M&M's

By: Prof. Shlomo Maital
TIM Academic Director

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 University 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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This is a piece from a series of blogs about "Humble Masterpieces".*    

Ever wonder how M&M's were invented?

Like many wonderful innovations, M&M's were not invented, but rather -- discovered, observed and perfected.

An American named Forrest Mars (the M&M company is still named Mars, and is the largest confectionary company in the world; the other "M" is his partner, Bruce Murrie) visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). He noticed that Spanish soldiers were eating chocolate covered with a hard sugary coating. The coating kept the chocolate from melting.  

When he came home to America, Mars developed a recipe for M&M's. When WWII broke out, he made and sold M&M's to the US Army and soldiers fighting in Europe consumed large amounts of them. After the war, Mars began to market M&M's to the public, in cardboard tubes. Later he shifted to the plastic packets we know today. 

M&M's has stuck fast to its original look and product over the decades. It added chocolate-coated peanuts in 1954. Since then, Mars has added incremental innovations, such as new colors -- pink, and blue.  

A great many of the 'humble masterpieces' were built on sharp-eyed observations by innovators, rather than do-it-from-scratch inventions. 

Innovators: Is your vision 20/20? Do you watch constantly for ways people use conventional products differently, to overcome constraints, to make their lives easier? Do you observe closely how people use your own products or services, in unusual ways? When the founders of Quicken (book-keeping software) saw that people were buying Quicken not to manage their checkbooks (its original intention) but actually to run their small businesses, they quickly moved to exploit this huge unexpected market. 

This is why time to market is so crucial for innovations. Get it out there fast! Then observe and learn.  Often this is the only way you will discover what the true market is for your product, and what its true Unique Value Proposition is, and for whom!

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