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去年四月，一个名为“精于心、简于形”的神秘庆典在美国曼哈顿西海岸举办，受邀者包括好莱坞明星、商界要人以及飞利浦公司的员工。当参会者来到会场时，他们仿佛置身于一个巨大的iPod，白色的墙壁、白色的地毯、白色沙发、甚至女士们的衣着都是白色的。
飞利浦公司首席市场官，Andrea Ragnetti向参会者发布了将在未来3到5年投放市场的产品，比如可以被用来作为影碟播放器的台灯或者能清洁室内空气的假树。所有产品被分为分享、关心、成长、信任和娱乐五个类别。尽管这些产品中的很大部分离面世还很遥远，但他们和“精于心、简于形”的主题倒颇为贴切。
飞利浦一直在努力地将其各混乱的商业部门整合成一个无缝的创新机器。从上世纪80年代开始，半导体和家庭电器部门市场份额不断下降的压力使飞利浦将旗下的30个部门划归为4个。其中，设计也许是改变飞利浦的重要因素。“设计帮助我们建立了从现实通向未来的桥梁，使未来变得触手可及。”CEO Gerard Kleisterlee说。
Stefano Marzano是飞利浦的创意总监，他掌管的设计部门有450名员工，每年的预算高达2.5亿美元。通过简约的设计风格，Stefano Marzano试图将整个公司的产品统一起来。Stefano的设计原则是：外型和功能的统一，容易使用以及最终能改善消费者的生活。
不要问：为了这个我们要花多少钱或者如此设计的投资回报是多少这样的问题，“问这些只能毁了我们，只要和设计有关，我们就该把那些商业和管理抛到脑后。” 负责飞利浦全球市场推广活动和品牌管理的Ragnetti说。
这样的声音来自飞利浦有些让人意外，尽管飞利浦有时也能设计出酷的产品，但鲜有真正在市场上成功的。X光机、CD播放器和录像机最初的想法均来自飞利浦，但最终在商业上有收获的却都是其他公司。
作为全球的思想库和创新来源，Marzano和他的设计部门甚至不被要求赢利，他们除了为飞利浦内部各公司工作，还为像福特、耐克和宝洁这样的公司设计。“我们要带给公司的不是现金，而是智慧、知识和新鲜的想法。”Marzano说。
很多人认为创意和设计是由负责艺术的人体的右侧大脑的灵光一现，其实不然，管理创意是有方法的。Marzano 的工作就是把用数据说话的传统思维方式和那些创意者的灵感结合起来，达到平衡。他尽力让坐在屋子里面的设计师和工程师走到市场中去，扩大自己的眼界。
在位于荷兰的飞利浦设计中心里，有专门为不同类型消费者建立的体验之家。比如喜欢技术的Simone之家，喜欢音乐的Justin之家和传统一点儿的Alexandra之家。
如果我们走进Simone的房间，能看到屋里到处都是概念化的电子设备，比如可以按个人喜好进行选择的没有按钮的电器，可感知使用者的便携式无线数字装置，这样无论在哪个房间，都可以接收想收看或收听的内容。
真正吸引Simone的不是技术本身，而是她能迅速得到想获得的信息。类似地，对于Alexandra有吸引力的则变成了可按情绪进行调节的台灯。
当然，这些产品要真正走进大众生活还有待时日，而且这些消费者可能从来没想到过的产品是否真正能被接受也未可知。
对于有着庞大产品线的飞利浦来说，在公司内部创造一种统一的设计文化并不容易，飞利浦的客户可能是医生、爱好音乐的年轻人甚至还有要购买路灯的城市管理者。不过至少现在飞利浦还做得不错，在卖掉了不赚钱的半导体业务并涉足医疗保健器械领域之后，过去两年里飞利浦的股票上升了47%。
设计导向的头脑风暴已经为飞利浦产生了不少成功产品，尽管他们也许和当初的原意并不相同。例如一种叫“Nebula”的灯光系统，原来准备放在卧室里，可以随人们需要自动调节光线，最终却被用于在核磁共振或CT检查中放松病人心情。
另外一个例子是Ambilight电视，研究人员发现，消费者在看电视时喜欢更真实和更放松地体验感受，因此他们开发了Ambilight，这款电视具有可随电视画面颜色的不同而在电视机周围散发不同色彩的技术，这增添了影院效果并能缓解眼睛疲劳。
“精于心，简于形” 战略也让飞利浦的设计人员重新考虑消费者在使用不同产品时的体验。飞利浦设计了可在多达8万种的产品上通用的遥控器和显示屏幕。即使是包装和操作菜单的设计也力图一致。
这意味着以后的设计将不再仅仅依赖“人们可能会喜欢”这样的假定，而要有严格的市场调研和数字做支持。三个月以来，飞利浦开始追踪分摊在各个创意所花费的研发资金的比例，并随时将调研和市场反应联系起来。这样做的好处是可以加快产品研发的速度并减少失败的可能性。
在这个越来越多的公司开始将设计作为差异化的手段的时代，飞利浦能否成为通过设计战略获得重生的榜样还有待观察。
不过，飞利浦的努力初见成效，2005年销售额的49%来自新产品，而2003年这一数字仅为25%。
Ragnetti不愿被别人认为他在模仿苹果公司，准备制造类似iPod产品，他说：我们要高瞻远瞩同时脚踏实地，如果我们是一个人，那我们的头要在云里，而脚要在地上。但更重要的是，头和脚要连起来。
Last April, a select group of Broadway celebrities, New York-area business types, and employees of Royal Philips Electronics found their way across town to a gritty pier on Manhattan’s west side, lured by a cryptic white invitation to “The Simplicity Event.” As the partygoers entered the space, they were transported from a windswept industrial dock into a crisp world of white walls, white carpet, and white couches. Women in white floated ethereally by, bearing hors d’oeuvres. It felt, somehow, like falling into an iPod. But that was the last thing Philips - the $37.7 billion Dutch company that makes everything from televisions to MRI machines - wanted its guests to be thinking about that evening.
