The 70^th anniversary of the start of the Blitz might not be the best day to reflect on the benefits of “creative destruction” (a concept coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter). However, its spectre certainly drifted over the opening session at last week’s dConstruct conference.

As Schumpeter reminded us, sometimes you need to destroy in order to create – a point frequently made in discussions of innovation. And it was the innovation imperative that was the topic of Friday’s first speaker, Marty Neumeier.

If you’re helping your clients to innovate, you’re also helping them to fulfil their mission – developing new (and better) products and services – and standing out from the crowd. In a world with so much competition for attention (and resources), being different – and valuable – is the key to survival, Marty noted. This may well mean rethinking the whole nature of certain products and services and how they’re delivered.

This is hardly new, of course. Marty’s key point was that innovation success is inextricably bound up with design. The principles of design, he argued – thinking through what users want, and giving them a product or service that meets their needs while also being appealing and easy to use – needs to underpin the whole innovation process.

Alas, as Marty lamented, many organisations (or, rather, certain managers within them), often lack the ability – and inclination – to reflect on problems and opportunities. The result? A headlong rush into change (or product/service development) that fails to think through the experience and utility that the customer would value.

Good design and innovation is not just about giving the customer a good experience, in the sense of a user-friendly interface. It’s also about thinking through what counts as value and looking at how this is generated. For the organisation, this may mean challenging existing ways of doing things, and in some cases demand a redesign of structures and working processes, as well as the technologies that underpin them.

The challenge, as always, is striking the right balance. For a start, it’s about maintaining the input and goodwill of employees, while simultaneously asking them to do things differently. But it also involves putting out new products and services that may seem odd or uncomfortable at first, but which provide greater functionality, convenience and productivity once users have got used to them.

Effective innovation, Marty concluded, is about doing things that are good (in the customers’ eyes) while also being different (sometimes radically).

A broader approach to design is essential here. This means looking beyond the product or service, rethinking the systems that create it while also supporting people along the process of change.

What connects Abba, modern web design and the English seaside?

The answer, of course, is the annual dConstruct conference, held on the first Friday in September at the Brighton Dome. Which is also the venue where Abba stormed the Eurovision song contest with ‘Waterloo’ (more trivia below).

This one-day event has become a staple for us in recent years. Yes it’s a bit geeky (few other occasions will see so many smart-phones gathered in one place), but it’s also a chance to see where web technology and design are heading.

Riding the new media wave, and developing services and features that respond to the latest thinking and possibilities, is a bit tricky if your heads are always over a keyboard or round a table with clients. Sometimes you just have to get away from it all, take in the sea air and just imagine how things could be.

In doing this our creativity might be aided by a bit more improvisation. This was the theme of one speaker, Hannah Donovan – an accomplished cellist as well as web designer, who introduced her talk (or was it ‘set’) by joining two other musicians to do some jamming of her own.

The analogy is intuitive but also instructive. As in music, improvisation can help designers to creatively explore ideas and emotions without being constrained by a preconceived plan, score or wireframe.

But this does require a structure and framework. As in music, you need a holistic vision of what you’re trying to achieve, but also the freedom to explore ways of expressing or fulfilling this.

It’s also important to get the right blend of roles. The ensemble, or creative team, needs a balance of skills and tools/instruments that are consistent with the product that is under construction.

Of course, there are methodologies that make some of these points. Rapid Application Development, for instance, is focused on producing an environment where programmers/developers can build up and test pockets of functionality without having the final output detailed in advance.

What I liked about Hannah’s argument, though, is the call for frameworks that also allow the creative juices to flow; to let the designers bounce ideas off one another and remember that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - and not always best set out in advance to the last bar or style sheet.

Over the next few days we’ll be providing further reflections on what was discussed last Friday. For now, here are some more bits of music trivia, which perhaps are now causes of national embarrassment; but first some questions:

1. Given the UK didn’t win in 73, why was the 1974 Eurovision song contest in Brighton at all?

2. How did the Swedish orchestra conductor decide to attire himself for Abba’s song?

3. Which British group provided the interval entertainment while the votes were counted?

Answers:

1. Having won the previous two years, Luxembourg decided not to host again. The BBC offered to step in and chose the Brighton Dome as the venue

2. The poor chap rather lamely dressed as Napoleon (well, he wasn’t to know this would be a moment in history, nor that YouTube would come along one day)

3. I’m afraid it was The Wombles. Good fun if you’re 8 years old (as I was), but was that really the best way we could have projected our musical prowess to the world?