Friday, May 23, 2008

Johnson & Johnson's innovation about its design


I read about changes in J&J's design process. The innovation brought from Chris Hacker, the design director of J&J. He was hired 2005 and did many successful works. When he firstly came to J&J, he found that J&J don't have any independent design process. He insisted that they have to create something for their own design and he changed the design process completely. Now, J&J's revenue is tripled compared to that of 2005. Amazingly, the costs of design declined and the quality of design improved. But the tasks were not easy. At first, they experienced many obstacles. Originally, J&J's design is done by outsourcing companies. Accordingly, the contractions between J&J and these companies were huge problems. Also, the management didn't like the change because the innovation was so costly at that time. But Chris persuaded them and achieved great results.
Then, what are the points of his success? He didn't waste resources in J&J. Even though J&J's old products looks bad and the contents are not different those of competitors, he tried to redesign the products and also reduced production costs by establishing stirct design process. Of course, it was very succesful. In the view of business, old products are just pains in the neck. Because the products don't have large market share and the growth potential power is very low. However, if we can derive something new from old one, we can achieve completely new results. Secondly, Chris knew the brand portfolio of J&J. Generally, design specialists focus only on his products, but he investigatied all of J&J's brands and tried to find out the core problems of J&J. If you don't know much about your company, you are doing wrong in your performance, even though you did your own work completely. You know the success of japanese companies. How they can achieve high revenues in America? It's because of the loyalty of employees. Japanese employees think the company as their lifelong place, and they did their full efforts to their company. I think the corporation culture of Korea is also a good one, but the real loyalty don't exist in the korean companies. If we need loyalty from employees, we have to innovate ourselves completely.
Chris also wanted to change the concept of sustainability. In current global world, one of the most positive words is 'sustainability'. All of the resources and advantages can be written as sustainable resources or sustainable advantage. And in the area of design, the words used as 'sustainable design'. Chris insisted that the sustainability is not a object of a company. Of course, sustainability can be a key to success, but it can be achieve in the process for results. In other words, the sustainable advantage or design can be achived if companies try to achive high performance in the market. His opinion is reasonable and we need to change our companies' concept of objectives. In korea, companies often insist that sustainability is very important. But they don't know how to achive it and instead they throw away their chance to achive these advantages. I think if we can realize these factors, we can improve greatly, and can dominate the market. We already dominate global market by innovative technology, but if we can achieve these innovative concepts, we can be a real great country.
Author: Mark Lamster
Title: Johnson & Johnson's Big Design Challenge
Date: May 21, 2008, 3:11PM EST
Page: 1
entry #11 20700067

No comments: