Predictable Magic | Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad

Predictable Magic presents a complete design process for making the “magic” happen—over and over again.

Companies invest fortunes on innovation and product strategy. But by some estimates, 80% of new products fail or underperform. Every year, though, a few rare products succeed brilliantly. Why? Their creators have seamlessly integrated corporate strategy with design. They don’t deliver utilitarian objects: They craft rewarding, empowering experiences. To outsiders, this looks like magic: incomprehensible and impossible to reproduce. But it isn’t. Predictable Magic presents a complete design process for making the “magic” happen—over and over again.

This book is well worth reading. Sawhney and RKS have a methodology that is intelligent and effective in identifying new innovative market opportunities.

What is intelligent about it? From a corporate point of view, companies are firstly interested in maximizing their opportunities in existing segments of a market because the inherent risks are lower when they do not have to make new markets, but can rather incrementally win existing ones.

However, that game has very limited returns and only a very few can play in it successfully.

What Sawhney demonstrates in Predictable Magic is a methodology and set of tools to help identify the gaps between exisiting concepts and known user requirements/personnas. This provides an incredible insight for those who are prepared to take the risks of developing new markets and reaping their just rewards from the higher risk, but ultimately more sustainable position they will create for themselves.

For more information or to find out where you can buy Predictable Magic, click here.

For a more in-depth review of the book, read Mark Dziersk's review in the 2011 Spring edition of Innovation.