in evaluating the potential impact on and relevance of an emerging technology to an existing business.

2. A design thinking approach is necessary for exploring the potential of a new technology.

3. Experience designers make for effective intrapreneurs. 

Goals

Aside from answering my central research question, I wanted to fulfill a set of personal goals during this process:

I wanted to use my new found skills which I obtained from Hyper Island in the real world. It was important to see how things such as design fiction, low-fidelity prototyping, and the rest faired outside of the safety afforded by 24 Lever St. 

I wanted to learn a lot about something outside of design and figure out how it related to my role. This desire brought me to the decision to focus on a particular emerging technology for the majority of the research.

Finally, I wanted to create something of value. It was important to me through this process to transcend the common academic short fall of simply talking about something rather than doing something. For a designer, I don’t think this is particularly common as we have an innate desire to create, nevertheless it was a central aim this project.

Limitations

This research was carried out over the course of five months from October 2015 to March 2016, three of which took place during my employment at Datami in Boston, MA. Due to this, the scope of my research was limited to one company and the emergence of one technology. Any given combination of technologies paired with companies could elicit very different results and not all the tools and strategies presented in this report may be applicable in all situations. Additionally the nature of working on emerging technologies means that there is an inherent lack in academic research on the topic. Because business typically moves quicker than academia, it was necessary to rely heavily on industry research, interviews, and experience to learn and uncover insights about my chosen technology. Furthermore, the time scale on which this research was conducted may not be appropriate in every situation. The vastness in attributes among the technologies of the future means that some are easily understood and others are still far from market. And finally, I was constrained by company participation. The nature of my research necessitated the support of a company whose interests would ultimately dictate the course of my research. However, given the time span, it was imperative that I begin narrowing my research objectives before receiving support from a company. In a later chapter I will discuss the implications of this reality.

Output

This research will be delivered in chapters that will be published online. The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1: Introduction - A brief overview of the project

Chapter 2: Methodology - Research framework and employed methods

Chapter 3: Design - Discussion of literature on topics of experience Desgin, human-centered desgin, and desgin thinking.

Chapter 4: Disrutpive Innovation - Discussion of literature on the subjects of disruption, innovation, and current models.

Chapter 5: Emerging Technology - Discussion of literature on emerging technologies, their forecasting, and models of evaluation

Chapter 6: Intervention - Case study and data gathered from time spent protoyping a process to answer the overall research question.

Chapter 7: Discussion - A review of learnings, reflections, and thoughts about the future of research on this topic.

Chapter 8: Conclusion - Acknowledgements and bibliography