4. Identifying Today's Trends for Tomorrow's Innovations

In light of the opportunities that are already here in the present, there is no reason to long for unavailable crystal ball forecasts of future prospects. The earliest work of innovation is to research existing trends and to understand them in the context of customers, because it is market dynamics that provide new opportunities that will be fulfilled by tomorrow's successful products.

New York, NY. Fredrick Marano put down Newsweek. The article on iPod's explosive sales growth had caught his eye because he very much enjoyed his iPod. For Fred, most products were extras—good appendages, but appendages nonetheless. The iPod was different, more central. Fred remembered his first Walkman. Big, bulky, heavy (at least in comparison to nowadays). A cassette tape player that jammed and jumped as he exercised. All the hassles of having to tape LP music.

It was clear to Fred why the iPod fared so well: It was the right product at the right time. The iPod is great. Stylish and easy to use. Any music he had or wanted to buy, he could download. He had just started using iTunes, a service to download individual songs for 99 cents. The last time he purchased an individual song was back in the days of vinyl in the 1980s when he used to go to CBGBs on the Lower East Side! It took Fred awhile to feel comfortable paying for something he could not hold. He can download a song, but it exists only on his iPod or computer. He cannot touch it. But he also is not stuck with a CD full of songs he does not want to listen to anyhow.

Most of the music Fred listens to on his iPod, he copied over from his collection of CDs. Much like he used to do with his cassettes, he chuckled to himself. Well, they had the idea right, but not the medium. Now all he has to do is pop in a CD, pick a track, and click a button. The rest is magic. As far as he could figure out, it really was magic. But it worked and worked well; so, like everything else today, he will go with the flow as long as he doesn't have to think about it.

Fred's teenage daughter, Liz, was always getting new music on her MP3. She kept telling Fred to go on Kazaa to get his music. She got most of her music that way. CDs are so overpriced, and who needs them cluttering up her room?

Liz and her friends believed it was their right. No bureaucratic corporate giant had the right to charge 20 bucks for a CD. Most mega bands had too much money already, and most independent groups who did not play the game made no money. It was her right to listen to what she wanted whether or not big business decided to mass-produce it.

Fred did not believe in piracy for himself, but he did not make a big deal of it to Liz. She was one of a million kids doing this. But Fred did like the idea of being able to change his music selection in minutes, and to store hundreds of songs on his tiny player.

Ah, yes, the smallness of current players provides an incredible benefit. Besides being cool-looking and so intuitive, the iPod is truly small. How does it store 10,000 songs? 10,000 songs would fill 750 CDs, which would take up a bookcase in his study! Instead, he can go running with it clipped to his belt, and the quality of sound is as good as it gets.

The iPod is not the only small player, for it is the MP3 technology that allows it to be small. One of Fred's friends at work has had an MP3 player for years now. But, then, that guy always had to have new gadgets first, even if he stayed up all night figuring them out. Fred always could tell what was coming down the road by talking with his friend, but he also waited until he knew he would not have hassles.

Lead Users and New Technology

MP3 technology was developed in the mid-1980s in Germany. All digital music, be it on CD or in MP3 format, is stored as 1s and 0s, or bits. A typical song is 32 megabytes (MB) of data, or 256,000,000 bits. A CD can store close to 800 MB, meaning 74 minutes in practice, or essentially an album. MP3 is a format that compresses the data by removing information that either the human ear cannot hear or that is much quieter than other sounds, making them hard to hear. This allows storage of almost the same quality music in one-tenth the number of bits. So a CD could now store 10 albums! The issue for portability is certainly size. MP3 players either work through “flash,” where songs are stored on a stationary medium, or through small hard drives, as with the iPod. Either way, there is limited storage space that, if each bit had to be stored, would make it impossible to store enough songs to keep the consumer happy in the small space of the player. MP3, and other compressed digital audio formats, such as the one iTunes uses, is a technological breakthrough that was a tipping point in making portable digital music desirable.

