Engineering News, November 14, 2005

November 14, 2005 Vol. 77, no. 12F


BIBLE FOR BUSINESS: “With globalization and offshoring, the only way for the West to stay competitive is to focus on innovation,” says Jonathan Cagan, ME alum, professor at Carnegie Mellon, and author of a new book. (Graphics provided by Jon Cagan)

ME alum co-authors book demystifying innovation and the process of early product design

You’re an engineer on a product design team. Your company is under intense pressure from foreign competition. Management asks you to come up with a Hail Mary product, something to push the company ahead. You must innovate. How to start?

You could rub a lucky rabbit’s foot and wait for ideas to come. But you’re an engineer. You want a plan for this elusive thing called innovation. A good place to start is ME alum Jonathan Cagan’s new book, The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products. Cagan and co-authors Craig Vogel and Peter Boatwright give tools, strategies, and a methodology for early product design. The three authors offer plenty of real-world examples showing how engineers and designers used these processes to come up with innovative products.

“A large number of new products fail,” says Cagan (Ph.D.’90 ME). “We can’t guarantee success, but we’ve shown that if you follow a good process, you increase your chances of
success. Innovation is the result of hard work.”

Cagan is an ME professor at Carnegie Mellon, focusing on early design processes. Much of the content for the book came from his teaching, research, consulting, and from starting his own company. Published in June, the book has already received warm praise. “It disaggregates the broad concept of ‘innovation’ into usable ideas and strategies that can be implemented,” writes Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor at Business Week. “I learned a great deal about innovation and design from it.”

Writing the book wasn’t easy, Cagan says. Each author drafted several chapters and shared them with the others for revisions. “There were a lot of arguments and late nights, but we tried to be an example of what we talked about in the book in terms of real integration between disciplines.” Cagan’s co-authors include a marketing professor and a design professor.

As a Ph.D. student studying under ME professor Alice Agogino, Cagan worked long hours on computational design but budgeted plenty of time for other things. He was president of Cal’s ballroom dance club and enjoyed Berkeley’s restaurants and coffee shops, SFMOMA, San Francisco, and the beaches. “It’s a really invigorating area to live in,” he says.

With increasing pressure on engineers to deliver the goods or turn in company key cards, Cagan has this advice for students: “You need to know engineering fundamentals but recognize that technology alone isn’t the answer. Take classes in art history, architecture, or business and read Fast Company or Business Week. All this will help you think in a broader context about how technology fits into rest of world.”

Vogel, C. M., J. Cagan and P. B. H. Boatwright, The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products, Wharton School Press/Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005.

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