I’ve been invited to participate in a symposium on Deep Practice, organised around the theme “Deepening knowledge and innovation through design practice.” The program includes this free talk by Professor Mark Burry on March 24th in Melbourne. To prepare for the event, we’ve been asked to write a brief piece on the topic. This is […]
Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr While revisiting some collected innovation readings, I recognized that it might be important to briefly emphasize again one “fundamental”: the distinction between needs and solutions. According to Christian Terwiesch, co-author of “Innovation Tournaments”, innovation is defined as “… a new match between a need and a solution so that value […]
One of the consistent messages from innovation surveys is that customers are a major source of innovation. Sometimes customers with more extreme uses for products will adapt products to suit their purpose and then the manufacturers find out what is happening and take these adaptations on board. If you’ve seen the videos of big wave […]
David Lazer included a really interesting demo in one of his talks at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. He was in a session talking about using the internet as a research resource, and there were about 100 people in the room. Lazer asked how many people there were under 30 years old – about 40% […]
For a couple of years I was the manager in charge of a self-managing marketing team (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that actually meant!). My first year with them, we ran the most successful campaign in the history of the organisation. There were many factors that came into play that led […]
Which of these two things is better designed? The Robert Graves Tea Kettle by Alessi? Or the little plastic thing that goes in the pizza box to keep the cheese from sticking to the box? And which of the two is more innovative? Does the Graves tea kettle heat water more effectively than other tea […]
Three things came together to make me think of this post: I regularly get feedback from my research interviews that people really enjoy them. That’s interesting, because I’m a lousy interviewer. After the last round, we got some feedback from our contact at the firm who said that he had received thank-you emails for setting […]
Here are some thoughts on ‘design-driven innovation’ versus ‘design as making things look cool’: Design-Driven Innovation – Nespresso from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. And here are some related points: We often think of design as making stuff look cool, but when we talk about design-driven innovation, we’re actually talking about creating new categories of goods […]
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -F. Scott Fitzgerald That’s the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book Innovation: The Missing Dimension. The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout […]