For any new technology, there is always a group of innovators who enjoy the cutting edge, the lead users who tolerate usability glitches in order to own the benefits of the new features. The purchases of lead users can serve as early indicators of trends, of changes in opportunities. But it is critical to keep in mind that lead user purchases point to new opportunities rather than to new products that will eventually hit big time; after all, the solutions that lead users tolerate do not necessarily “cross the chasm” into mainstream purchase.

The iPod, for instance, was not new technology. Since the late 1990s, there had been several MP3 players on the market. With a bit of research, innovators had been able to find MP3 players that met their functional needs—reliable MP3 music with a usable interface. For everybody else, the majority of people, it was an abstract technology for kids and nerds. As Geoffrey Moore¹ would say, there was a chasm or gap between the small group of early adopters and the large early majority market who liked new technology as long as it was a complete product. In this case, cultural and economic trends had readied the majority market for a complete product and had provided opportunity for the insightful company.

Apple: Trend Reader

This is where Apple came in. In the computer industry, Apple is known as the innovator. The rest follow. Apple has consistently provided models of where the industry needs to go. Most PC manufacturers have made commodities, computers that are exchangeable parts housed in generic dark gray boxes. No wonder companies such as Gateway struggle, fighting for razor-thin profit margins, for such is the natural way of commodities. For the first time in the history of computers, saturation at the new millennium brought a slump in sales, and PC manufacturers are hit hard, because thin margins require large sales volumes. Apple, on the other hand, understands that this is the experience economy, and it has maintained price premiums by focusing on the user experience. Apple has even moved its product beyond the experience economy to appeal to the nascent fantasy economy, which we describe in the next chapter. The line of iMacs are examples of high-styled products that rely on more than just the latest technology. Apple is a trend reader.

Of course, not all of Apple's products have been perfect. Trend reading does not offer the imaginary promise of a look into a crystal ball. Apple went wrong by maintaining a proprietary operating system, insisting on delivering a complete hardware and software product. Because it kept competitors out, fewer Macs were available to the market. Fewer Macs meant fewer programs being written for them. Then, in the mid-1990s, as the personal computer market flourished, Apple sought to join the other manufacturers in their Wal-Mart strategy—high volume and low costs. Apple fired innovator Steve Jobs and hired businessman John Scully. Scully focused on cutting costs and strayed from the company's innovation mantra. The resulting lackluster products and poor quality almost sent Apple into bankruptcy. The return of Steve Jobs brought Apple back on the path to innovation, and Apple flourishes again after retaking the smaller but premium market. In spite of these problems, Apple has consistently brought out insightful products that other companies end up imitating. Apple is an ideas leader, consistently better at anticipating trends because it reads the trends, and its ideas not only tap pools of lead users but cross the chasm to the mainstream.

Focusing back on MP3s, the technology existed, and lead users had it, but no product had grabbed the attention of the rest of the market. Companies that are adept at developing new products recognize such situations and have learned to use design as a means to translate barely useable technology into useful, useable, and desirable products. For instance, Palm Computing built the wildly successful PDA out of the ashes of Apple's Newton, Sharp's Wizard, Microsoft's WinPad, and others. Technology is part of the equation, but equally important is the user interaction, ergonomics, and lifestyle features. Palm's first PDA had a form factor far smaller than its predecessors and was truly portable and therefore usable. Apple's computers, for example, have technical capability, are easy to use, and also look great. They set the standard rather than follow. They are the first products in the computer industry that look so good that they become the focus of a room rather than the blemish.

The same is true for the iPod. The iPod itself defines the contemporary aesthetic for portability with its simple lines and white plastic shell and its intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface through its click wheel. At 6 ounces, it is light and fits in your pocket. But Apple went further. As if the iPod weren't small enough, sleek enough, or beautiful enough, Apple introduced the iPod mini, which weighs less than 4 ounces, is significantly smaller, and comes in a variety of anodized aluminum finishes, and then Apple introduced the even smaller iPod shuffle.

