Category Archives: design

Posted on

How Can We Break Out of Our Thinking Ruts?

by

Nancy and I just got back from an excellent trip to Italy. We each had presentations at different events there, and we also had a chance to take some time to see the sights. One of the things that we got to see in Rome was the Colosseum. Here’s a shot of us while we […]

Posted on

For Most Researchers, “Practice” is Harder than “Deep”

by

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 […]

Posted on

Innovation – A New Match Between Need and Solution

by

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 […]

Posted on

Listening to customers…. really listening.

by

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 […]

Posted on

Innovating Meaning

by

Often when we someone asks us to describe a product or a service, we tell them about features. What does it do? How does it do it? This is a mistake. Products and services are not about features – they are about meaning, and they are about getting jobs done. Here’s an example – listen […]

Posted on

An Innovation Paradox

by

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% […]

Posted on

Constraints Make Us More Creative

by

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 […]

Posted on

Empathy-Driven Innovation

by

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 […]

Posted on

You Have to Break Connections to Get Your Ideas to Spread

by

Next time you get in a car to drive somewhere, take a minute to think about how many parts of the economy are connected to your trip. There are a whole lot. There all of the people and firms involved in building your car. They have taken ideas and designs that have evolved for over […]

Posted on

Designing Espresso Innovation

by

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 […]