Andrea Ragnetti, Philips’s chief marketing officer, gave a brief introduction, then stepped back theatrically as a white screen rose to reveal five different installations, each featuring working prototypes of products that were mostly three to five years away from the market. Oohs of amazement arose from the various stations (Share, Care, Glow, Trust, and Play), prompted by demonstrations of artifacts such as the Momento, which looked like a cross between a snow globe and a lava lamp (shake it, and it morphs into a home-movie player). The Glow section boasted sculptural lamp shades that changed color to match the fabric underneath them. Care showcased an AirTree that cleans and humidifies the air, much as a real tree would. The technology felt seamless, sleek. The products seemed simple - although they were anything but - and ready for the marketplace, even though they were far from it.
Philips is trying to capture that spark of possibility - of what could be rather than what is - as it looks to transform its reputation from a floundering, commodity-peddling conglomerate into a streamlined innovation machine. After years, even decades, of being defined by what it was losing, rejecting, or surrendering, Philips is eager to move forward again. Since the late 1980s, the company has pared itself down from 30 divisions to 4 and lost market share in industries such as semiconductors and consumer electronics. Since 2001, sell-offs have cut the number of employees by nearly half. “Design helps us to bridge the gap between the present and the future,” says Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee, “and makes the future tangible today.”
In short, Philips hopes to create a design-led organization. And mapping out just how it should function has fallen in large part to Ragnetti and Stefano Marzano, the longtime CEO and chief creative director of Philips Design, a freestanding unit with 450 staffers, a satchelful of prestigious awards, and an estimated annual budget of $250 million. Marzano has been tapped to unify the company through what it calls “simplicity-led design.” He wants to establish his design principles - the unity of form and function, ease of use, and, in Philips’s world, improving the consumer’s life - as an organizing framework for the entire company, from its corporate structure to the ways departments and executives communicate, right on up to the user interface on every electronic gizmo.
Ragnetti isn’t fond of questions about whether design actually pays off in the end, at least when discussing experimental projects such as the New York event. “‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘What is the ROI?’ These are the questions that kill,” he says. “I made a clear point in the boardroom that whenever it comes to design, we have to keep business management out of the process.”
