Innovation Blog

A few years ago I attended a conference in New York. During that conference, we experienced a major electrical blackout. Many of the conference attendees had to sleep on the ground in Times Square. Now, in the UK, engineers are working on a way to convert the vibrations from foot, train, and automobile traffic into energy.

An Article by: Mark Dziersk, Senior Vice President of Design and Marketing, Herbst LaZar Bell

The idea that design succeeds depending on how well one defines the need is a truth that is verified by many examples—too many to count. For designers, this is not a new idea; for marketing teams today, it is news. Part of what is new are the many ways of using research to correctly define need and the manner in which this is being done today. There are many more proven ways that designers can engage and exploit clever research to achieve a better definition of need, which in turn results in better designs than ever before. I often say that business has a blind spot: metrics. Research, and its interpretation, can be a way to bridge the gap between a designer’s intuition and the metrics that business needs to mitigate risk in decision-making.