innovation playground Idris Mootee

Social Innovation Is A Smart Business Strategy. Businesses Can Be Good Stewards Of Our Societies.

Innovation takes many forms, but social innovation is least understood and today there are pressing needs and urge for the creation, adoption and diffusion of innovations. Innovation takes many forms such technological, organizational, product, service and business model etc. The term ‘social innovation’ has come into common parlance in recent years. Some may consider social innovation no more than a passing fad, but many entrepreneurs and social scientists see significant value in the concept of social innovation because it identifies a critical type of innovation.

Social innovations will probably the most significant innovation in the next decades. Some distinguish social innovation from business innovation, and identify a subset of social innovations that requires government support, which I totally disagree with. Business innovation should have a component in social innovation when we think sustainability.

A good business strategy needs to be more than just maximizing value creation. It is important to make lots of money, but more important to ensure the business is sustainable. Our future is in the hands of a couple thousands of top Fortune 500 executives who are already very occupied with the daily crisis and make decisions that impact our future. They need to understand the long-range implications and impacts of their immediate, everyday, urgent actions and decisions in relation to the far-reaching social innovations now taking place which are management's new and most significant dimension. This is a critical junction of modern management.

Last month, my friend Mehmood Khan (photo above), London based ex-Unilever's global leader of innovation process development, took a public oath in his home village of Nai Nangla in India that he would dedicate the rest of his life to making the world a better place. He is starting from his home village in India. Wish more executive should do that. Imagine the all the smart minds in large corporations taking a little time off to do this?

He left his job at Unilever to return India to focus on innovation of a different kind. Khan’s job is to forge connections between the village of Mewat and big corporations to create employment. A year ago, Aviva, the UK's biggest insurer, was looking to build its rural presence in India. Khan's trust connected the company with 60 local young people and 12 were ultimately recruited. "It's a cycle that generates money . .  Aviva hired some people whose income went up . . . This creates a market economy," Khan told Forbes magazine. He has set up a computer center in Nai Nangla. He has also facilitated ICICI Bank to recruit 16 of the 30 villagers trained in the first intake. Khan also engaged charities and NGOs to administer literacy programs. He is full of creative ideas on how corporations can participate in helping.

The question is should companies' role in meeting basic needs be kept distinct from their desire to create more profits? For Khan, the two can work together. I totally believe that is possible and even necessarily. The lines between business strategy and social innovation have blurred and converged as the business world attempts to respond to the modern culture’s demand that businesses be good stewards of our societies. Hats off to Mehmood and Aviva.

Aviva is a bold and innovative player in the insurance industry (full disclosure: they are a client of ours and this is one of our innovation projects). Most people feel that insurance is just a black box and,you’ll never interact with them. For many it becomes very difficult to see the value in insurance. As an expansion to their successful “Change Insurance” communications platform, Aviva has launched “In Your Shoes”  which is a site dedicated to viewing the opinions and thoughts of customers about insurance. We started playing with the idea a few months back based on the notion of using storytelling to create customer engagement.

Good Industrial Designers Also Need To Be Cultural Anthropologists.

I am a chair person. I started buying designers chairs when I was 20 and started collecting British and Italian design pieces. I have a thing for chair and I am very picky with chairs. I can find a dozen of things to critique on almost any new designs. Chair design is an art form. I took this picture at Roppongi Hills (Tokyo), the chair is named "Chair that disappears in the rain" by Tokujin Yoshioka. It was made from a massive block of glass of astronomical observatory quality. Imagine what the chair looks under the rain. It is a street art and anyone can sit on it. It is great piece of street art.

In the old days, chairs were made of wood and the nature of the material and woodworking techniques pretty much dictated the basic shape of chairs. Over time some chairs and seats evolved as ergonomics playing a larger role. Humans are adapting to the chairs as well design are catering different human needs. We spend more and more time in front of a computer or TV and this lifestyle has lead to deterioration in posture and physical strength and many people now habitually slump. Chairs and seats are not designed to cater for this collapsed posture, which is making is worse. That brings up the question of ‘what is a good chair?”