That sounds odd coming from a company like Philips, which, despite its legacy, has a reputation for making cool objects that either never made it to market or lost out to the competition. The place that dreamed up such iconic products as the X-ray machine, the compact-disc player, and the audiocassette has routinely failed to capitalize on its own big ideas. “It has often been described as the company that made the most things and made the least money,” says Scott Geels, senior equity analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
In other words, Philips Design isn’t about slapping on a flywheel or a little candy-colored plastic. It’s a global think tank, a freewheeling idea farm. In fact, Marzano isn’t even required to make money: His group charges market rates both internally (when “hired” by one of Philips’s units) and externally (its hundreds of outside clients have included Ford, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Securitas); in return, Philips asks only that the group break even. “I don’t have to deliver cash to the company,” Marzano says. “I have to deliver talent, knowledge, and ideas.”
Yet Marzano’s attempt to overhaul Philips through design is not just some right-brain fantasia. There is a method here, one that draws together the data-driven old guard, the truest of blue-sky thinkers, and everyone in between. Marzano has devoted his career to exploring meta-trends in society and has put that experience at the center of product development at Philips. So, where a company of this scale would typically rely on designers or engineers to generate ideas in-house and then force them into the market, at Philips the process starts out as macrofocused as possible.
Just how well Philips sees into our souls was driven home for me in a simulated living room I visited in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where Philips Design is headquartered. A team of researchers and designers had created the room just for me - or rather for “Simone”, the persona Philips created to represent people like me: a professional woman in her thirties, pregnant, somewhat comfortable with technology. There were three different “rooms” one for “Justin,” a tech-savvy 29-year-old with a huge music collection; another for “Alexandra”, a fiftysomething technophobe who loves hosting dinner parties; and Simone’s.
Settling into Simone’s chair, I clicked on the stripped-down remote control, which turned on a device that put the term “idiot box” to rest forever (or perhaps resurrected it, since even an idiot can handle it). There were virtually no buttons, and organized neatly on the screen was information selected just for “me”- my favorite shows, my music, photos, movies, even prenatal yoga instructions. Customizing the screen of the clean, white television required only a simple click and drag. On the table below lay a light wireless digital “tablet” a device that lets you carry the content with you from room to room, take notes, or share pictures. And if another family member were to pick up the tablet, a technology called BodyAura would sense the change and display the corresponding interface. If a friend came to visit, she could download her own pictures just by tapping the top of the tablet with her phone or camera.
For Simone, what counted was not the technology itself but quick access to the information she needed. Alexandra’s room, by contrast, struck a lower-tech note, with objects such as a table with changeable mood lighting. Justin’s had a vast array of gadgets to create visual displays and allow him to access his thousands of CDs, sorted by album cover and music type.
I knew the beautiful, cutting-edge stuff in Simone’s living room would make my life easier. But even though everything worked in Eindhoven (Philips makes working prototypes, rather than mock-ups or sketches, in the belief that everyone reacts more naturally to a real product), it’s still a long way from Wal-Mart. In fact, as with the New York event, it’s a very open question whether I’ll ever get my hands on any of these things. “It’s not that we have an idea of a product in our mind,” says Stefanie Un, senior research consultant.
A t a company such as Apple, integrating design into virtually every business decision seems a relatively straightforward task. The visual vocabulary is the same, the products all exist within a narrow functional spectrum, and the audience for them is well defined and understood. Philips, however, is a very different animal; a sprawling company with constituencies that include doctors buying complex medical equipment, music-loving teenagers, and urban planners ordering massive streetlights. Creating a consistency of design isn’t easy. And while Philips has shown major improvement - its stock has risen 47% over the past two years as it expanded into health-care equipment and sold off most of its ailing semiconductor business - it is hardly out of the woods. Its consumer-electronics business has fallen from an estimated 11% of the market in 1999 to 6.5%, where it has stalled. Most Wall Streeters, meanwhile, couldn’t care less about what’s happening at Marzano’s funky office inside a former lightbulb factory (in Europe, no less). “The things they’re done have been modestly clever,” says Geels, the analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “They’re doing a better job, but we haven’t had a big hit. They really have to get out products in the near-term.”
