Are consumer research groups effective in improving design or are they an impediment to innovation?
If you don’t over-generalize the results, focus groups can be a useful tool. I know design firms that use them to learn what is good or bad about a product in the marketplace. It gives them a starting point for innovating, a way to learn what people like and don’t like about a product. That’s pretty useful. But it won’t give you a Palm Pilot. It won’t give you a breakthrough. It’s what you do with the information that determines how effective it will be. Last year Business Week began collaborating with the American Institute of Architects on a joint architecture competition. What prompted this interest? Over the last couple of years it has become clear that architecture is being used as a powerful business tool. That was not always so. Ten, 15 years ago, architecture was basically a plaything of oversized egos for both individuals and corporations. Corporations created these monuments for themselves. We were not interested in that at Business Week. But once architecture transformed its
