I’m happy to say that I’m now writing a column for BusinessWeek Online
Here’s my debut: Saturn’s Rust-Proof Brand
Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez
Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness
The Brill Luxus 38 lawn mower
Tom Kelley Blogging about Innovation
My colleague Tom Kelley is writing about innovation this week over at Fast Company Now.
You can hear a podcast of on interview Tom did on NPR about his new book titled The Ten Faces of Innovation. If you’re at all interested in becoming a better innovator, the podcast is 45 minutes very well spent. The book is worth your while, too!
Innovators All: TED Prize Winners
The new TEDBLOG has a nice overview of each of the TED Prize winners. They’re as amazing as last year’s group, and just as humbling, too:
Time and Design
Time and design — what happens to your offering as it lives in the world? How can you design with that in mind? That might mean optimizing for beausage, or perhaps recognizing that the dynamic experience of your offering — as exemplified by the Rivendell SpeedBlend bike tire — can be so much more interesting than that provided by a static object.
And then there’s the Kumho Ecsta MX-C automobile tire, which puts an entirely new spin on tire smoke. When spun faster than the corresponding groundspeed of the car they’re attached to, tires burn. Burning rubber emits lots of smoke, generally of a bluish-white variety.
Kumho’s innovation was to recognize that, as with SpeedBlend, the experience of a tire in motion could be designed. In this case, that meant formulating the rubber compound such that it emits dense red smoke when burned. Here’s a photo and video of the tire in action from Automobile Magazine (I highly recommend the video — if Pontiac made GTO ads like this, their sales would be oh so much higher):
Please recognize that while I find the Kumho tire interesting from a "how in the world are we going to differentiate our product in this market?" point of view, I’m not an advocate of crazy driving. In fact, I hate it when people speed in the wrong context, such as all the cell-phone-porting-latte-quafing-fast-driving jerks who drive down my suburban street at ten over the posted speed limit.
But for the time and the place where a well-laid patch of rubber is just what the doctor ordered, why not make it a red one?
Introducing the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
This past Monday was a Good Day for the Stanford "d.school". Monday was the day it became the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Plattner’s incredibly generous and visionary donation means that all of us at the Institute can now really focus on our primary mission of training leaders who use design thinking to solve big challenges.
The Plattner Institute was rung in with a big celebration at Stanford’s Frost Amphiteater, attended by such luminaries as Plattner (shown above), Stanford President John Hennessy, Professor David Kelley, and Executive Director George Kembel. As Kelley remarked to the assembled crowd, "Bravo, Hasso!"
metacool Thought of the Day
"The guitar for me is a translation device. It’s not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn’t a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination – a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works."
– Pat Metheny
(Metheny’s take on jazz isn’t so far from how Ettore Sottsass thinks about design. If there’s such a thing as "jazz thinking", I think it shares many elements with "design thinking".)
A Welcome Voice in the World of Design Thinking
Bruce Nussbaum is blogging: NussbaumOnDesign
On Zanardi and Innovation
Earlier this month, Alex Zanardi won the Italian Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a BMW.
Even if you don’t "get" auto racing, give me a chance to tell you why Zanardi is one of my personal heroes, and why he’s an important role model for innovators. Simply put, Zanardi, has the kind of singular genius that makes something very difficult look oh so easy. He is an incredible driver, very talented. During the 1990’s, from his come from behind win at Long Beach, to his audacious Corkscrew maneuver at Laguna Seca (in racing circles simple referred to as The Pass), Zanardi was the guy you knew would always go for it, would never ever – ever! – give up. In other word, Zanardi is a racer, a person intrinsically motivated to win.
He almost died in 2001. Zanardi’s recent Touring car crown is all the more remarkable because it was achieved by a man whose legs were amputated above the knee, by a man whose died several times in a helicopter on the way to the ER room after his horrible accident. Made all the more remarkable by the fact that, after regaining his health, his intrinsic motivation led him to figure out a control system for his racing BMW which uses his hands and his hip so effectively that he could not just be competitive, but be the most competitive in what is a very competitive racing series.
At the risk of trivializing Zanardi’s accomplishments, let me say this: innovation is a difficult pastime. Most of the time it’s not glamorous, fun videos about shopping carts not withstanding. You’re going to lose a lot of the time. Ideas get beat up mercilessly. Hard work gets flushed down the toilet. People don’t believe you can do it. And the real world has a way of providing harsh feedback on things that work very well in theory but not in practice. If you’re serious about changing the world, innovation is ultimately about doing, and ultimately, winning. Winning, as it turns out, is tough.
I think great innovators – winners – share a lot in common with great racers. I just want to be a great racer. That’s why Zanardi is my hero.
Venture Design, part 9
Now that’s a creative business model: Eternal Reefs