All the uncertainty feared by the early majority is missing from this product. It is hip and cool, it is easy to use, it is affordable, and it is produced from a company that people trust. Apple invested in a great advertising campaign that communicates the positive experience in making the product a part of the individual by having the silhouette of an X- or Y-gen dancing to tunes with his or her iPod. In sum, it is the product that is taking the compressed digital audio format across the chasm.

So How Does One Read Trends?

Trends provide immense profit opportunities to those who read them and can leverage their power. Niall FitzGerald, of Unilever and Reuters fame, talked about trends being analogous to the ocean waves and companies as surfers, saying, “You can be the best surfer in the world. But if you sit with your surfboard on a flat ocean, you won't go very far.”² If the ocean had no waves, there would be no surfing. If the world were not dynamic, there would be no new opportunities to propel corporate growth. The companies that recognize the trends can be borne along on their energy.

As a first reaction to the idea of “trend reading,” many people assume that the task is to foretell the future. But the real task is to understand the present and the dynamics in the present tense and to use that to anticipate future successes. This approach is called “anticipatory design,” and it is used by cutting-edge, consistently innovative companies. In many cases, extrapolation to the future is straightforward after one understands the present. For instance, a well-known trend is the aging of the baby boomer generation. Once recognized in the present tense, some future implications are crystal clear, such as the increasing need for medical devices and health-care products.

As an aid to identifying and understanding trends, we use a framework of three broad areas: social, economic, and technological. The idea is that these three main categories are a dynamic window into what the market has and what it wants. In other words, it helps you see where there are gaps between what products are on the market and where there are opportunities to introduce new products. We call these product opportunity gaps.

The social factor looks at a market's cultural, lifestyle, and political aspects. The economic factor focuses on a market's buying power and buying focus. The technological factor summarizes advances in new uses for technology within a niche area. The social, economic, and technological (SET) factors summarize a given, often narrow, market segment or focus. They are dynamic and can be driven by or lagged by any one of the factors. The goal is for any company to constantly read these factors and look for opportunities to create new products. The power behind the factors is that they are constantly changing. The best companies read these factors in the present tense and react to changes as they occur.

Not all changes can be easily accommodated. Not all present wonderful opportunities that can be leveraged by all. Consider the catastrophe of 9/11, which adversely affected international travel but boosted local travel industries in the United States such as snowmobiling. Or consider Ford and Firestone after the Explorer tire explosions, an adverse trend for them. Ford was one of the prime auto companies to be followed by all the rest of the industry until this tragedy. The system could not react quickly enough to the tire problem, and Ford's position in the market declined. This was only part of the problem. The economy had burst, and Ford had invested many resources in the purchase of companies under former CEO Jac Nassar. But clearly, the bad press and concern for safety in a vehicle that was supposed to be safer than the rest led to mistrust of the company and a decline in Explorer sales. The good news for the Ford system is that the impact was temporary. The system had enough robustness to slowly recover and regain market share.

But even the recognition that not all trends are helpful to all industries does not belie the argument that companies succeed by a keen understanding of their competitive marketplace. Exceptionally innovative companies are helped or hurt by good luck or bad luck, but at the same time, they provide consistent insights that provide a constant stream of revenues during good and bad economic times.

Companies such as Apple that can consistently introduce great products have learned to read those trends and are leaders of industry. Often, the products of tomorrow emerge from trends; at times, they create the trends.

Products Impacting Trends

Thinking back to trends as ocean waves and companies as surfers, an aspect of the analogy is interestingly incomplete. Although surfers enjoy the dynamic thrill of the waves, they do not reorient the waves themselves. Their position is changed by the waves, but their little surfboards do not change the direction of the ocean's temperamental flow. However, products do impact trends at the same time that trends impact products. The iPod as a product and MP3 as a technology are both reacting to and setting trends and expectations. MP3 technology allows consumers far more flexibility and demand in music than ever before. People download only the songs they want. The need for physical product gives way to choice and variety. For those who download complete CDs, there are Web sites from which the CD cover can be printed. But for many, the album cover is no longer needed or desired. The social aspects of sharing move to a new level with international participation in shareware sites.

