Don't Judge a Suit by his cover!

Being completely honest I wasn’t thrilled when seeing our weeks design and technology slot was being taken by the director of the GSA. I didn’t know anything about him but imagined him as a next level school headmaster- another man in a suit who speaks about values of the school and how we all need to excel ourselves in order to get the most out of our education BLAH BLAH BLAH. After 16 and a half years in education these talks get a bit old….

But surprisingly he wasn’t as expected at all! He was in fact a very interesting man and had a lot more time for us than expected. His talk titled- ‘professor tom inns- why I see things the way I do’ was very refreshing.

He took us through his background from studying in Bristol to researching for the rspca and finally working as dean of the university of Dundee. He then went on to speak about product development success using the obvious example of apple. He spoke about how apple are not as bullet proof as people think and showed us an example of the apple newton- a product that they took out but completely flopped! 

This opened up a discussion of the future of apple. Being such a successful company many question when or what will eventually lead to their demise. There were some theories that companies like Samsung who are actually more technologically advanced than apple will overtake them with more advanced products at cheaper prices. This is due to the fact apple are more of a design company- their capabilities with technology are actually not as advanced as you would assume and they buy in lots of their internal tech from other companies. Personally I imagine they’re not going to fall anytime soon, they have such a dedicated following I can only imagine apple will keep on growing and producing more apple branded things for apple junkies to lap up; perhaps a complete integrated apple home system. Apple heating, apple kitchens ,APPLE EVEYRTHING!! 

He also presented us with an interesting stat: of all the new products produced by all companies in the last 5 years only 56% were deemed to be ‘successful’ by the companies who made them. That’s a pretty disheartening stat. What chance do I have as an amateur designer if the odds are already stacked against me!?

This quickly moved from quite a negative note to a much more positive one as he went on to discuss his PHD which explored the impact of the designer on innovation in small businesses. This was very interesting and completely relevant to our Product Design Engineering course. He explained how he discovered designers have an amazing ability to look to the future, since everything they do doesn’t actually exist at the time of doing. This made me feel like some kind of crystal ball mystic meg and that’s always good.

Finally he moved on to speak about business strategy and took us through a few well known businesses’ strategies. I learnt my favourite clothing shop – Zara have a reactive strategy – they do all their product testing in store- they put lines out in the shops and if they don’t sell they stop stocking them. Very logical if you ask me. All their factories are in turkey not china because deliveries cant come from china quick enough.

Tesco use the same reactive strategy- they adapt every one of their stores around what the locals buy and eat. They surprisingly have more data on us than any other cooperation in the uk since the tesco club card tracks what we buy and when we buy it.

Companies who utalise proactive strategies are Dyson and virgin. James dyson is always researching new technology, new applications for it and bringing out innovative new products. Virgin work in a different way by buying companies to gain assets- they see something and think ‘hey that’s cool lets make a virgin version of it.’ Perhaps a worse way to run a company but still successful none the less.

Overall I found Tom Inns’ talk really inspiring. He’s a great speaker and I was pretty enthralled by what he had to say and was overall really surprised at how much of a down to earth interesting guy he was! I learnt a lot about how businesses work and how designers contribute to them. Sorry for pre judging you Tom but I take it all back!