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NancyLebovitz comments on The cup-holder paradox - Less Wrong
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I submit to you the iPhone. Developed by a company that had never built a cellphone or any other kind of phone for that matter before. Developed in to an industry that spent billions every year thrashing about trying (it thought) EVERYTHING to see how to build a phone that would exploit data in a way which would compel all those who saw it to want one if not actually buy it.
Apple didn't do anything that it wouldn't have been easier for a larger more expert cell phone maker (Nokia, Motorola leap to mind) to do. And the iPhone blasted it out of the park and completely defined the current generation of smart phones virtually immediately upon its becoming available.
Perhaps the rate for being correct is low, but the times it is correct are powerful.
The idea that automakers are not as "stupid" about some design assumptions as the collective entrenched cell phone makers prior to the iPhone were, how likely does that seem? My experience teaches me I would be shocked if it weren't at least as true with automakers as it is with cell phone companies. Automaking is an even harder field for a newbie to come in to, but they do manage it once in a while.
As far as I know, Steve Jobs was an extreme example of the CEO using themself as model for their customers. Any thoughts about how often that works out well?
In high tech with novelty perhaps we think these things must always be focus-grouped.
But wouldn't fashion be an example of an industry where the novelty is tested by trying to sell it from the runway, and the successful designers, who presumably are greatly outnumbered by unsuccessful designers, have the success of their predicting what people will want labeled as "having taste?"
Jobs was said to have taste, and in a hauntingly beautiful interview you can hear him complaining about Gates/Microsoft that the real problem with them is that they don't have taste. It could be that some industries are much easier to succeed in by taste alone where others really do defy taste and need market testing.
Perhaps in some industries, succeeding by having taste is rarer than in others. But I would be interested in any particular innovations which really were game changers which were introduced through a more systematic process and were not the result of a small number of designers taking a shot in the dark.
Its hard to account it exactly, but if we estimate that the iPhone is worth 1/10 of Apple's value, then it is/was a $40 billion idea. And this jumping ahead of companies that had built model after model of cell phone to generally great reviews (Nokia and Motorola spring to mind).
So counting numerically, it might be rare to the vanishing point. But weighted by impact, I'd say genius levels of taste are the part of innovation that is most interesting.
Of course this doesn't mean that Jaguar should have put more cupholders in their cars sooner than they did, but it also doesn't prove they shouldn't have. Considering Jaguar used Lucas Electrics with a legendary failure rate from doing so for decades, it seems likely to me that Jaguar and other manufacturers have always had a lot to gain by being better at challenging their old mistakes.
By the way, I remember admiring all the clever and useful places that Honda had put cupholders and other useful pockets and surfaces in the Odyssey around the time my daughter thought I was an idiot for buying a Mercedes. There absolutely were car companies who paid attention to things in design that other companies didn't, and those companies have higher market shares now than they did decades ago.