Even before MP3s were developed, music and entertainment delivery systems were continuing the drive toward miniaturization. Smaller is better, and the inconvenience of needing any physical device is compensated for with the iPod through another Apple trend-setting aesthetic and lifestyle statement. For the early adopters, what is next is MP3 in every product that is a part of their life. Even cars today offer MP3 technology. The logistical problems and inconvenience of downloading music to the car stereo is still a roadblock to cross the chasm. But it will happen, and soon MP3 and downloaded music will be the norm.

The iPod holds more music than most people own and organizes it far better than most people organize their CD collection. The concept of portability has implications for producers of environments where people listen to music. Already BMW includes a connection for iPods within some cutting-edge-performance vehicles; customers can take their entire music collection into their car, play it over 10 speakers, and then take it with them when they leave. Also, high-quality speaker systems with an iPod docking station are available for the home and office, effectively replacing the traditional stereo system.

Never before has a music technology been driven by the consumer instead of the recording industry. Kazaa and Limewire are, today, replacements for the original Napster. Shareware software allows each participant to download music from the hard disks of others on the system and to make their music available to others in the same way. The desire and ability to access any music at any time immediately is an expectation of the Y generation today. It is also an illegal exchange format that, through the power and benefits of the Internet, is difficult at best to track down and stop. The original understanding that an individual can copy for himself or herself purchased music has been pushed to a new dimension. Of course, people used to make copies of their albums for their friends. But one, two, or even the occasional hundred copies were noise in the music industry's sales and profits. Today, in theory, one sale of one CD can be distributed to everyone in the world. All they need is Kazaa and someone to fork over $19.95 for the first copy to put online. Although many who use these shareware programs leave the music on their computer or MP3 player, it can easily be copied onto a CD with any burner, creating a perfect copy of an album for anyone who desires it.

The music industry did not push the technology to new formats; instead, the industry has fought the new platform tooth and nail. Lawsuits and arrests to keep shareware sites off the Internet, or at least people off those sites, show the fear the industry rightly feels. For those isolationists who fear the impact China will have on our economy, the answer is that it is reality; learn to work with China rather than fight it. The same is true here. The Internet and compact digital audio technology have changed the business model for the recording industry. Instead of fighting it, the industry must look to new ways to earn the consumer's business—something it has never had to face. Instead of overpricing CDs, companies must look to provide added features to those who buy their product. They must demonstrate in their product the expected morals that people demand so that honesty of purchasing a product wins out over the piracy of Kazaa.

The impact on all of this for the Y and X generations is the demand for more. What they want. When they want it. Now. And free! The reality of the MP3 concept has reinforced the need and demand for immediate gratification.

For the long term, the implication for the music industry is to revisit what it means to be part of the emerging fantasy economy. The industry will produce more singles more often and fewer albums. It will price them at what consumers believe is a reasonable cost. It will support smaller artists. It will recognize that independent record companies have a legitimate business and place in the industry—that, like the MP3 players, bigger is not better. For the consumer as well, the quality of new music will improve. People will have the ability to preview for free anything they would consider buying. The music companies will have to provide a positive enough experience through quality sound and production to earn the purchase of that song. Trust will drive the relationship between the industry and the consumer.

For the majority of people who will pay for the service of downloading music, the virtual stores to purchase the music will become commodities. Services like iTunes will become the Wal-Mart of music everywhere on the Internet (and Wal-Mart now has a music download service). Opportunities will emerge for high-value services that provide more than just access to the music. These services will offer suggestions for music that meet an individual's tastes and will learn what a person likes and dislikes. They will offer virtual and possibly physical social experiences that encourage use of their service. They will provide access to quality entertainment-delivery systems far beyond the transfer of songs to MP3 players.