Philips’s design-based brainstorming has led to some real product successes in the past, even if they came out differently than originally conceived. One exercise Philips Design put on in 2000, called “Nebula,” looked at the experience of going to bed. It came up with a “Smart sheet” that sensed what was going on in the bedroom and projected appropriate ceiling lighting. If you were trying to sleep, you might see clouds and stars; if you were in for a night of unbridled passion, the lighting got sportier. Philips never developed its libidinous linens, but the idea of using lighting to help people relax resurfaced in 2003 in the company’s MRI and CT scanners, which project imagery on the ceiling to help people, particularly children, feel more at ease during their scans. In the first of six hospitals that have installed them, the need for sedation of nervous children has fallen by 30%. Now Philips is gaining share in both MRI and CT scanners, says Geels-and new uses of lighting are being explored throughout the company.
A similarly upbeat story is the Ambilight television, which originally stemmed from a 1994 design project called “Television at the Crossroads.” Research showed that people wanted a more immersive, relaxing experience with their TVs; design reported this to the technical research groups, which developed a way to project the colors on the screen beyond it, creating a more cinematic feel and reducing eye strain. Philips designers then came up with two ”wings” on the outside of the set to cast the light and lend it a sculptural element. Ambilight came to market in 2004 and already makes up 50% of Philips’s LCD-TV sales, taking its market share in the past two years from 7% to an estimated 12% to 14%.
As part of “Sense and Simplicity,” the design group has also been called in to rethink the way consumers experience each product. With the consumer-electronics division, the group created a common set of controls and displays that will eventually hold constant across some 80,000 products - a Herculean task in itself. Now it is working on a common look across all of its divisions. Even Philips’s packaging and operating instructions have been harmonized in an effort to present a front unified by design.
Philips is also trying to better track the impact of design at the company, an acknowledgment of the Vision of the Future default. Now, design shares its broad-based research at every early meeting to ensure that each proposed product is backed up by a real “validated proposition,” in Philips jargon. This means it’s based not on a hypothesis about what people might desire but rather on hard research that shows what people actually desire. Since March, the company has been tracking the percentage of R&D funds spent on such propositions; products that are now “mission critical,” meaning one to two years from the market, must be tied to research or they will not go forward. And thousands of managers have had to be retrained to understand these new metrics. The theory is that this clear linkage with the customer will lead to speedier product development and fewer products having to be abandoned or rethought in midstream. “The problem was not the number of ideas translated into products,” says Ragnetti, “but the fact that we did not really follow up on those concepts.?
Will Philips emerge as a shining example of an organization that fueled its renaissance with design, or as one that ultimately failed because it lost sight of its real objective? At a time when hundreds of companies are grappling with what it really means to use design as a true differentiator, Philips’s gamble is a case study for businesses everywhere.
And there are at least a few encouraging signs. Philips’s total sales from products introduced in the last year were 49% of total revenues in 2005, up from just 25% in 2003. In medical systems alone, an industry with long product cycles, some 70% of revenues came from products less than two years old - up 20 percentage points from the previous year. And despite disappointing LCD results in 2006’s second quarter, from a less-than-expected World Cup boost, growth in Philips’s medical systems and consumer electronics came in better than expected, at 9% and 10%, respectively.
Ragnetti resists being judged on the “basis of the next sensational iPod-like product.”But, tired as we may be of hearing about it, it was the iPod that overhauled Apple, turning it from an innovative niche player into a corporate icon. “You have to have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground,” says Marzano. “But the feet and the head have to be connected.” We couldn’t have said it better.
Jennifer Reingold (jreingold@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.
(C) 2006 MANSUETO VENTURES LLC, AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES.
