The Ten Commandments of Good Design. Dieter Rams Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer who has been recognized as one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th century.
He worked for 40 years at the German consumer products company, Braun. Today, he works at Vitsœ, a British furniture company that manufactures and sells products designed by Rams. According to Vitsœ’s website, in the early 1980′s, as he became increasingly aware of his influence in the world, Rams began asking himself a fundamental question: “Is my design good design?”
Should You Back That Innovation Proposal? - Scott Anthony. By Scott Anthony | 10:00 AM September 25, 2013 Imagine you were choosing between two investment proposals.
The first comes from a team of young entrepreneurs hoping to bring word-of-mouth marketing to China. 10 Lessons For Design-Driven Success. Imagine that the iPhone does not yet exist.
Creative Teams - What 7 elements do they all share? Free Yourself from Conventional Thinking - Brian Klapper. Groundbreaking ideas are no longer a luxury when success is contingent upon an organization’s ability to adapt, innovate, and improve.
We need look no further than Kodak, Sears, or Sony for validation that status-quo thinking is the fast-track to failure. How, then, can organizations break free of conventional thinking to spark creativity? Building an Agile Organization – Implications for functional management. As more and more companies adapt lean and agile practices and continue the journey to become more agile, the traditional functional structures become a bottleneck.
As the agile spreads across the teams, so does the activities of the team members and their managers requires rethink. The command and control ways of controlling the teams will not work any more as agile needs more work participation from the team. This creates some interesting problems for the traditional functional managers such as development manager or test manager. Innovation and Diversity. Tomorrow’s management systems will need to value diversity, dissent and divergence as highly as conformance, consensus and cohesion. A while ago, I came across this tweet by Gary Hamel.
It reflects well the fact that businesses range in increasingly dynamic and complex environments, imposing accelerated and mostly unforeseeable change. The most promising way for organizations to face this unprecedented discontinuity is to develop an ability to adapt to changing conditions and emerging opportunities: Adaptability. How to Be a Highly Innovative Company. Oh, the joys of screwing up! By Jeff DeGraff (TheMIX) -- Innovation poses two problems for most leaders, given the way they are trained to think.
First, its value diminishes over time; it goes sour, like milk. Learn To Think About Innovation Like A CEO. Innovation has become an evergreen subject simply because it is no longer a luxury.
It is now a necessity. Gone are the days of the gold watch at retirement. Today, you must earn your daily bread, well, daily. Shrinking product life cycles, unorthodox competition, and receding barriers to entry across categories have created an unprecedented need to unleash corporate creativity. Most Innovative Companies 2013. Top Ten Causes of Innovation Failure. So who do you think form the group that are the most likely candidates for innovations consistent failure?
It may surprise you to know that most fingers point straight to the top of the organization as the main cause for its enduring failure. In a recent survey I was reading*, it provided a set of results about the common cause of innovation failure. Business Model Innovation Failure. Companies fail at business model innovation because they’re so busy pedalling the bicycle of current business models they leave no time or resource to design new ones.
Most companies focus innovation efforts on new products and on driving efficiencies into current models. These are important activities, but not sufficient in the 21st century when business models don’t last as long and face disruption. This means business model innovation is the new strategic imperative. Your business model is obsolete. By Geoff Colvin, senior editor-at-large FORTUNE -- When Carlos Ghosn announced last year that Nissan, which he runs, will start making ultracheap cars for emerging markets under the revived Datsun brand -- and will make a profit on them -- the mainstream response was contemptuous.
"A big mistake," a Toyota (TM) executive told the Wall Street Journal; "another blunder," said a Japanese professor. Surfacing Hidden Barriers to Innovation. To surface hidden barriers that might be blocking innovation does needs a conscious effort, a consistent questioning, validating and exploring to “peel away” and get at the root of the problem. Often it is simply the fear of moving from the current established practices into new ways and that stepping over is very hard and often very personal.Often in innovation adoption there are so many hidden barriers that need drawing out and resolving. It becomes even harder when it comes to getting an executive team to recognize this.
Asking the Right Questions. Albert Einstein is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying, “If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would spend 19 days to define it.” Innovation is a particularly sticky problem because it so often remains undefined. Innovation Velocity. Yesterday I wrote an introductory blog post about the importance of VELOCITY as an innovation outcome. Today I want to drill a little deeper, to examine why velocity is so important to many businesses, and why innovation should be the technique that many turn to to accelerate velocity. Few people would quibble with the argument that the pace of change is accelerating, and continues to accelerate. If, for example, you could teleport yourself to the Roman empire and examine the living conditions of the average family, you'd find that conditions weren't overly improved for hundreds of years.
New technologies were infrequent and scientific discovery was slow. Fast forward to the early Middle ages, as learning and communication improved, and we see an increasing pace of change. Factors Driving Pace of Change What factors drive the increasing pace of change? These are factors that I think are driving the increasing pace of change. The ability to bring products to market very quickly. Why Design Thinking Will Fail. Where there is a rise of a dynasty, there will be a fall of a dynasty. Similar concept applies to the most-hyped innovation process; Design Thinking. If a process meets the current needs of the market, it escalates with monumental success.
Not living up to the hype will be the cause of failure of Design Thinking as the sought-after innovation process. However there are good reasons why Design Thinking has been prominent in the recent years. Design Thinking is a creative problem-solving approach with specific tools, methods and mindset designers are adept in.