I try and try and try to avoid using Apple as an innovation exemplar. For one, big brand stories just aren’t relevant to small and medium sized enterprises. “How can I operate at that level? What does that have to do with me?” We strive to tell the stories of smaller organisations leveraging design to innovate and grow. And frankly, it’s a cop out to say the same rules are transferable. We continually paint a picture that this is for the big guy.

However, the words of Jonathan Ive, from a recent and rare public appearance beg repeating to organisations of any size:

Ive also had bad news for anyone looking to foster a design or innovation-driven culture within an enterprise that doesn’t at heart “get” it. Unless the disciplines are acknowledged and embraced as core values by every employee, they won’t gain traction. “We don’t have identity manuals reminding us of points of philosophy for why our company exists … I’m sure those things are very well meaning, but if you have to institutionalize stuff, you end up chasing your tail.” In other words, unless the commitment to innovation or design is authentic and heartfelt, rather than this month’s short-term strategy to cater to a hot trend, it will be nigh on impossible to build a true, innovation-led culture.

I’d rather focus resources on the organisations that are committed; and work together to make a tangible impact, than fill a hundred auditoriums to put on a good show about what design can do.

Read the BusinessWeek article.

Policy makers must find it hard to ignore the man who has made Dyson a household word and a pot of money in the process. This short and sweet interview with Jeff Randall, the Business Editor at Sky News, touches on all the usual themes of the importance of engineering and design within the economy as well as science and technology within schools. Between the lines there are some nice insights about prototyping and the importance of the user. You have to admire a man who recognises the issues and puts his money where his mouth is in creating a college to support design and engineering.

Photo credit: Amy Tiemann and The Laptop Club

Not only are they paper-thin, but infinitely customisable by the user and recyclable to boot. You can even make one yourself. Alright, they may not be commercially available (yet) but clearly are some of the most innovative computers around.

Amy Tiemann, creator of MojoMom.com and c|net contributor blogged about The Laptop Club, where 7-9 year-olds at a local school were creating paper laptops for play. From a research perspective, this is serious stuff and reminiscent of one of my favourite research exercises, Draw The Experience. Looking for insights, particularly from young children? Crack open a box of Crayola crayons and have them draw what they are thinking. We recently used this approach with children travelling through Ireland West Airport to understand what they liked, disliked and wished for in the perfect airport.

Be sure to check out this interview with Amy Tiemann, which includes a gallery of the laptop designs.

There are a number of nice nuggets in this interview of Scott Berkun on his book, The Myths of Innovation.

People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out.

Which leads me to believe that creativity can be taught. Some people may be more naturally gifted at those skills, but skills can be taught, and more importantly learned.

Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.

Again, our Innovation by Design programme puts user research right at the heart of the process. Real value is found by talking to the real experts. Your users. It is about applying a set of new habits, as well as opening your mind to new perspectives and approaches to work. I’ve seen the look on faces in our workshops that say, “You want me to do that with one of my customers? You must be crazy.” No, not crazy, just willing to try a new approach, possibly “fail early in order to succeed sooner” and gain some key insights from your users.

via How to Change the World

Threadless is a great success story of a business model built entirely on co-creation. The idea is fairly simple; users create a tee shirt design and the community votes on whether it should be produced. If your design is selected, you get paid. Co-creation is as close as you can get to involving your user in the design process. Allowing the community to decide whether a product is produced or not certainly lowers the risk of new product launches. Also consider the benefits of a global R&D department that only gets paid when they produce.

Guy Kawasaki posted this short interview with their Chief Creative Officer.

via Mass Customisation & Open Innovation News

If succesful innovation is determined by more completely meeting the needs of your users, customisation for a single consumer must be highly successful innovation. B. Joseph Pine II believes the Internet has made it possible for every company to provide customised products and services.

Any company in the world can reach any potential customer in the world with a digitized representation of what it has to offer, and can change that representation – and then the actual offering – to meet the needs of that individual customer.

How quickly will desktop fabrication and FabLabs become a reality, allowing individuals to produce small quantities of unique items. (Look at how blogging has democratised publishing.) Even without adopting mass customisation, I found Chris Hart’s concept of “customer sacrifice” applicable to anyone uncovering the needs of users.

Customer sacrifice is the gap between what a customer wants exactly and what he has to settle for today. As opposed to customer satisfaction, which relates to expectations, customer sacrifice looks at what each customer really and truly wants and needs. Companies need to uncover the few dimensions, or even just the one, solitary dimension of sacrifice that will yield the most value for their customers, and for them.

Read the interview
Fab@Home and RepRap

via Creative Generalist …

An interview with Jane Fulton Suri, Chief Creative Officer at IDEO. Jane discusses a number of things related to design innovation and expands the definition of user-centered design to the idea of the “empathic economy”.

This is no longer a very new idea; at least in progressive companies, it’s a fairly widely accepted and well-established approach to innovation. When I refer to “the empathic economy” I’m talking about a future possibility – about a huge opportunity for innovation in which a similar level of empathy and imagination might be applied to the many different kinds of people who populate the business ecology of a particular industry, not just customers/end-users/consumers. In an empathic economy the provider/supplier of goods and services would be keen to reach an empathic understanding not just of consumers, but also of many other people within the business network upon whom business success depends…

Read the interview