When I was a design manager, I always preached you could never go too far, only not far enough. By providing a range of concepts from close-in to further afield, you had a better chance of stretching your client to a more “radical” solution.

The nonobject Book is every designer’s dream. No clients. No customers. No limitations.

The principal objective of the book is to stimulate thought: What is an object? Why do we desire what we desire? Why has “functionality” been defined in such a historically narrow way? What is beauty? Nonobject is an attempt to free the imagination by disengaging it form the constraints of utility, economy and technology.

The site is worth a visit to see the preview of Tarati, a phone concept that highlights the magical empty space between telephone connections by removing keys and making dialing a function of passing your finger through the interface.

The title of the post comes from a Populuxe film from the 1950′s. My how far we have come …

The American Chamber of Commerce has published a strategic paper on creating an innovation and commercialisation base in Ireland. Entitled “Retuning the Growth Engine“, the paper sets out a blueprint for co-operation between the Irish government, Irish business and the base of US multinationals in this country in order to build an innovation base to underpin Ireland’s future sustainable growth. Last Monday the Irish Times provides a nice editorial from Jim O’ Hara, president of the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland, who believes the time is right for a new type of partnership between “Ireland Inc”, the Government, and the US multinational companies which have together and enjoyed such successful working relationships to date here in Ireland. Retuning the Growth Engine, sets out the American Chamber’s blueprint for this future success.

The aim is to create a “virtuous circle” built on positive action in five key areas: education, research, convergence, commercialisation and fiscal policy.This will not only help us retain the existing base of overseas companies located here but assist in attracting the next wave. US companies here are ready and willing to play their part with Government and all other stakeholders in meeting the challenges which face us and helping to create the conditions which will maintain Ireland’s economic success into the future.

This paper makes for very interesting reading in terms of America’s influence in our past economic success, problems with respect to eroding competitiveness, and how we can strategically position ourselves for future economic progress through sustaining important relationships with existing and new US companies willing to operate out of “Ireland Inc”.

It seems uncharitable to carp about such an extraordinary investment in the future of the country but I cannot help but look the proverbial gift horse of the NDP in the mouth.
In the race to invest in R&D it seems that we are forgetting one critical constituent; the user.

Much of the NDP builds on the foundations of the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, an important but dull document. In so doing it focuses quite rightly on the importance of R&D, but as we have observed before, investment in R&D is not sufficient in itself. You need to find ways of making sure that the investment is commercialised in the best way.

Both documents continue to create a technocracy that ignores the user, the human element. Not a short term problem, but it will have an impact on our competitiveness in the long run if we cannot turn world-class R&D into attractive, desirable products and services.

Charles Leadbeater, all-round innovation and creativity thinker, and James Wilsdon, Head of Science and Innovation at DEMOS, have spent the last two years researching The Atlas of Ideas project with colleagues at DEMOS. In a strole of collaborative genius, the work was part supported by Tom McCarthy and his team at the Irish Management Institute. The study looks at the reality behind the hyperbole of Asian innovation:

We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.

All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.

This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.

Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia’s share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.

Alongside new sources of competition, the rise of China, India and South Korea creates new opportunities for collaboration. We need to develop better mechanisms for orchestrating research across international networks, and for directing innovation towards shared goals of development and environmental sustainability.

The thinking is challenging and nicely non-simplistic. Yes, there is a threat, but no, it is not as we currently perceive it and we should grasp the opportunities it presents swiftly and with determination.

The Irish Management Institute hosted a conference with this work as a focal point. It was really pleasing to see Martin Cronin, Chief Executive of Forfas, give a really considered response to the ideas in the report but my overwhelming impression was that our insularity will mean that there will be precious little impact in Ireland

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William Gibson’s glorious observation that “the future is already here; it is just not evenly distributed” is one of the best arguments I know for high quality ethnographic research. Undertake enough observation and you will start to get user insights about what the future will be.

Nevertheless, it is always useful to get a helping hand when it comes to predicting the future. I am no great fan of “futurology”; it always seems either too simplistic (extend the trend) or too complex (study the chicken entrails).

Courtesy of those brilliant people at Experientia I was directed to a recent collection of papers called Sigma and Delta foresight scans that look ahead at developments over the next 50 years. The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation’s Horizon Scanning Centre, and complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The papers look forward at emerging trends in science, health and technology. As well as assessing the current state of thinking they also examine the possible implications for society. The sites are clunky but the insights are very sound.

via Experientia (and Louis) …

Though written primarily for a design audience, this collaboration between Cheskin and the AIGA is an excellent primer on how ethnography supports successful design.

Great design always connects with people. To truly connect, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. Designers need to understand the relationship between what they produce and the meaning their product has for others. Enter ethnography.

Download the report here

For the second year in a row, Booz Allen Hamilton finds “there are no significant statistical relationships between R&D spending and the primary measures of financial or corporate success: sales and earnings growth, gross and operating profitability, market capitalization growth, and total shareholder returns.”

However the study does report that “effective innovators excel at four key elements. The high-leverage innovators distinguish themselves not by the money they spend, but by building strong capabilities in the four principal elements of innovation: ideation, project selection, product development, and commercialization. High-leverage innovators listen closely to their customers across the entire innovation cycle. Companies such as Stryker and Black & Decker design their innovation strategy around a keen understanding of their end customers’ needs.”

How loud can you say DESIGN THINKING? Design thinking provides context for ideation and deep understanding of end user benefits improves your success at picking the right opportunities. Effective use of design during product development reduces risk & costs. This is the making of design innovation.

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