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296 CHAPTER 8 • PRoduCT And sERviCE dEvEloPmEnT And oRgAnisATion
sections may be planned several weeks in advance and may even be printed well before
their publication. Similarly, regular sections such as television times and advertisements
are prepared several days before the newspaper is due to come out. On the day of publica-
tion, several stories may be vying for the front page. This is where flexibility is needed.
The more flexible is the news desk in taking in new news and deciding the layout and
priority of stories, the later the decision can be made and the more current the newspa-
per will be. Thus, in the development of any product or service, the more stable elements
can be designed (in terms of making decisions around their form) well in advance, with
their specification fixed early in the process. Other elements of the design can remain
fluid so as to incorporate the latest thinking and then fixed only at the last moment. 14

Incremental commitment
One method of retaining some flexibility in development processes is to avoid yes/no
decisions. Alternative and parallel options can be progressed in stages; so, for example,
an idea might be given approval to move to the next stage with no implied commit-
ment to develop that idea through to the end of the project. One often-quoted example
concerns the development of the Boeing 777. Unusually for this type of product, the
drawing that defined some parts had six or seven ‘release levels’. This means that rather
than confirming the final design of a part, it would be done in stages. So the design
may be given approval for purposes of purchasing test materials but not for purposes of
confirming tool design. This provided a more flexible way of delaying decisions until
the last minute without holding up the whole development process.

Example iKEA’s slow development process 15

Most companies are obsessed with reducing the time to market (TTM) of their design process.
Short TTM means lower development costs and more opportunities to hit the market with new
designs. Some automobile companies have reduced the design time for their products to less
than three years, while a new smartphone (a far more dynamic market) can be developed in
as little as six months. So why does IKEA, the most successful homeware retailer ever, take five
years to design its kitchens? Because, with the huge volumes that IKEA sells, development costs
are small compared with the savings that can result from product designs that bring down the
final price in their stores.
‘It’s five years of work into finding ways to engineer cost out of the system, to improve the functional-
ity’, IKEA’s new chief executive, Peter Agnefjäll, said of the company’s ‘Metod’ kitchen (which
means ‘method’ in English). Metod is a complex product: it has over 1,000 different compo-
nents; and the kitchen is a product of IKEA’s ‘democratic design’ process that ensures designs
that will work in homes anywhere in the world – an important consideration when you sell
about one million kitchens a year. Also, unlike some big-ticket purchases, consumer taste in
home furnishing does not shift rapidly. ‘We still hang paintings above the sofa and tend to have a TV
in the corner’, says IKEA’s creative director, Mia Lundström. But even if trends do not materialise
overnight, it is still important to spot emerging consumer preferences. A research team visits
thousands of homes annually and compiles reports that look as far as a decade into the future.
So without the imperative to change its product designs too frequently, product cost becomes a
key driver. Rather than buy prefabricated components from outside sources, IKEA will develop
its own if it keeps costs down. For example, IKEA’s designers created their own LED lighting
system to light one of the kitchen drawers.

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