Score a hit in the global marketplace with a sleek handset that spawns imitators and you can crown yourself a design innovator and refer to your designs as “iconic.”
This is particularly true if, previously, you’d been groping for ideas and, now, sales and glowing press propel your company’s revival. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say.
In developing this story line-part hard fact, part myth-making-it helps if you are recognized by a high-profile award for your work and you have hard-working, humble brainiacs to trot out as representative of your new direction.
Yes, we’re talking Motorola Inc. and the Razr handset, which has taken the world by storm in the past two years. Deservedly, the company, the handset and in particular the Razr design team were recognized last week in Washington, D.C., by the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation’s Industrial Design Inventor of the Year Award.
Motorola, through its anointed designers and engineers, claims that it has learned some keys to design innovation through the creation of the Razr. If that’s true and the process can be repeated, the Midwestern handset behemoth may have struck upon a process that could produce another hit-certainly that’s the dream and the plan of the company and its investors.
The competition, indeed the entire industry, awaits Motorola’s analyst day meeting July 25 outside Chicago-on the heels of quarterly results announced this Wednesday-to see if the company unveils new handsets for the second half of the year, as it did two years ago with the Razr. If so, those handsets would hit the market soon after in Motorola’s new announce-and-launch strategy to foil the competition.
An interview with the Razr development team’s three principals in design and engineering reveals that certain processes and parameters-at least those Motorola will discuss publicly-can encourage innovation. It seems the secret formula includes a genuine hunger for success, assembling the right people, specific marching orders to go for greatness, a degree of sequestration for the team, a shroud of secrecy, a deadline, some hard-and-fast rules (for breaking), a generous budget and internal champions. One elusive element: the switch to model names that relate to the phone’s design, rather than the typical jumble of letters and numbers that don’t stick in consumers’ memory when they enter a retail store.
In the case of the Razr’s design award, three key Motorolans were chosen to represent the company’s success: Chris Arnholt, a lead industrial designer in personal communications, Paul Pierce, creative director in mobile devices, and Tim Sutherland, an engineer in Moto’s industrial design department. (Obviously, other team members and a number of internal champions contributed as well.) They spoke to RCR Wireless News just prior to the award ceremony.
Focus, focus, focus
“Razr was unique in my experience at Motorola, in how we planned and executed a product and brought it to market,” Pierce said. “It was probably the most singularly focused program I’ve been involved with at Motorola. It involved teamwork, where everyone clearly understood the program’s goals and all had the same mantra in mind.”
The team was specifically asked to produce the thinnest clamshell that Motorola had ever produced, and quickly. An advanced concept team and an engineering team huddled separately to produce ideas. Then, in June-July 2003, they came together. The design team had developed the look and feel it desired. The engineers had resolved an antenna design issue, among other things. That’s when work began in earnest. The initial target was product placement at the Academy Awards at the end of February 2004, less than a year away.
“We worked specifically to create an icon and the Razr was our target,” Arnholt said.
(At Motorola, some teams work on specific platforms, presumably for various price points and levels of functionality, while at the leading edge, special projects such as the Razr team are launched specifically to generate new form factors in the search for an icon.)
Certain guidelines for the product were set at the start. For instance, the company’s research indicated that handsets should be no wider than 49 millimeters, but the team went with a width of 53mm. Specific marching orders limited the new product to an exacting thinness of 10 millimeters in thickness; it ended up at nearly 14 mm. The Academy Award deadline came and went as production neared on the final design.
In the well-known dance between design ideas and engineering reality, several issues cropped up.
According to Pierce, the product’s thinness drove the team to find a way to give the keypad the “illusion of depth.” The decision to use a spun-metal casing led to practical challenges in the production process.
“Some of the `limitations’ are positive, because they help put a scope on it,” Arnholt said. “For instance, the solid timeframe and thickness goal helped push everything forward.”
Not skipping a beat, Pierce continued: “Innovation often comes with a set of hard-and-fast rules and you have to figure out `how can I innovate within this space?’ Living with those rules and yet innovating within them is where a lot of the magic with the Razr happened.”
“Breaking some of the rules,” Arnholt added, “and a willingness to take risks.”
Arnholt specifically cited the development of the Razr keypad as “a huge achievement” and the selection of exterior materials, or “the look”-achieved with spun metals-as emblematic of the Razr’s innovation process. “Cost wasn’t mentioned while we were developing this, so some limitations went away,” Arnholt said.
“Some issues resolved themselves,” said Sutherland. “For instance, the selection of magnesium for the phone’s guts was a no-brainer due to the goal of thinness. But magnesium is brittle and doesn’t handle impacts well, so it couldn’t be used on the exterior-hence magnesium on inner housings. The outer casing is stamped metal, for toughness. The antenna area had to be plastic. So some technical constraints were known. The aesthetics worked around or with the technical constraints.”
Repeat business
So has the Razr process been dissected and successful elements applied to future efforts? And whither Motorola’s design approach and culture?
“Clearly it has impacted a lot of what we do,” Pierce said. “We had very strong teammates on the product management side.” (Read: internal champions.)
Pierce heard one manager say in a meeting after Razr’s success that he would put additional resources into the industrial design effort for an upcoming handset model because he could recoup the investment in the marketplace. “He saw the tangible results of putting money into the design,” Pierce said. “He saw that he could make more money with the design than, maybe, squeezing another feature into the product.”
What about specific changes in how Motorola now manages the process of design and innovation?
“Motorola used to do less `platforming’ and is doing more of it now,” Pierce said. “We’ve worked through platform design to the point where we can create products that look and feel unique, yet share some of the `internals.’ Certainly, we and our competitors have found a way to work with platforms to create global products” with economies of scale.
Looking ahead, what trends will inform future designs?
“A lot of things influence us,” said Arnholt. “Inspiration comes from everywhere. Personally, I’m focused on finishes and materials, which has a lot to do with the technical reality of the product. Watches and other consumer products shed light on, for instance, how to lend a `hand-crafted’ quality to a mobile handset.”
“In a broader sense,” Pierce quickly added, lest the curtain be pulled back too far, “you’ve heard the term `seamless mobility’ from us and we’ll be working hard to find ways to tie what people can do with their handsets to content they typically have in their homes. We think we’re well-positioned that way.”
The handset, Pierce explained, will provide many functions in the fixed-mobile convergence era and Motorola is working on how to provide multi-functionality without confusing consumers.
And does the Razr team have marching orders to create another icon?
Pierce put as smooth a finish on the team interview as the “hand-crafted” exterior on a Razr.
“Certainly we want people to expect new icons from us,” Pierce said. “We want to create the impression of design leadership in every handset model. We’ll try to generate a few models each year in the `icon’ category so that consumers will say, `Wow, Motorola’s done it again.’ We’ll be successful when we have the same conversation (as that on Razr) on every product in our portfolio.”
