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Wednesday with Jens Hilgenstock

Jens Hilgenstock studied management, art history and sociology and holds a masters degree in business from the University of Trier, Germany. During his studies he volunteered in reorganizing the legendary 1920s design school Bauhaus in the East-German city of Dessau, right after the fall of Berlin Wall. Ever since then, design marks his path.

Jens played a key role in building up Germany's leading design management consultancy in the mid 90s and later joined German Rail, where he was responsible for the brand and design strategies group wide. With the turn of the millennium he founded jk+klein, a pioneering consultancy focused on the organizational aspects of brand and design strategies. Jens currently lives in Spain from where he works as an independent adviser.

Tom Asacker asks . . .

Jens, the Design Management Institute (DMI) has launched a new blog to stimulate online discussion and learning around the role of innovation in today's business environment. They recently posted the following about Apple's ipod:

“An Apple in Every Home: iPods aren't the biggest and they don't last the longest but consumers clearly think they are the best, even if they are more expensive. What does Apple's design have that others don't? How did they respond to consumer needs in ways others missed? What are the lessons here? Is there any way others can steal the show from Apple?”

What are your thoughts?

JH: Learning from Apple to me sounds like an odd question. It is too obvious and at the same time it leads you nowhere. I am a little bit surprised that the DMI initiated the discussion in such a conventional way.

That being said, it is clear that Steve Jobs' little iPod-wonder brought design onto the business agenda big time. He showed everybody that the game can be played differently. And he also showed everybody that the game has to be played by every player in its very own and authentic way.

Is the iPod a challenge to marketing as usual? Definitely. Has the DMI been advocating design as a business issue for decades now? Definitely. Is the DMI also missing the heart of the discussion right now? Most definitely.

What is at the heart of the discussion?

The iPod case does not come with answers. It comes with questions: how can we change our companies to be more innovative, more entrepreneurial, more relevant, more customer centered?

Design and business as unusual is being discussed all over the place right now. Toronto's Rotman School and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka d-school Stanford) are amongst the first academic institutions that are dedicated to exclusively examining this topic.

Amongst the many things that we will learn in the years after iPod will be that design is one thing, and management is something completely different. In other words, design thinking will profoundly change management practice. This could be the historical aspect - the big, rule changing aspect of the whole thing. It is what everybody is hoping for - the utopian aspect of the hot design discussion that we are experiencing right now.

But carrying our utopian dreams back to Steve Jobs, we might get a little disappointed. Instead of changing the world, Steve has just done with his little iPod what he has always done: creating some user experiences different to the nerdy mainstream. The success of the Apple mp3 player is partly due to great design work, but also to a super consistent and pretty conventional marketing approach, and to the existence of a incredibly large (and mostly hidden) infrastructure. His mean little washing machine massively capitalizes on the fact that something as dirty as pixeled music, and theft of intellectual property, never existed in such a clean and hip customer experience.

Thank you Jens for your insight.

Visit Jens blog at  www.sachlichkeit.blogspot.com

Posted November 9, 2005
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