On a broader scale, the impact of compressed digital audio goes beyond music and entertainment. Businesses need to have accelerated product introductions with more rapid time-to-market development processes. Mass customization will become the norm, where consumers will choose what features they want in a product and what color and style it will be. Nokia was an early proponent of mass customization in what is called “postponement.” Consumers not only choose the style phone they want, they can also choose from 50 or more faceplates that allow them to express who they are. Nokia can design and manufacture those faceplates at the last minute to have the most up-to-date style, “postponing” the design of that part. In the future, people will create their own expression in almost every major product they purchase.

Personalization, immediate gratification, and immediate accessibility of the digital music realm spills out into the rest of life; it is part of the future of product development. Companies are constantly developing or seeking out technology to help them produce more, faster, cheaper, and smaller with higher differentiation. This is a global trend. There are others.

In Reading Trends, It Is All About People

There are a host of trends to consider at the outset of product development, forcing those considering trends to identify which are the most relevant to the task at hand. One way to help do so is to frame the trends in the context of the product users or other product stakeholders. For the rest of this chapter, we use Herman Miller's Mirra chair as an example of how trends can be identified and presented in the context of a person, a representative of a key customer type, Tom.

Tom had become an expert on chairs. Not because he was interested in fashion trends in the furniture industry, but simply because, at the age of 50, he was suffering from severe back problems. Like many aging baby boomers, Tom was facing an illness that had evolved over the past decade. The doctor called it a life-limiting illness, but Tom had no time for limitations.

After the proper diagnosis was made, that his back problem was a form of arthritis, the challenge was how to thrive in spite of a disability that affects not only every moment of your waking life but also your sleep. Office seating, more accurately called task seating, is a major challenge to back comfort. Tom started looking into the different types of chairs available to him at work and found that none of them were comfortable, especially over time. He had been able to sample a few, but each time, he ended up using the money-back guarantee. His car seat was better than most seats he sat in at home or at work, and he could not figure out why no one could make a chair as comfortable as his car seat. His wife stumbled on a catalog at a friend's house, the friend with all the “designer” furniture. Not that her friend's furniture was any more comfortable than his own; it was a style thing. Even so, he browsed the catalog, Design Within Reach (DWR), finding chairs that never appeared in the local Office Depot inventory. One in particular, called the Aeron chair, interested him because he had seen that chair become popular in high-flying dot-coms. What caught his attention was that the Aeron was classified as ergonomic. He had thought the Aeron was only a status symbol, one heavily sought out by start-ups that wanted the appearance of stability, not that it was a chair to alleviate back and shoulder pain. The names of the guys who designed it, Chadwick and Stumpf, were in the catalog, and so was a reference to Herman Miller, the company that manufactured the chair. Intrigued, he looked the company up on the Web.

The Aeron chair was there with a slew of other chairs. All of Herman Miller's chairs had good ergonomics, which meant they were alternatives to his car seat. The big new chair was not the Aeron, but the Mirra chair. He had seen the chair in the DWR catalog, but it carried more intrigue on the Herman Miller Web site. Herman Miller presented the chair primarily as an ergonomic solution, with “total back support,” a result of four years of research and development. When he looked back at the DWR catalog, the chair was surprisingly inexpensive, priced less than the Aeron and less than most competitors' task chairs. The next day at work, Tom filled out a work order for a Mirra chair, taking a walk on the wild side and getting it in lime green.

