This is the first in a series of blogs about “Humble Masterpieces”*. The curator of architecture and design at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York City, Paola Antonelli, has written a fine book about 100 innovative products and designs of small, inconsequential products. Together they add up to this conclusion: “Design can act as a bridge between the abstraction of strategy and the complex details of the real world.” In this, Ms. Antonelli echoes the well-known principle of world-changing innovation: Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. And she affirms the brilliance of Univ. of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, in choosing industrial design as the paradigm for its management courses. Designing great businesses can leverage the same principles as designing great products. Simplicity.
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Bar Code

The invention of bar codes illustrates many of the key principles of winning innovation. And with the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to the inventors of CCD – charge coupled devices — bar codes are back in the news: The black stripes of the bar code are read by CCD’s.

In 1948, the head of a local Philadelphia food chain asked a dean at Drexel Institute of Technology to develop a system for automatically reading product information during checkout. A graduate student, Bernard Silver, overhead the conversation. He and his friend Norman Woodland tackled the problem. 

(First principle: Start with a real demonstrated proven need, not with a vague idea).  

They tried using ink that would glow under ultraviolet light. Dead end — didn’t work.

(Second principle: Technology is always an enabler; but it is never truly certain which technology will best answer the need and enable the solution. Fail often to succeed early).  

Then they used a series of concentric black circles, close to today’s bar codes. They applied for a patent on Oct. 20, 1949. But the first scanner did not emerge until 1974, when Marsh’s supermarket in Troy Ohio used a scanner with the UPC Universal Product Code.

(Why did it take so long? It was necessary for Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs to invent the CCD, so that the bar codes could be read rapidly and accurately; their discovery was made in 1969. Often, breakthrough ‘humble masterpieces’ are a portfolio of ideas and technologies, not just a single one). 

The first product scanned at the checkout counter was a ten pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It is exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, becoming the world’s first Immortal Chewing Gum.

(Humble masterpieces require patience. The barcode inventors waited for twenty years until crucial additional enabling technology (CCD) came along. Timing is everything — your invention may be far ahead of its time, or, perhaps, just enough ahead of its time. Engineers at GE Ultrasound invented a PC-based ultrasound machine for cardiology diagnostics. At the time the PC was not nearly powerful enough for this; but the engineers knew that in two years it might be. They designed to a ‘future trajectory’ of the PC, rather than today’s existing technology. Most humble masterpieces do this.)   

* Paola Antonelli, Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design. Harper Collins: 2005.