LANGUAGE TIPS
squash 挤进
crisp 清新的，干净的
conglomerate大型联合企业
elixir 解决问题的灵丹妙药
iconic 标志性的
utopian 乌托邦式的
fantasia 幻想曲
brainiacs 聪明的想法
extravaganza 铺张华丽的表演
peril 巨大的危险
travail 苦活
unbridled 放纵的，不受控制的
immersive 身临其境的
breezy 愉快的，轻松自信的
jargon 行话，专业术语
renaissance 复兴
飞利浦公司首席市场官，Andrea Ragnetti向参会者发布了将在未来3到5年投放市场的产品，比如可以被用来作为影碟播放器的台灯或者能清洁室内空气的假树。所有产品被分为分享、关心、成长、信任和娱乐五个类别。尽管这些产品中的很大部分离面世还很遥远，但他们和“精于心、简于形”的主题倒颇为贴切。
飞利浦一直在努力地将其各混乱的商业部门整合成一个无缝的创新机器。从上世纪80年代开始，半导体和家庭电器部门市场份额不断下降的压力使飞利浦将旗下的30个部门划归为4个。其中，设计也许是改变飞利浦的重要因素。“设计帮助我们建立了从现实通向未来的桥梁，使未来变得触手可及。”CEO Gerard Kleisterlee说。
Stefano Marzano是飞利浦的创意总监，他掌管的设计部门有450名员工，每年的预算高达2.5亿美元。通过简约的设计风格，Stefano Marzano试图将整个公司的产品统一起来。Stefano的设计原则是：外型和功能的统一，容易使用以及最终能改善消费者的生活。
不要问：为了这个我们要花多少钱或者如此设计的投资回报是多少这样的问题，“问这些只能毁了我们，只要和设计有关，我们就该把那些商业和管理抛到脑后。” 负责飞利浦全球市场推广活动和品牌管理的Ragnetti说。
这样的声音来自飞利浦有些让人意外，尽管飞利浦有时也能设计出酷的产品，但鲜有真正在市场上成功的。X光机、CD播放器和录像机最初的想法均来自飞利浦，但最终在商业上有收获的却都是其他公司。
作为全球的思想库和创新来源，Marzano和他的设计部门甚至不被要求赢利，他们除了为飞利浦内部各公司工作，还为像福特、耐克和宝洁这样的公司设计。“我们要带给公司的不是现金，而是智慧、知识和新鲜的想法。”Marzano说。
很多人认为创意和设计是由负责艺术的人体的右侧大脑的灵光一现，其实不然，管理创意是有方法的。Marzano 的工作就是把用数据说话的传统思维方式和那些创意者的灵感结合起来，达到平衡。他尽力让坐在屋子里面的设计师和工程师走到市场中去，扩大自己的眼界。
在位于荷兰的飞利浦设计中心里，有专门为不同类型消费者建立的体验之家。比如喜欢技术的Simone之家，喜欢音乐的Justin之家和传统一点儿的Alexandra之家。
如果我们走进Simone的房间，能看到屋里到处都是概念化的电子设备，比如可以按个人喜好进行选择的没有按钮的电器，可感知使用者的便携式无线数字装置，这样无论在哪个房间，都可以接收想收看或收听的内容。
真正吸引Simone的不是技术本身，而是她能迅速得到想获得的信息。类似地，对于Alexandra有吸引力的则变成了可按情绪进行调节的台灯。
当然，这些产品要真正走进大众生活还有待时日，而且这些消费者可能从来没想到过的产品是否真正能被接受也未可知。
对于有着庞大产品线的飞利浦来说，在公司内部创造一种统一的设计文化并不容易，飞利浦的客户可能是医生、爱好音乐的年轻人甚至还有要购买路灯的城市管理者。不过至少现在飞利浦还做得不错，在卖掉了不赚钱的半导体业务并涉足医疗保健器械领域之后，过去两年里飞利浦的股票上升了47%。
设计导向的头脑风暴已经为飞利浦产生了不少成功产品，尽管他们也许和当初的原意并不相同。例如一种叫“Nebula”的灯光系统，原来准备放在卧室里，可以随人们需要自动调节光线，最终却被用于在核磁共振或CT检查中放松病人心情。
另外一个例子是Ambilight电视，研究人员发现，消费者在看电视时喜欢更真实和更放松地体验感受，因此他们开发了Ambilight，这款电视具有可随电视画面颜色的不同而在电视机周围散发不同色彩的技术，这增添了影院效果并能缓解眼睛疲劳。
“精于心，简于形” 战略也让飞利浦的设计人员重新考虑消费者在使用不同产品时的体验。飞利浦设计了可在多达8万种的产品上通用的遥控器和显示屏幕。即使是包装和操作菜单的设计也力图一致。
这意味着以后的设计将不再仅仅依赖“人们可能会喜欢”这样的假定，而要有严格的市场调研和数字做支持。三个月以来，飞利浦开始追踪分摊在各个创意所花费的研发资金的比例，并随时将调研和市场反应联系起来。这样做的好处是可以加快产品研发的速度并减少失败的可能性。
在这个越来越多的公司开始将设计作为差异化的手段的时代，飞利浦能否成为通过设计战略获得重生的榜样还有待观察。
不过，飞利浦的努力初见成效，2005年销售额的49%来自新产品，而2003年这一数字仅为25%。
Ragnetti不愿被别人认为他在模仿苹果公司，准备制造类似iPod产品，他说：我们要高瞻远瞩同时脚踏实地，如果我们是一个人，那我们的头要在云里，而脚要在地上。但更重要的是，头和脚要连起来。
Last April, a select group of Broadway celebrities, New York-area business types, and employees of Royal Philips Electronics found their way across town to a gritty pier on Manhattan’s west side, lured by a cryptic white invitation to “The Simplicity Event.” As the partygoers entered the space, they were transported from a windswept industrial dock into a crisp world of white walls, white carpet, and white couches. Women in white floated ethereally by, bearing hors d’oeuvres. It felt, somehow, like falling into an iPod. But that was the last thing Philips - the $37.7 billion Dutch company that makes everything from televisions to MRI machines - wanted its guests to be thinking about that evening.