After sitting on the chair for a week, he had much less pain, could work longer, and could concentrate better. Sure, the chair cost almost twice as much as the chairs the company normally provided, but he was more than twice as productive. He figured he had actually made up the difference in cost in the first week alone. He had actually saved the company a fortune in terms of better quality work time at the office. Now everyone asks him about his chair—after all, it is hard to ignore the lime green—and he has evolved into being the company advocate for comfortable seating. He even eventually got his purchasing agent to start ordering directly from Herman Miller, saving some money to obtain not just ergonomics but looks. For him, the comfort was the best thing, but he also relished the fact that the chair is a conversation piece and is the best-looking chair in the office. The youngest office workers love how it looks, and the oldest workers just feel better the minute they sit down.

Over time, as Tom continued to research ergonomics and furniture design, trying to help the company achieve not just physical comfort but visual appeal as well, he found new insights into innovations and evolving objectives in the furniture design industry. For instance, he became familiar with the idea of universal design, that a number of companies are trying to design products that are universally acceptable, or at least they are careful to explain why their product is not intended for any particular group's use if that is the case. When you order a prescription, you often get two types of tops. One is child-proof, whereas the other is actually easy to open. Neither top is universal. If you have young children, you need a child-proof lid; if you are older and have limited hand strength, you want an easy-opening lid. Possibly, some company or someone will find a way to have one lid, a universal top that achieves both objectives. But the Mirra was different. It was a chair for everyone; it was a universal design like that universal top.

Tom is one of many office workers at all levels dealing with back and repetitive stress injuries. There are now experts in ergonomics, sometimes called human-factor experts, who can design a work environment to minimize the impact of long-term task seating in the workplace. The chairs designed by the best office furniture companies are now being made available to consumers, just like the best industrial-grade butcher knives have begun to appear in consumer kitchen catalogs. As many people age, they find they need a host of new products to help them stay active and fully functional, where “fully functional” to them means that their bodies will continue to perform like 30-year-old bodies instead of 50-year-old ones. They have disposable income and are happy to part with it if it pays for products that deliver. They have no time or patience for inferior substitutes.

The Toms of the world are legion, now that baby boomers are feeling the aches of aging. While appealing to this market and the broader market of those generally seeking ergonomic support in the office environment, Herman Miller has the daunting task of continuing the success of the Aeron, one of the few office furniture pieces ever to attain the status of public sensation. By any measure, the Aeron chair has been one of the most successful office chairs in the past 50 years. Herman Miller was looking for the next big design. How do you improve on a breakthrough success and make it competitive in a tough economy? By understanding the trends laid out by Tom and converting that understanding into a product.

Designing the Mirra Chair

The Mirra chair, which debuted in the spring of 2003 at the Annual NeoCon International furniture show centered in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, was an instant hit, winning a number of awards. It is an excellent example of global design coordination: A furniture company based in Zealand, Michigan, blended a German design team and the concept of Nike shoes while holding to a new environmental standards system developed in conjunction with William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Herman Miller had made a major commitment to work with McDonough and Braungart to make their company an environmentally friendly manufacturer. Their buildings and manufacturing facilities were environmentally responsible, and now they had a new process for designing their chairs. The end result is the latest office seating sensation in the industry, the Mirra chair. The chair design not only added a new dimension ergonomically, it also used new technology and introduced a new visual design that may have the same impact on office seating trends as the Aeron did a decade ago. The German design group Studio 7.5, working with the new environmental standards team within Herman Miller, delivered a design that continues Herman Miller's tradition of brand excellence and innovation. The chair costs less than the Aeron and Herman Miller's competition. This new chair design is starting with the same success that its predecessor had a decade ago. The Aeron also won an award at the NeoCon show when it debuted and has been reviewed and discussed by design organizations and museums across the globe. It remains to be seen whether the public will embrace the Mirra and whether sales will follow a trajectory similar to that for the Aeron.

The breakthrough idea was based on the concept that a chair should be as comfortable as an athletic shoe. When giving the project to Studio 7.5, Herman Miller had no idea what the chair would look like, but it was convinced the idea was worth researching and developing. At the same time, during the early phases of the design of the new chair, Herman Miller developed a new environmental approach to help designers ensure that material and manufacturing decisions would be the best from an environmental standpoint and that products would be designed for disassembly, reuse, and recycling. A team of two Herman Miller specialists—Scott Charon in marketing and material purchasing, and chemical engineer Gabe Wing—worked with Studio 7.5 to make sure the design would be the best possible solution environmentally.

