Etude de cas DYSON

Innovation Excellence

November 17, 2016

Innovation The Dyson Way

Written by The Leadership Network ®

Sir James Dyson is lauded as one of the greatest innovators of our time, but how was this enterprising entrepreneur able to build a company that continues to innovate and disrupt ‘The Dyson Way’?  

How it all began

Dyson’s beginnings have become the stuff of entrepreneurial legend. In 1974, after discovering his passion for industrial design, Dyson reinvented the wheelbarrow by replacing the front wheel with a large ball to improve both stability and maneuverability. He formed a business partnership to manufacture and market the “Ballbarrow,” which quickly became popular with gardeners. (Unfortunately, Dyson left the company in a disagreement over marketing and lost all rights to the design).

In 1978, Dyson noticed that the air filter in the Ballbarrow paint room was constantly clogging with dust and powder, so he designed and built an industrial cyclone tower which removed the particles using centrifugal force.

Later, when renovating his home in the Cotswolds, the inventor realised he could solve a common frustration with vacuum cleaners using the same technology. His first vacuum cleaner prototype sucked dust into a cone in the middle and spun it out to the edges of the canister using centrifugal force, from which it could then be removed.

Left: Sir James Dyson attaches a cardboard cyclone to his Hoover vacuum cleaner in the early 1980s. Right: A sketch of the cyclone tower prototype.

An Opportunity to Disrupt

Dyson spent eight years trying to license his dual cyclone concept to established vacuum cleaner manufacturers, including Hoover, but they all turned him down. The industry's response to Dyson's invention epitomised 'the way we do it around here' closed innovation. Dyson's technology negated the need for vacuum cleaner bags, a profitable market for the manufacturers, so the incumbents created a competitor when they could have gained an asset.  Eventually, a small Japanese company contacted Dyson after seeing a picture of his vacuum cleaner in a magazine. This led to the production of the G-Force vacuum cleaner, a luxury goods item for the Japanese market. With the money from this development, Dyson opened a research centre and manufacturing base in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.  

Innovation The Dyson Way  

Having trained at Art College, Dyson’s innovations began from a design perspective. First, he would propose a radical innovation on a product - for example, a cyclone instead of a bag – and create a prototype to test his ideas.

Then, through a process of discovery and experimentation, hundreds of small, incremental innovations are made to the product until it is a high-functioning and thoroughly tested item. Over time, this process has allowed the Dyson brand to develop a reputation for producing a well-considered and quality products, whilst becoming a disruptor.

Dyson employs radical and incremental innovation to produce well-considered, high quality, disruptive products.

It's all about the prototyping

Dyson famously took 15 years and 5,127 prototypes before creating a vacuum cleaner that worked perfectly and would become a household name. Lengthy R&D and prototyping phases continue to be a core part of the production cycle and innovation at Dyson.

Dyson’s engineers start the product design process with card and foam models, which they use to map out what needs to go into the product and roughly where the components should go. Then they build prototypes, which are often failures.

At Dyson, however, failure is seen as positive: it allows the engineers to use maths, science, and creative thinking to find solutions, build great products more quickly and identify other areas for innovation. In the prototyping phase, solving one problem often raises other questions for the engineers. (For example, adding a ball increased the weight of the vacuum cleaner, so engineers had to redesign the engine to make it lightweight and energy efficient.)

Dyson engineers also use maths and statistics for quality control. With any manufacturing process you get parts of different sizes, so the engineers use mathematic formulas to incorporate ‘intolerances’ to ensure that the parts will fit together every time. Later, they use statistics to test the quality of various products in a given sample to ensure all are above the minimum standard.  

Incremental innovations can still be disruptive

The idea to have a transparent case for the novel cyclonic vacuum cleaner is a case in point of how small incremental innovations can still be disruptive, whilst being surprisingly cheap and easy to implement.

Dyson thought that, far from feeling revolted when seeing their vacuum cleaners filled with dirt and grime, his customers would be thrilled to see how well their machines were working. The costs of transparency were minimal, but the perceived customer benefits were immense. Customer research affirmed that being able to see how well the Dyson cleaned was a valuable feature. In addition, transparency differentiated Dyson from its competition – a classic disruptively incremental innovation.  

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