Andrea Ragnetti, Philips’s chief marketing officer, gave a brief introduction, then stepped back theatrically as a white screen rose to reveal five different installations, each featuring working prototypes of products that were mostly three to five years away from the market. Oohs of amazement arose from the various stations (Share, Care, Glow, Trust, and Play), prompted by demonstrations of artifacts such as the Momento, which looked like a cross between a snow globe and a lava lamp (shake it, and it morphs into a home-movie player). The Glow section boasted sculptural lamp shades that changed color to match the fabric underneath them. Care showcased an AirTree that cleans and humidifies the air, much as a real tree would. The technology felt seamless, sleek. The products seemed simple - although they were anything but - and ready for the marketplace, even though they were far from it.
Philips is trying to capture that spark of possibility - of what could be rather than what is - as it looks to transform its reputation from a floundering, commodity-peddling conglomerate into a streamlined innovation machine. After years, even decades, of being defined by what it was losing, rejecting, or surrendering, Philips is eager to move forward again. Since the late 1980s, the company has pared itself down from 30 divisions to 4 and lost market share in industries such as semiconductors and consumer electronics. Since 2001, sell-offs have cut the number of employees by nearly half. “Design helps us to bridge the gap between the present and the future,” says Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee, “and makes the future tangible today.”
In short, Philips hopes to create a design-led organization. And mapping out just how it should function has fallen in large part to Ragnetti and Stefano Marzano, the longtime CEO and chief creative director of Philips Design, a freestanding unit with 450 staffers, a satchelful of prestigious awards, and an estimated annual budget of $250 million. Marzano has been tapped to unify the company through what it calls “simplicity-led design.” He wants to establish his design principles - the unity of form and function, ease of use, and, in Philips’s world, improving the consumer’s life - as an organizing framework for the entire company, from its corporate structure to the ways departments and executives communicate, right on up to the user interface on every electronic gizmo.
Ragnetti isn’t fond of questions about whether design actually pays off in the end, at least when discussing experimental projects such as the New York event. “‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘What is the ROI?’ These are the questions that kill,” he says. “I made a clear point in the boardroom that whenever it comes to design, we have to keep business management out of the process.”
