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7 Ways To Disrupt Your Industry. Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your firm is going to cause it or fall victim to it.

7 Ways To Disrupt Your Industry

Disruption is not easy--either to create or to confront. We have no illusions about that. But in the spirit of helping established firms best serve their customers, we offer seven ways your firm could disrupt its own industry, raising the standards of customer experience and creating new opportunities for growth: 1) Totally eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points. Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy. Technology providers drive customers crazy with technical support that often requires long waits on hold and hopelessly complex interactions (“Just find the serial number on the back of your device and type that into the space provided along with your IP address and the exact wording of the error message you encountered”).

Baking Innovation Into New Smart Cities. Projections suggest there will be more than 136 new cities containing over 1 million people by 2025.

Baking Innovation Into New Smart Cities

While most of the cities will be in China, they will spring up all over the world. It is one thing to explore how existing cities can gradually (or relatively rapidly in the case in Singapore) get smarter. But what about when you have a blank canvas? Given today’s technology (and keeping an eye toward the future), how might governments collaborate with the private sector to plan and build cities of the future in a way that eliminates all the dumb things we did in the 20th century, like designing cities around the car and designing buildings around the air conditioner? Last week, I learned of a new planned city in Portugal called PlanIT Valley. The sensors will be used for a whole range of services, including smart transit and parking; emergency services dispatching; energy monitoring and management in smart buildings; and monitoring infrastructure condition and performance. 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature.

Electric Clothes.

32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature

Branding Talk Isn't Helping Your Company. Here's What Should Replace It. Last week, WPP brought out its league table of the world’s most valuable brands.

Branding Talk Isn't Helping Your Company. Here's What Should Replace It

It values Apple at $183 billion and McDonald’s at $95 billion. The Next Wave Of VC Strategy: Bringing Branding Into The Earliest Phases. As readers of Co.Design know well, branding is an essential component of an organization’s success.

The Next Wave Of VC Strategy: Bringing Branding Into The Earliest Phases

We all take for granted that the companies with the strongest brands, as defined by Interbrand’s "Best Global Brands" study--Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, Google, McDonald’s, etc. --also tend to be their market leaders. Yet the financial titans of the private equity and venture capital (PE/VC) worlds do not seem to concur, as evidenced by the fact that they do not give branding experts permanent positions on their teams. By failing to do so, these firms, whose sole purpose is to seek outsized financial returns on behalf of their investors, are actually leaving money on the table.

To Connect With Consumers, Ditch The Focus Groups. Try Acting Instead. Some months ago, I wrote an article here where I claimed that market research data is overrated, especially when it comes to innovative products and services.

To Connect With Consumers, Ditch The Focus Groups. Try Acting Instead

An innovation is new and original, so by definition, it departs from users’ experiences and behavior. Consequently, it is hard to establish quantitatively how to market it. Unfortunately, I didn’t offer up any viable alternative methods to surveys and focus groups. So how do you manage product development and brand and marketing decisions without relying on numbers? Www.fastcompany.com/1838014/use-entrepreneurial-energy-inside-your-organization. Master Class: How to Develop Bits Like a Late Night Talk Show Writer.

In the 1970s, if you wanted to have a laugh before drifting off to sleep, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the only game in town, more or less.

Master Class: How to Develop Bits Like a Late Night Talk Show Writer

With the advent of cable and DVR, and then Twitter and podcasts, modern audiences have since been inundated with options for their late-night fix of funny. As a result, those who currently work within the talk-show format are forced to find innovative ways to stay fresh and entice viewers back night after night, all while maintaining a consistent voice. It’s a difficult balancing act, but one pulled off with aplomb by comedians like Andres du Bouchet, who is a writer for TBS’s Conan. Du Bouchet started writing and performing comedy in New York in 1997, specializing in absurdist bits that succeeded on the strength of their own internal logic. His particular brand of alt-comedy eventually earned him a distinction as one of Time Out New York's Best Comedians of 2004. The Moment of Inspiration. Melinda Gates On The Importance Of The Girl Effect.

Melinda Gates has been a consistent voice for women around the world who are dealing with the wrenching circumstances of poverty. In an April 2012 TEDxChange talk, Gates called upon governments to establish universal access to birth control for women. The foundation plans to organize a world summit in London this summer to bring leaders together and raise $4 billion, the estimate of what it will cost to provide birth control to 120 million women in the developing world by 2020. “You simply cannot talk to real women about their lives and not hear the issue of family planning come up,” she says. Think You Can't Take A Vacation? The Sound Business Reasons You Really Should.