Although more attention is paid to design and ergonomics than ever before, new chairs are everywhere, at the office, at home, in public transport, at schools etc. Sometimes uncomfortable chairs cab ne a healthy thing. And sitting is a very cultural thing. Take an example of how people in India versus people in Italy or Japan, the are many distinctive differences. We don’t sit the same way at all.

A young Indian designer Darshan Nerkar (a design student at the Indian Institute of Technology's Industrial Design Centre) developed a culture-specific chair as one of his school projects. After observing Indian-specific sitting styles by having people sit in a "study rig" mockup, Darshan revised his design into ...a stand alone single seat chair made up of stainless steel pipe structure with bent plywood for the base and woven jute for the backrest. A special support at arms level along with a specially contoured polyurethane foam seat is also provided to fulfill the requirements of the Indian sitting postures. His design would help to reposition the Indian sitting style furniture as it is suitable for the day-to-day activities and fits in contemporary interiors.

Designers need to think how cultural elements can inspire innovation. They need tol explore inter-related levels to explore the challenge of multi-cultural design in relation to people's needs in diverse contexts: Internationalization; accommodating multiple languages; localization; and embracing user needs in the context of their cultural values.  Our design process needs to be multi-disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, it is the transdisciplinary character of design; and subcultures, hybrid identities, and global assemblages that create design excellence.

Prototyping Is One Way Of Developing Strategic Agility. That Makes It A Strategy Tool In Additional To Just A Design Tool.

Open-source software is nothing new and I am a big fan. Open-source hardware is something new. A 15-employee New York start-up called Bug Labs is helping companies to build rapid prototypes to support development new business models. This is something we live and breathe at idea Couture, prototyping and power point are the 2Ps of our everyday work.

Hard ware is different from software in many aspects. But there is no reason why there can be an equivalent of Lego Techno that allows people to use for rapid prototyping. Get a box and choose from a menu of components including a GPS unit, a camera, a music player, an accelerometer, a motion detector, and a 3G connection, and now you can build your own Transformer.

Technology and outsourcing giant Accenture is teaming up with Bug Labs to offer hardware and software packages unique to each customer. For Accenture the payoff is in getting these buyers to subscribe to its new software platform, AMOS, or Accenture Mobility Operated Services. As for Bug Labs, its wager is that

Accenture will open doors to big companies that will put in multiple orders for its snap-together computerized gear. The advantage for would-be customers is that the hardware can be tailored to fit a company. Accenture's AMOS software can processes the information taken from Bug's devices. If a trucking company uses the fleet-tracking device, it could log onto the AMOS Web site that will produce mapped routes and pick up schedules. If a pop-ups store uses the device, it can provide info on traffic and sales etc.

This is a big move away from Accenture's consulting and outsourcing model.In the past, they typically waited for clients to come to them with specific business or system problems. Now they are actively pitching products and services to anyone. This Accenture’s new ventures do not charge clients a consultant fee and the fee is transaction-based. If you have 100 devices deployed and they will charge for the usages. Like a free phone and charge you for the minutes. This is a good example of industries are beginning to wake up to the needs for strategic agility.

Companies today need to move fast to take advantage of disruptive opportunities; it is the only way a company can learn to thrive on multiple waves of disruptions. Anticipating change, seeing emerging opportunities and prototyping are all about the capacity for learning and is something every company needs. Prototyping is a powerful too to provide a company the ability to respond to complex and unpredictable marketing conditions.

From Google Streetview To Google Partyview? Technology Continues To Push Privacy Limit.

Technology often creates new privacy concerns and technologies used for security are creating even bigger concerns. Take Google streetview as an example, they have been asked by a the European Article 29 Working Party to keep "unblurred" photos for Street View for as little time as possible. It taking Google too long to blur things such as license plates and faces. How they do it the blurring technology often blurs the wrong thing, so they need to keep the original unblurred image to add back to it. So the question is how long should they kept these images?

The Europeans has bigger concern than Americans; much spontaneous protest erupted after a van filming digital footage was spotted entering Broughton in Buckinghamshire. The vehicle was forced to turn back when the residents blocked the street. They believe these images can be used by criminals for targeting. Google Street View launched in 25 cities in the UK and it not pushing to other smaller towns. People called the police, when they arrived, the van was gone. Does it make it easier for criminal? In that case Google map helps criminal too? I really don’t think it is a big deal as long as no faces are shown.

