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How different countries design products
The general public believes great inventions are the result of an individuals genius, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This concept seems embedded in most high-school science text-books. However, the longer I am in engineering, it seems great inventions are nothing more than an ability to satisfy a desire of society in an economical and timely manner.
For example, think of the internet, cup holders, and nuclear power. They are not the product of one person independently conceiving these ideas. They came about because society had a desire for them and engineering was able to satisfy the desire economically and timely. The key point is that it is society's desires that fund 99% of the world's great inventions. Of course 1% of the time, it can work work the other way around , such as the discovery of pennicillin by serendipity.
The top four industrial countries have unique philosophy's on good engineering design. If you plan to build a new product you can learn a lot by applying the best of each countries design philosophy's while avoiding their shortcomings. The four countries are Japan, Germany, England and USA. I will discuss the pros and cons of each countries approach to manufacturing .
Japan
Japan is known for reliability and consistency. They focus on mass producing simple designs with utmost care to accuracy in each step of the many processes. Nothing epitomizes Japanese design like a Toyota. The cars are fairly unimpressive with regards to performance, however, they excel in quality and reliability. When you buy a Toyota you can be assured it will last many hundreds of thousands of miles with regular inexpensive maintenance.
Japanese also focus on mass producing their designs. The larger the population of their vehicles, the more feedback they can incorporate from the field into making future products robust. The major drawback to Japanese designs is their lack of performance and high end features. Generally those customers who are very knowledgeable and experienced with a product have complex needs. Japanese designs do not cater to their needs well as it would involved sacrificing their commitment to quality and reliability. For this market , the Germans come in as described below.
Germany
Germans are known for their focus on precision and complexity. They love to make a design with complex features that cater to the needs of the most demanding customers. While Japanese go after the 80/20 rule, Germans follow the 99/1 rule. In other words Germans believe in satisfying the needs of the niche 1% of their demanding customers. This philosophy is great if you are such a demanding customer and know you need complexity. However most customers don't need the complexity for their day to day needs. As a results German engineering suffers from unreliable and expensive to maintain designs. Since they are riddled with so many features, the probability of the whole design failing due to one of it's features' failing is very high. Furthermore these complex features require someone experienced and possessing advanced technical knowledge to repair. So if one of these features breaks, it will be quite expensive to fix. The operating costs of a BMW are more than triple the costs of a similar sized Toyota car.
USA
The Americans have quite an unusual approach to engineering. The adage, 'When in doubt make it stout' summarizes it best. The Americans are blessed with abundant cheap resources. So they have no problem throwing as much iron, technical know-how, and test prototypes in order to come up with a working design. The common 'Muscle cars', i.e Chevy Camaro and Ford Mustang best reflect this.
In fact American engineers often have so much resources at their disposal that they like to make bold new designs that are significantly different than their current production designs. The result of this is products tend to be over designed and unreliable since they have no field history. The pros are the customer gets to try radically new products that may benefit them in ways they could never imagine.
England
The English have probably one of the most sensible approaches to engineering . They believe in just making incremental changes to existing , time-tested designs based on customer feedback. Since they do not have abundant resources like the Americans, they are forced to take a conservative approach similar to the Japanese.. The result is a very reliable and effective product . The negatives is the designs tend to be out dated and lacking in complex functionality.
As you can see, the four manufacturing giants have a lot to teach us about how to design good products. While there is a lot of generalization, the overall philosophy hold true in the design culture of each of the countries. The same principles carry over to whatever type of product you are designing. You can even apply the principles to software engineering .