That sounds odd coming from a company like Philips, which, despite its legacy, has a reputation for making cool objects that either never made it to market or lost out to the competition. The place that dreamed up such iconic products as the X-ray machine, the compact-disc player, and the audiocassette has routinely failed to capitalize on its own big ideas. “It has often been described as the company that made the most things and made the least money,” says Scott Geels, senior equity analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
In other words, Philips Design isn’t about slapping on a flywheel or a little candy-colored plastic. It’s a global think tank, a freewheeling idea farm. In fact, Marzano isn’t even required to make money: His group charges market rates both internally (when “hired” by one of Philips’s units) and externally (its hundreds of outside clients have included Ford, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Securitas); in return, Philips asks only that the group break even. “I don’t have to deliver cash to the company,” Marzano says. “I have to deliver talent, knowledge, and ideas.”
Yet Marzano’s attempt to overhaul Philips through design is not just some right-brain fantasia. There is a method here, one that draws together the data-driven old guard, the truest of blue-sky thinkers, and everyone in between. Marzano has devoted his career to exploring meta-trends in society and has put that experience at the center of product development at Philips. So, where a company of this scale would typically rely on designers or engineers to generate ideas in-house and then force them into the market, at Philips the process starts out as macrofocused as possible.
Just how well Philips sees into our souls was driven home for me in a simulated living room I visited in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where Philips Design is headquartered. A team of researchers and designers had created the room just for me - or rather for “Simone”, the persona Philips created to represent people like me: a professional woman in her thirties, pregnant, somewhat comfortable with technology. There were three different “rooms” one for “Justin,” a tech-savvy 29-year-old with a huge music collection; another for “Alexandra”, a fiftysomething technophobe who loves hosting dinner parties; and Simone’s.
Settling into Simone’s chair, I clicked on the stripped-down remote control, which turned on a device that put the term “idiot box” to rest forever (or perhaps resurrected it, since even an idiot can handle it). There were virtually no buttons, and organized neatly on the screen was information selected just for “me”- my favorite shows, my music, photos, movies, even prenatal yoga instructions. Customizing the screen of the clean, white television required only a simple click and drag. On the table below lay a light wireless digital “tablet” a device that lets you carry the content with you from room to room, take notes, or share pictures. And if another family member were to pick up the tablet, a technology called BodyAura would sense the change and display the corresponding interface. If a friend came to visit, she could download her own pictures just by tapping the top of the tablet with her phone or camera.
For Simone, what counted was not the technology itself but quick access to the information she needed. Alexandra’s room, by contrast, struck a lower-tech note, with objects such as a table with changeable mood lighting. Justin’s had a vast array of gadgets to create visual displays and allow him to access his thousands of CDs, sorted by album cover and music type.
I knew the beautiful, cutting-edge stuff in Simone’s living room would make my life easier. But even though everything worked in Eindhoven (Philips makes working prototypes, rather than mock-ups or sketches, in the belief that everyone reacts more naturally to a real product), it’s still a long way from Wal-Mart. In fact, as with the New York event, it’s a very open question whether I’ll ever get my hands on any of these things. “It’s not that we have an idea of a product in our mind,” says Stefanie Un, senior research consultant.
A t a company such as Apple, integrating design into virtually every business decision seems a relatively straightforward task. The visual vocabulary is the same, the products all exist within a narrow functional spectrum, and the audience for them is well defined and understood. Philips, however, is a very different animal; a sprawling company with constituencies that include doctors buying complex medical equipment, music-loving teenagers, and urban planners ordering massive streetlights. Creating a consistency of design isn’t easy. And while Philips has shown major improvement - its stock has risen 47% over the past two years as it expanded into health-care equipment and sold off most of its ailing semiconductor business - it is hardly out of the woods. Its consumer-electronics business has fallen from an estimated 11% of the market in 1999 to 6.5%, where it has stalled. Most Wall Streeters, meanwhile, couldn’t care less about what’s happening at Marzano’s funky office inside a former lightbulb factory (in Europe, no less). “The things they’re done have been modestly clever,” says Geels, the analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “They’re doing a better job, but we haven’t had a big hit. They really have to get out products in the near-term.”
