When Innovations Meet Institutions: Edison and the Design of the Electric Light

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors argue that a successful design strategy requires a purposeful selection of details, where some design details are grounded in things that are familiar, while others represent newness. Innovations are social, and adoption demands a consumer understanding of how to contextualize change. This is based on an understanding of an existing schema, or, quoting DiMaggio (1997), “knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information” (478, quoting 269). A new design brings with it change, and by definition, people that encounter the change have incomplete information on how to react to it. They compare it to an existing schema to see if there is a fit. Simply, “entrepreneurs must initially present the meaning and value of their innovations, including their novel features, in the language of existing institutions by giving them the appearance of familiar ideas” (478).

The authors argue that design is an arrangement process of the particular, and it “provides the means to mediate between innovations and institutions” (478). An institution is rigid, and a schema provides a vehicle to impact that rigidity through users or consumers. Because design deals with the particulars, those particulars are the way a schema is selected; “while people make sense of the new only in terms of the old, the design of the new shapes which sense they make by determining which aspects of the old are invoked” (479).

Robust design is offered by the authors as a term to indicate the locating of a design in the context of something familiar, and this is a process of design strategy: “an innovation’s design is robust when its arrangement of concrete details are immediately effective in locating the novel product or process within the familiar world, by invoking valued schemas and scripts” (479-480) while letting whatever is new appear in a valuable manner. The selection of this arrangement is strategic in the sense that it is a forward-thinking plan with intention. It is design-strategic as it manifests as details in the product or service itself. It is not abstracted to a process or way of thinking or acting in an organization: it shows up in what is designed.

The strategy requires schema selection not only be users but also by a comprehensive set of system stakeholders. When a design strategy is proposed in a stable field, all of those involved need to see and embrace that same existing-to-new schema. Institutions resist change (485) and require “cognitive models for interpreting situations, identifying valued ends and possible means, and initiating actions” (486). Design strategy, then, demands strategizing on the internal path towards the external delivery of the new design, and this requires providing those cognitive models to those who shape the institution.

The authors argue that key to Edison’s strategy of electric light in the home was introducing much of the innovation in an existing schema rather than attempting to forge an entirely new one; this suggests that other strategists “may similarly foster the adoption of their ideas by designing the concrete details of their embodiment to embed them within—rather than distinguish them from—the established social system they seek to change, creating a robust design” (488). Robust, in this sense, means that there is a sense of immediacy in triggering an existing schema for understanding, while still providing ways to activate elements of new schemas. The strategic design challenge is “in deciding which details to present as new, which to present as old, and which to hide from view altogether” (488). Skeuomorphism is offered as one technique for introducing something visibly distinct, where some elements “serve little objective function” but instead “serve as subjective signposts that signal one possible interpretation of and one way to use a new technology without precluding others” (491). This is the sphere of design, as “it is the job of architects and industrial designers to be good at understanding and manipulating these cultural symbols through the design of an innovation” (492).