When you look you at the chair, the first thing you notice is the form of the back support and the unique pattern of holes in the hard-molded one-piece plastic shape. Just when the competition responded to the advanced breathable mesh of the Aeron, Herman Miller introduced a new solution. The Mirra achieves a new hybrid aesthetic by combining a solid polymer back with a set of organically shaped holes to look like a cross between a butterfly and a piece of Swiss cheese. This new ergonomic aesthetic provides a viable alternative to the Aeron. The shadows projected by the profile of the shape and holes add a light and unique new visual element to the landscape of a home or office. Herman Miller had to take a risk to see whether its customers would accept this new visual style and the idea of a solid one-piece back. Herman Miller has had an uncanny instinct as a company during the past 50 years, anticipating and setting new trends in material choice, product aesthetics, and ergonomics. Under the direction of George Nelson in the 1950s and 1960s, Herman Miller introduced one new classic after another for the home and then for office seating. The designers hired by the company introduced designs using bent plywood, fiberglass, and aluminum. The designs of Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eero Saarinen set a new standard for design in the office environment. The Mirra chair continues that tradition.

When you sit on the chair, the first thing you feel is the chair back conforming to your back and the woven seat supplying a firm support for your bottom. The adjustable arms are easy to set, and the material has a slight friction that prevents your elbow and forearm from slipping, keeping your arms positioned where you set them. The best thing is that, after awhile, you stop being aware of the chair. The feeling is just like a good pair of running shoes. The design team at Studio 7.5 actually consulted with Nike when designing the chair. The design team took the perspective that your back should receive the same support as the bottom of your foot. A shoe has to flex and respond to a number of three-dimensional movements of the foot, and so does a chair in a modern office environment. The challenge with a chair is the difficulty in making a size that fits everyone. Although the Aeron does accommodate size differences with three sizes of chairs, Studio 7.5 wanted to make one back and seat to fit the whole spectrum of people. By achieving this goal, it allowed Herman Miller to have to manufacture only a one-size chair, which cuts costs on tooling, manufacturing, and inventory. This feat was accomplished by choosing a plastic material for the back membrane that, enhanced by a series of organic-shaped holes, has just the right flex to conform to different-size backs. The support of the membrane is done via a Y-bar that went through several redesigns because it originally did not meet the design team's environmental standard. The original design was made from different materials. The drive to stay true to the environmental mission led to an innovation that improved the chair's comfort and, at the same time, reduced production costs. The end result is also a chair that is 96 percent recyclable.

In this case study, we roamed far and wide to identify trends. The Mirra chair is a product that is international in scope, universal and ergonomic in design, and thoughtful in terms of material, manufacture, assembly, disassembly, reuse, and recycle. It is an exciting, contemporary new look and feel for the office landscape and costs less than the leading chair it is designed to complement in the Herman Miller stable of seating options. Herman Miller is willing to share its new cradle-to-cradle environmental furniture design method with others. The company has more than enough innovation in ergonomics, aesthetics, engineering design, and manufacture, so it can be generous with its new environmental innovation. The key trends that started this discussion are aging and associated back problems, and relevant trends ended far beyond those boundaries, touching on aspects of life relevant to every country in the world.

The art of reading trends can be learned by anyone intimately involved in developing new products. You need to learn to read the dynamic social, economic, and technological factors. Based on those factors and changes in them, what are the probable directions for new needs, wants, and desires? From those directions emerge multiple opportunities for new products. The iPod and the Mirra chair each emerged from an insightful but straightforward understanding of contemporary trends. All the innovations discussed throughout this book similarly emerged from an educated understanding of yesterday's trends.