"For the longest time ideation was about throwing out
as many ideas as you can. We’ve realized pretty quickly it’s really not
about a bunch of ideas, it’s about really good strategy, alignment with
business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding…Then, the ideas are no longer
just about the product, they’re about new business models and how you
go to market, and what’s your supply chain like."
Category Archives: innovating
Public Progress Lists
I suppose a natural extension of the "public to-do list" concept we explored a while back on metacool would be something like a "public progress report". Assuming the to-do list was on the web and somewhat wiki-like, you’d be able to click-thru on any individual to-do list item to see its status. The progress report could take the form of a blog.
Once you were there, you could be part of making it happen. Offer some advice. Find out how to help. Cheer the effort on. Or just send some love.
A good example of a public progress report is Russell Davies’s nonentity fat club blog, which plays yin to the yang of his eggsbaconchipsandbeans blog. It’s been cool to track the progress of his entire getting in shape effort, and it makes me want to run (or walk) out and get a Nike+ setup. Especially with nifty data services available like Justdoing.it, which allows you to set up a RSS badge of your running data. For use on your public progress report, of course.
Zooming out to the big picture, I can think of many corporate innovation efforts which could benefit greatly from this kind of transparency. Not to keep the team members feeling like they’re under a microscope, of course, but to tie them to a larger community which could help them along. It’s tempting to think of progress measures solely as a way to evaluate performance; it’s much more interesting, optimistic, and useful to find a way to use them to improve performance as it happens.
Memorable Ads, Impossible Dreams, and Being Innovative
My colleague Paul Bennett of IDEO has written an insightful and delightful essay for BusinessWeek: Most Memorable Ads of 2006
Here’s an excerpt from Paul:
We’re clearly at an inflection point. I’m not even a traditional ad-guy
and I’ve been asked to write this, so what does that say? We’re all
firmly in this together—marketers, designers, clients, agencies,
researchers, ethnographers, art directors and writers, all being sniped
at, out-thought, and remixed by consumers younger than our own kids.
Hard as it is to say, in most cases, they’re as good, if not better, at
this stuff than we are. Now, together, we must figure out where to go
from here. But before we get in to a whole spiral of circle drumming,
chest-beating and problem-solving, let’s take a quick tour of some of
the highlights of the last year.But first a warm-up of sorts: Honda’s Impossible Dream spot—which aired in December, 2005, and therefore doesn’t make the official 2006 list—deserves a mention for Not Being Afraid of the Joy of Great Storytelling,
for expansive locations, great nostalgic music, excellent casting, and
a fantastically simple premise. In it, a guy emerges from his trailer,
mounts a scooter, and then seamlessly moves from product to product,
stirring emotions, sweeping us along in his wake, and bringing a tear
to many an eye.
I’ve written before about Honda’s Impossible Dream ad in the context of what I like to call tangible brand mantras (you can see the ad by following that hyperlink). It’s an ad I can watch over and over (and I have – maybe 50 times; not as many viewings for me as the original Star Wars, but getting there). And it’s one which is authentic and true even though it’s so outrageous and funny. Honda is a company where the CEO knows whereof he speaks. It’s a company as capable of pulling off revolutionary innovation outcomes as it is innovating on a routine basis. It’s a group of people not afraid of thinking weird but right. And, above all, it’s a company which solves for happiness because, when one gets down to the bottom of it all, that’s what drives innovation.
Watch disruption as it takes shape
Check out this update on The Venice Project, which promises to be to the traditional business models behind television as Skype is to your local phone company.
New Economy Models and Old Bridges
A wise person helped me see today that the Golden Gate Bridge is an excellent example of HAAS (Hardware As A Service) which has been living right under our noses for decades. It’s a pay per use business model, and is certainly a lot more affordable than building your own bridge.
Sounds a lot like B2B plays in Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 to me.
It’s all about perceptions, isn’t it? I believe there are very few, if any, new business models under the sun. The challenge for us is to see clearly, to think creatively, and to apply what we already know to make things new things happen in interesting and effective ways.
What class would you want to be part of?
So, I’m starting the planning process for another Business + Design class at the Stanford d.school for Spring 2007.
My big question is: what kind of class would you want to be a part of?
One choice would be to teach Creating Infectious Action again. We learned a lot teaching it last year, both in terms of how to structure the class as well the content which was developed in the class by staff and students alike. It certainly caught people’s attention, as in here, and here, and here. So that’s one choice.
The other is to teach something new. I have some ideas about content and form but I’d like to hear what you have to say. What kind of a class would you want to take if you were a graduate student at Stanford interested in learning more about design thinking? Drop me an email, post a comment below, or (best of all), write something on your own blog and send a trackback back over here.
Roads to Innovation at Stanford
I’ll be part of a panel discussion at the Roads to Innovation conference at Stanford this coming weekend. All the panels are stocked with really interesting people. Given my penchant for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness, I’m a little disappointed that Mario Almondo from Ferrari won’t be joining my panel as was previously scheduled. But he just got one helluva promotion at work, so I can see why he’s not schlepping out to California for the conference.
Please shoot me an email if you’re going to be attending and would like to say hi.
2007 TEDPrize Winners
Be sure to watch it all the way through to the end…
Proving vs. Measuring
Earlier this week I gave a talk a the Design Management Institute’s yearly International Design Conference in beautiful Manchester Village, Vermont. I spoke on the topic of innovation metrics, and explored some of our latest thinking from the business design thinkers here at IDEO.
What was interesting to me was the split nature of the feedback I received from the crowd. I would say that most of the people resonated with my stated point of view that the innovation process can be made more predictable by thinking in a structured way about where you want to go and then using metrics and measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the design process going forward. A smaller minority of the people present felt that I hadn’t argued strongly enough along the lines of "Good Design = Good Business". I hadn’t expected that feedback.
In fact, I didn’t try to argue that equation at all. Not because I don’t think that good design outcomes are a key driver of organic growth, but because it’s not a provable point. Success on the market is a complex thing, and it’s a gross simplification to tie it back to what I would consider to be the somewhat myopic worldview of "Good Design", which is very much about a fetish for beautiful objects and less about creating good fit to broader webs of individual, social, and economic needs and benefits, which is the realm of design thinking. Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them. Instead, I believe that good design thinking can lead to a higher success rate when innovating, and that’s the link to good business outcomes. And that’s where employing metrics to gauge and guide the innovation process comes into play — they’re a way to inform and improve the context in which our design thinking occurs. It’s about measuring and aiding the process of value creation via design thinking, not proving that design can create value.
This Thursday: Sustainability Conference at Stanford
The d.school’s Clicks-n-Bricks class (part of the Design + Business movement at the d.school) is holding a mini conference on sustainability this coming Thursday. Here are the speakers:
- Debra Dunn, former HP Executive Vice-President who (among other things) led their sustainability efforts
- Bob Adams, who leads IDEO’s sustainability efforts
- Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart’s VP of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability
Here are the details:
What is Designing for Sustainability?
d.school Mini-Conference Fall 2006
3:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Hewlett 200
And though my marketing professors would shoot me for saying this, it’s really hard to beat the value of something which costs nothing. How can something this good be free? And it’s anything near as good as the mini conference we held last Spring for CIA, it’ll be really good.