The rounded Coke bottle, the forward thrust of a classic Greyhound bus, and the Lucky Strike cigarettes logo show how design can drive the success of a corporate brand. Jay Doblin believed that design could do much more. To prove his point, the prominent industrial designer left a prestigious post at Raymond Loewy's seminal design firm in New York, opened a top design school in Chicago, and, in 1981, launched a consulting firm.
Since then, Chicago-based Doblin Inc. has been crafting "comprehensive, reliable, and repeatable" approaches to innovation for its clients. The private firm's staff — currently about 20 consultants, although that figure is returning to a more typical playing weight of 30 to 35 consultants — consists of business strategists, cultural anthropologists, contextual researchers, design planners, and information designers.
Jay Doblin strongly believed that design can be the best advocate of the end-user and a main driver of great customer experience. That principle infuses the staff's focus on innovation today as the consultants carry on the legacy of Doblin, who died in 1989.
Doblin president Larry Keeley cofounded the firm with his former professor and is the author of The Taming of the New, a book to be published by Harvard Business Press later this year. Keeley says that the "emerging science of innovation" is at the heart of his firm's practice. Doblin Inc. helps clients assess and expand their innovation capabilities, improve innovation cycle times and the value derived from innovation, and better understand their competitive environment through the lens of innovation. To that end, the firm provides a proprietary diagnostic tool, a methodology for fostering innovation, and plenty of multidisciplined brainpower.
In practice, that approach translates to an intriguing mix of projects and results. Doblin has helped Motorola improve the way it invests in emerging technology; LensCrafters strengthen its customers' eyewear shopping experiences; McDonald's understand its customers' frustrations; Zurich Financial Services bolster its executive education program; Texas Instruments better understand potential digital display technology applications, the single largest R&D investment in the company's history; and more.
Doblin consultants Katie Joyce and Jeff Tull each joined the firm about three years ago. They both point to the variety and depth of work as a main attraction. "The scale of the problems that we have the opportunity to dig into and develop solutions for is huge when you consider the size of our company," says Tull.
Joyce enjoys the variety of challenges, which frequently occur within a single assignment. Pith-helmeted corporate ethnography (interviewing and videotaping passengers in an airline terminal, for example) may be followed by a second layer of research, numbers crunching, and recommendations on how innovation, in some form, can reduce costs, boost revenue, or achieve both benefits.
John Pipino, who directs Doblin's technology strategy and is a charter member of the firm, says that Doblin looks for consultants who harbor "the nagging suspicion that there must be more to their particular discipline." For example, Pipino is an IT guy (and a historian) who believes that IT "chronically underperforms in what it delivers to the rest of the enterprise." To scratch that intellectual itch, Pipino collaborates with his MBAs, researchers, and anthropologists to design innovative solutions to that problem and much more.
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