Philips’s design-based brainstorming has led to some real product successes in the past, even if they came out differently than originally conceived. One exercise Philips Design put on in 2000, called “Nebula,” looked at the experience of going to bed. It came up with a “Smart sheet” that sensed what was going on in the bedroom and projected appropriate ceiling lighting. If you were trying to sleep, you might see clouds and stars; if you were in for a night of unbridled passion, the lighting got sportier. Philips never developed its libidinous linens, but the idea of using lighting to help people relax resurfaced in 2003 in the company’s MRI and CT scanners, which project imagery on the ceiling to help people, particularly children, feel more at ease during their scans. In the first of six hospitals that have installed them, the need for sedation of nervous children has fallen by 30%. Now Philips is gaining share in both MRI and CT scanners, says Geels-and new uses of lighting are being explored throughout the company.
A similarly upbeat story is the Ambilight television, which originally stemmed from a 1994 design project called “Television at the Crossroads.” Research showed that people wanted a more immersive, relaxing experience with their TVs; design reported this to the technical research groups, which developed a way to project the colors on the screen beyond it, creating a more cinematic feel and reducing eye strain. Philips designers then came up with two ”wings” on the outside of the set to cast the light and lend it a sculptural element. Ambilight came to market in 2004 and already makes up 50% of Philips’s LCD-TV sales, taking its market share in the past two years from 7% to an estimated 12% to 14%.
As part of “Sense and Simplicity,” the design group has also been called in to rethink the way consumers experience each product. With the consumer-electronics division, the group created a common set of controls and displays that will eventually hold constant across some 80,000 products - a Herculean task in itself. Now it is working on a common look across all of its divisions. Even Philips’s packaging and operating instructions have been harmonized in an effort to present a front unified by design.
Philips is also trying to better track the impact of design at the company, an acknowledgment of the Vision of the Future default. Now, design shares its broad-based research at every early meeting to ensure that each proposed product is backed up by a real “validated proposition,” in Philips jargon. This means it’s based not on a hypothesis about what people might desire but rather on hard research that shows what people actually desire. Since March, the company has been tracking the percentage of R&D funds spent on such propositions; products that are now “mission critical,” meaning one to two years from the market, must be tied to research or they will not go forward. And thousands of managers have had to be retrained to understand these new metrics. The theory is that this clear linkage with the customer will lead to speedier product development and fewer products having to be abandoned or rethought in midstream. “The problem was not the number of ideas translated into products,” says Ragnetti, “but the fact that we did not really follow up on those concepts.?
Will Philips emerge as a shining example of an organization that fueled its renaissance with design, or as one that ultimately failed because it lost sight of its real objective? At a time when hundreds of companies are grappling with what it really means to use design as a true differentiator, Philips’s gamble is a case study for businesses everywhere.
And there are at least a few encouraging signs. Philips’s total sales from products introduced in the last year were 49% of total revenues in 2005, up from just 25% in 2003. In medical systems alone, an industry with long product cycles, some 70% of revenues came from products less than two years old - up 20 percentage points from the previous year. And despite disappointing LCD results in 2006’s second quarter, from a less-than-expected World Cup boost, growth in Philips’s medical systems and consumer electronics came in better than expected, at 9% and 10%, respectively.
Ragnetti resists being judged on the “basis of the next sensational iPod-like product.”But, tired as we may be of hearing about it, it was the iPod that overhauled Apple, turning it from an innovative niche player into a corporate icon. “You have to have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground,” says Marzano. “But the feet and the head have to be connected.” We couldn’t have said it better.
Jennifer Reingold (jreingold@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.
(C) 2006 MANSUETO VENTURES LLC, AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES.
LANGUAGE TIPS
squash 挤进
crisp 清新的，干净的
conglomerate大型联合企业
elixir 解决问题的灵丹妙药
iconic 标志性的
utopian 乌托邦式的
fantasia 幻想曲
brainiacs 聪明的想法
extravaganza 铺张华丽的表演
peril 巨大的危险
travail 苦活
unbridled 放纵的，不受控制的
immersive 身临其境的
breezy 愉快的，轻松自信的
jargon 行话，专业术语
renaissance 复兴