The Potential For Pitfalls And Success In The Sharing Economy. In the past six months, I have stayed at a stranger’s apartment, crowdsourced the construction of my Ikea dresser, and taken numerous rides from people I never met before (including one where I feared for my safety).

The Potential For Pitfalls And Success In The Sharing Economy

Like so many others, I have been participating in the growing sharing economy. It sounds like something that a preschool teacher might dream up. But it’s a powerful idea--instead of encouraging consumers to buy more goods, sharing startups ask people to share what they already have and get paid in the process. 13 Ways Companies Kill Creativity. Creativity is the driving force behind many new products, services, and companies around the world, creating solutions to age-old problems and offering new ways to live our daily lives.

13 Ways Companies Kill Creativity

Yet despite the indispensable nature of innovation, many businesses don’t exactly foster creativity in the workplace, sometimes even actively working against it. Whether they realize it or not, there are many ways that businesses kill creativity on a daily basis, which isn’t just bad for those creative minds but also the organization as a whole. So what can be done? Empowerment Marketing: Advertising To Humans As More Than Just Selfish Machines. Empowerment Marketing: A Resistance to the Dark Art For nearly a century now, inadequacy marketing has provided the favored weapons for fighting the story wars.

Empowerment Marketing: Advertising To Humans As More Than Just Selfish Machines

And though the cautionary tales of Groupon and Kenneth Cole show how the digitoral age is putting chinks in its armor, the approach is anything but dead. In fact, its practice remains the automatic starting point for most of us, whether we’re selling fish curry or social action. Www.aimediaserver6.com/prnewsonline/email/PRN_052112_FINAL.pdf. 5 Visions Of The Future Of Service In America. Today’s social entrepreneurs are making it easy for us to open our wallets and our hearts to our favorite causes. Leveraging online technology, innovators are making giving so easy and enjoyable that the experience does not feel like “giving” at all.

Take Sevenly, a service that provides the user with a wonderful shopping experience in which one can buy uniquely designed T-shirts and where a portion of proceeds benefit a different charity each week. Social entrepreneurs are also helping us sort through and make sense of the nearly 2 million social good organizations in the United States. What Do We Mean By "Innovation," "Collaboration," or "Design"? If you work in design, you are probably sick of hearing the words "innovation," 'collaboration,' and even the word "design. " They're used so often that they've almost lost all meaning. But sometimes we can be surprised by those things that have been right in front of us. Thinking about the etymology of these words made me think about exactly why we, as designers, were originally inspired by these ideas.

What I've Learned About Collaboration From My Daughters. Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer. Collaboration. Kickstarter Rescues Startups That VCs Won't Touch, But Here's What's Missing. How Do You Create A Culture Of Innovation? The Simplicity Thesis. A fascinating trend is consuming Silicon Valley and beginning to eat away at rest of the world: the radical simplification of everything. Technology, Art, And Why The Future Of Branding Is Nonfiction. Action Items: 3 Tangible Ways To Make Your Career Dreams A Reality. "Are you happy? " a curious and adorable 9-year-old girl named Emma asked me last week as my flight from Denver to Austin reached 30,000 feet. "Absolutely," I told her.

How The Creator Of "Doc McStuffins" Bucked The Norm And Made "Cheers" For Preschoolers. Good Bosses Are The Same Today As They Were In 1992. Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work. Bite-Sized Wisdom From Innovative Thinkers At Google, IBM, Airbnb, And More. Why Ditching The Office Could Help You Be More Creative. Building Better Businesses By Closing The Happiness Gap. Infographics Show The Cultural Divide Between Country Music And Pop. 6 Lessons In Brand Strategy, From The Brains Behind Gaming's Best Brand. The Innovator’s Blindspot: Even Your Best Ideas Will Fail If Your Partners Don’t Innovate Too. How 'Gender-Washing' Can Kill Brand Love And Loyalty. How Percolate Helps Brands Like AmEx And GE Become Always-On Content Publishers. Design’s Next Frontier: Nudging Consumers Into Making Better Life Choices.

An Augmented Reality Game Aimed At Making You More Saintly. The Biggest Opportunity For Disruption Today: Health Care Products That Work. What Good Bosses Do With Bad Apples. In The Future, You Will Eat Your Food Packaging, And It Will Be Delicious. Up Close With Feltron’s Latest Annual Report. How The Kindle Stomped Sony, Or, Why Good Solutions Beat Great Products. 3 Lessons On The Wrong Ways To Use Social Media To Create Change. Why The PC Will Die Soon. The 20 Best Businesses For The World.