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As Apple’s ascent has transformed it from a company returning from the brink of disaster into an object of serious academic study, the idea of design-driven innovation has become a veritable zeitgeist among those interested in technology and business. In short, everyone wants to know why Apple is so great - from the idea that Steve Jobs is one of the great men of history, worthy of admiration and replication, to what we can learn from Jonny Ives about reinventing Swiss design for our stage of history.

Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, and the originator of Apple’s “Snow White” design language throws his hat into the design-driven innovation ring with his book, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business.

This volume fares well against those like Roberto Verganti’s Design Driven Innovation - they both offer case studies about how real companies have thrived or failed due to their embrace or rejection of design driven design practices. Although, were Verganti, a business school professor, writes with the dry and methodical prose of an academic &emdash; Esslinger’s delivery is biographical and warmed by the emotional delivery that can only come from living through these experiences. The Italian, Verganti, is a bit more of Machiavelli describing the strategy of kings of the past, while Esslinger is more the older, wiser gentleman telling you valuable lessons learned.

One of the most compelling parts of Esslinger’s book to me is his borrowing of Julius Caesar’s Fourth Line and adapting it for use in design driven innovation. This idea rests close to the idea of R&D but is distinguished from it by its focus on delivering holistic experiences versus new products.

According to Esslinger, as Caesar’s armies faced larger ones, he would insert smaller forces near the end of a battle that had worked with each other over long periods of time, thus having the agility destroy the competition. They were not merely a group put together to do new things in battle because they had better weapons. Instead, they were an example of leveraging existing resources to do something great.

Esslinger makes a compelling case as he draws parallels between the fourth line and Apple’s resurgence in the market place. With the iPod, Apple introduced a flashy piece of technology that was stunning, and arguably better than the competition in terms of hardware. But one must remember that it was solely an Apple product for Apple machines. More so, it was an MP3 player in a sea of MP3 players. This is where the concept of the fourth line arrives: Apple then used its reserves - the talent that made the initial product, to provide added innovation to provide a more holistic experience. While other companies rushed their own short-sighted MP3 players to market, Apple, on the other hand, was preparing iTunes. The iTunes store. The Mac App store. In only this one example we see how Apple used its fourth line resources to go from a single piece of hardware to providing a holistic way for computer users to control the music on their computers, in their lives, and later moved into the manner in which people handle the applications in their computers, in their lives.

Hartmut Esslinger, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business. Recommended.

Tags: apple, design driven innovation, esslinger, innovation