Every so often I witness a manufacturer release a flagship product and instantly feel a jolt of déjà vu. Recently, Dyson launched the PencilVac—a compact and highly maneuverable stick vacuum that felt eerily familiar. That’s because I’d worked on a similar concept earlier while working with a client who, ultimately, shelved it.
Tech blogs are starting to praise PencilVac’s compact form packed with useful features. It will probably win many awards. Once it makes it to the American market, it will probably fly off retailer shelves. And yet, I remember how close we once came to bringing something like it into the world.
What really stands out is Dyson’s ability to deliver on its brand promise of innovation while capitalizing on the social, economic, and technical (S.E.T.) factors of specific global markets. This product showcases R&D investment and cross pollination of technology from different product verticals. New features such as conical brush heads, dust separation and compression, compact motor, swappable batteries, and a connected app show they invested in new technologies making each sub system support the overall vision. The organization didn’t limit the product development teams with constraints from current supplier components or market data.
It’s frustrating but also validating because I knew we were on to something great. Because it reminds me great ideas often exist long before they’re ever realized. And in many cases, the challenge isn’t about creativity or a team’s capability. It’s about overcoming organizational barriers that quietly, and sometimes unintentionally, keep innovation stuck at the conceptual level. Sometimes the difference between flag ship products and red flags comes down to internal culture. Ask yourself: does your organization promote or inhibit innovation? Here are 4 common barriers to game changing innovation we’ve seen—and a few ways we overcome them.
Over the years, I’ve learned that innovation doesn’t fail in the early design phases; it often fails during decision making. Sometimes the culture of an organization is built around being a fast follower rather than an industry leader. The perceived risk of doing something new feels too high. So bold ideas are quietly passed over in favor of incremental improvements that can comfortably fill a product road map. Time and time again, Dyson has found success entering established markets with a flagship product causing competitors to quickly pivot and copy. History favors the bold.
In other organizations, the supply chain is the limiter. Manufacturers lock themselves into systems optimized for efficiency and repeatability, not flexibility or experimentation. Their partners—tooling vendors, materials suppliers, manufacturing engineers—may not be equipped or incentivized to explore anything outside the norm. The result? What could have been a truly differentiated product gets dialed back to something safer and easier to produce with readily available existing components.
Another barrier we see often is overreliance on predictive market analytics. Some internal product management teams lean so heavily on market data it causes them to overlook what users are actually saying or doing. They wait for market proof instead of pursuing by insight. But most of the time, breakthrough products come not from what the market is telling you today, but from anticipating or observing needs the market doesn’t know how to express yet.
And perhaps the most challenging of all—when leadership holds the innovation reins too tightly. In some organizations, decisions about product direction are made at the top, without fully engaging the expertise of the teams closest to the user or the problem. When leadership assumes they know better than the people they’ve hired, good ideas die quietly after they’re visualized—never challenged, never tested, never prototyped, never validated.
This is where our Product Design team at BOLTGROUP comes in. We don’t just design products, we design pathways through these barriers. Our team starts every engagement by understanding not only the problem the product needs to solve, but also the internal dynamics that could either support or sabotage innovation. We ask the tough questions early. We listen deeply—not just to users, but to engineers, marketers, researchers, sales, and executive leaders. And we bring empathy not only to users, but to our client partners who are trying to do brave work in complex manufacturing organizations.
We use prototyping not only as a design tool, but as a persuasion tool. We make ideas tangible early and often, because a proof-of-concept model speaks louder than a slide deck. We help build internal alignment by creating a shared vision that real users can see, touch, test, and rally around. We push for small bets and fast validation, so big ideas can take root without feeling like big risks.
When you see one of our client’s products on the shelf or in a user’s hand, you see the end result. What you don’t see is the behind-the-scenes work—advocating for ideas, obsessing over user feedback, reframing barriers, and helping internal champions build the case for something new. That’s the real work of industrial design in today’s world. And that’s what makes turning a sketch into a flagship product not only possible, but inevitable.