Innovation is one thing; success in the marketplace, quite another. Alonzo Canada, Pete Mortensen, and Dev Patnaik offer a framework in which design becomes the channel for uniting these two realities. Identifying five clusters of users—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—and numerous hands-on examples, this trio of authors advocates tailoring designs to the priorities of each group.

In 1999, Honda introduced the Insight, a car promising greater fuel economy than any automobile ever made. Years in the making, the Insight could travel up to 70 miles on a single gallon of gasoline, thanks to a revolutionary gas/electric hybrid engine. Despite the Insight’s many innovations, the car was a flop, selling just 13,200 units before Honda pulled the plug in 2006.

The Insight’s development team sought to incorporate every possible advance in fuel efficiency into a single car. In the process, they created a vehicle that was far too weird for most mainstream drivers. Honda focused on endorsing the technology as viable, proudly calling the Insight a “real-world product for the global market.” But with two seats, an unproven aluminum frame, and a form seemingly borrowed from old Buck Rogers serials, the Insight seemed more like a bleeding-edge prototype than a product that was ready for prime time.

While Honda was working on the Insight, its arch-rival Toyota was developing its own hybrid car, the Prius, capable of 47 miles per gallon. Toyota recognized that the most important problem to solve was not how to maximize fuel efficiency, but rather how to develop a car that would maintain the comfort of existing compact sedans but have significantly better fuel economy thanks to advanced engine technology. To highlight its improvements in fuel economy, Toyota kept most things the same when it designed the Prius. The vehicle looked virtually indistinguishable from Toyota’s existing Echo model, an economy sedan targeted to younger buyers. Most elements in the initial design spoke to reliability and safety, not advanced technology. By keeping almost everything else the same, Toyota highlighted the primary benefit of hybrid engine technology—better gas mileage. To help drive that message home, the car manufacturer built in a computer display dashboard that provided continuous feedback about the car’s remarkable efficiency. The Prius was a runaway success and would go on to sell more than 400,000 units in its first seven years in the United States alone.

Toyota and Honda were in competition to define a new technology, and Toyota won. On the face of it, technology played a central role in Toyota’s success. Yet other factors were equally important in deciding that contest. One of the means through which Toyota succeeded was an effective design strategy. Design strategy is an emerging discipline created to help firms determine what to make and do, both immediately and over the long term. Design strategy is the interplay between design and business strategy, wherein design methods are used to inform business strategy, and strategic planning provides a context for design. While not always required, design strategy often uses social research methods to help ground the results and mitigate the risk of any course of action. The approach has proved useful for companies in a variety of strategic scenarios. As the Prius case shows, one particularly effective application of design strategy has been in helping to ensure the successful management of new technologies.

Many companies struggle with how to best bring new technologies to market. Like Toyota, some of these firms have developed targeted design strategies to drive the widespread adoption of new offerings. By drawing from adoption theory—the study of how new ideas spread to new audiences—these businesses tailor their offerings to meet the different needs people have at various points in a category’s lifecycle. Jump Associates has conducted extensive research into design strategies to drive adoption. We’ve developed six generic strategies that play best at different points in a technology’s diffusion, from endorsing a new technology’s viability to drastically economizing already successful technologies. This article will demonstrate how to implement an appropriate design strategy for adoption at a company and also explain the theoretical underpinnings of the practice.

From the cornfields to the concept lab

Technology-driven companies, such as consumer electronics manufacturers, have concerned themselves for years with reaching early adopters—a small but influential group of users who are more likely to value new offerings than the rest of the population. Because of the social status of early adopters, other buyers who might not immediately recognize the value of a new product, service, or technology look to these folks to make their purchasing decisions.

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