The Porsche 911: An ode to iteration by Jason Fried of 37signals The Porsche 911 celebrates its 50th anniversary. What an incredible run. The 911 has always served as special inspiration to those who believe in long-term iteration. innovation engine Cross-industry Collaboration Spurs Innovation: Procter & Gamble as Example A great example of a group of companies that collaborate to innovate. Procter & Gamble initiated a learning consortium of companies who are making business intelligence and analytics a strategic choice, and therefore transforming their business operations. And even though such cross-company and –industry collaborations are difficult to sustain they spur innovation. Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald is very clear about the critical role for technology at P&G: He thinks better data analytics is at the heart of how P&G will improve productivity and make more innovative products. P&G's executives, as evidenced in an effort led by CIO Filippo Passerini, think analytics software can get better, faster, if companies together push for software that's more relevant to companies' real business problems. Any such cross-company cooperation is difficult to sustain. We believe in unique combinations as foundation to spur innovation. Do you collaborate to innovate cross-industry and –company?
Best Practices Vs. Next Practices: Are You Looking Forward or Backward? Over my career, I have been coached by bosses, mentors, and colleagues that successful businesses build their business strategies upon best practices. Business people have often considered introduction of a new best practice as thought leadership. My question is should business leaders focus on developing best practices, which are based upon the past, or should they be thinking ahead? Looking Forward or Backward? I’m not so sure that touting best practices equates to thought leadership. Are founded upon what has worked most successfully in the past.Distract us from thinking about “Next Practices” or new ways of doing things for the future. I think Adrian hit the nail on the head with those comments. Next Practices Are All About Innovation Interestingly, the concept of “Next Practices” is not a new one. Dr. Saul Kaplan (Founder, Business Innovation Factory), May 2009 — “It is not best practices, but next practices that will sustain your organization on a strong growth trajectory. C.K.
Innovation Through Simplicity “iHKDesign” ably responds to this jacktastic CNN piece by Steve Kovach, arguing that Samsung is “out-innovating” Apple. This bit (from Kovach) caught my eye: Based on all this evidence, Apple feels behind. Take a look at its newest fourth-generation iPad. It has a killer processor and other great hardware features, but the operating system doesn’t take advantage of any of that. Kovach’s whole piece is inane, but the above criticism — that iOS’s home screen is behind because it’s “just a grid of static icons” — is one I’ve seen from other, more reasonable critics. The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation.
The Truth Behind "Secret" Innovation At Nike, Apple, Google X On the outskirts of Nike's yawning campus in Beaverton, Oregon, a nondescript garage sits behind a line of tall trees, hiding between a day-care center and a security firm. A door to the garage, marked only with the letter "A," is always locked; the windows to the facility are tinted like a rapper's SUV. Inside, two toned athletes are lunging in front of a pair of Xboxes. A gaggle of laptops tracks their progress, spitting out Matrix-like data onto the screens. The floor plates beneath their feet are pressure-sensitive. This is the Sparq performance center, one of the most secretive labs at Nike's headquarters. During my reporting for Fast Company's profile of Nike, which we just named as the world's Most Innovative Company, I was continuously being let into Nike's "secret" facilities--underground research labs, high-tech training centers--so much so that I wondered if Nike labels its locations "secret" the way the government broadly labels files "classified."
The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill More and more interactive products are being returned. In 2002, 48% of all returned products were technically fully functional but were rejected for failing to satisfy user needs (28%) or purely due to users’ remorse (20%). Even though a product may have all the features one can hope for, complexity and bad user experience can prevent users from integrating it into their lives. User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Going With The Flow In 1975, the Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined his theory of “flow” in his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Video games Video games have evolved from simple games, where users had to bounce a ball around the screen, into advanced three-dimensional multiplayer environments. Complex televisions Learning how to use complex products is like learning a computer game
27 creativity and innovation tools - in one-pagers! Tony_Vengrove : "Fall in love with the problem."... RamonVullings : Without deviation from the...