In a few months, we will see people with a filming device walking around? (Morgan wants this camera) Call it Google 360. The latest invention is called the Yellowbird Camera that records in 360 makes a photo 360 view look pretty one dimensional. You can press play and move the cursor in the direction that you want to see. This is similar to the model being used by Google Streetview except this is more portable. The exception is this video instead of stills. The data stream is very powerful through a double glass-fiber connection, a stream of 1200 Mbit per second is captured and saved in an uncompressed format, a surround sound microphone system enables to record audio at 96 khz. So it is live 360 broadcast.

Imagine a person wearing this 360 video camera walking into a crime scene and record high quality 360 video for future use in courts or investigations? Imagine a security person wearing this 360 camera (protected by armor) getting into a riot scene and capture everything for command center? Imagine Google starting a new service called Google Party and filming life events of people in social events? London can add this to the massive CCTV system? The walking video cop.

Bauhaus Is Not Just A Design Movement. What Business Can Learn From Bauhaus? How Can We Move From The Industrial Age - An Age Of Exploitation To An Age Of Regeneration?

I've been a Bahaus follower for 30 years. I am still fascinated by some of work produced during that period. A Bauhaus Summer School workshop was hosted last month by Michael Zinganel who is a freelance architecture theorist, cultural historian, curator, and artist from Austria. The workshop was designed in a way to bring the Bauhaus sites closer to its local residents through more everyday interaction with special postcards, downtown dialogues, Bauhaus city game, and by projecting super sized figures on the walls of the 1920's Bauhaus building. I think that’s really cool. I wish I could join them for a few outdoor workshops.

Talking about Design School, the Bauhaus was the most influential art, craft and design school of the century. They are definitely more than just design. The Bauhaus teachers were very  influential people including artists such as Paul Klee, Lászl Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. I am a big believer of multi-disciplinary thinking and Bauhaus was the first to advocate multi-disciplinary thinking with the goal that students should be able to do work from graphics, products to architecture and every student needed a combined practical and theoretical education (which was revolutionary at that time).

 The result was a successful integration of design theory with the industrial process. Bauhaus reacted to social change by creating an aesthetic relevance to the requirements of the time. Bauhaus protagonists wanted to bridge the gap between the social idealism and the commercial reality and to promote a response to the emerging technological culture. The aim was to take advantage of the possibilities of mass production to achieve a style of design that was both functional and aesthetic. Objects were to be designed to have "simplicity, multiplicity, economical use of space, material, time and money which looks as modern as anything in production today. What would a revive Bauhaus movement means within the context to today's social technological advances?

What is interesting and not well known is that Bauhaus was not just a design experiment, it was a political experiment a well. Some suggested that they were socialists and the Bauhaus philosophy is fundamentally a socialist philosophy. The concept of manufacturability, affordable designed objects, the stripping away of all those non-essential decorative elements (being viewed not only as poor design but bourgeois), are all elements of a socialist philosophy. I am not sure I agree with that view but it is something interesting to share. For me, it is a sound business strategy.

What we need today is a movement in business that is equivalent to Bauhaus. How do we take advantage of mass co-creation and social connectivity to create new business models that are designed to be sustainable, simple and empathetic? We’re still applying Alfred Sloan’s concept of what a corporation is since he invented the modern corporation half a century ago. His concept of the modern American corporation was a big innovation with core ideas including: 1/ Firms exist as a monitoring device to control shirking 2/Bigger is better because of the economies of scale.

In the next decade, we will need to reinvent the Modern Corporation and management as we’ve seen today. There are many flaws in the design of the modern corporation. One such flaw is the over emphasis on short-term financial performance. All the great management thinkers—going right back to Peter Drucker—have said this for years. There's nothing wrong with using profit as a measure of your company's economic performance so long as you look at it over 10 or 20 years. But if you shorten that time horizon too much, and CEOs become focused on minute-by-minute fluctuations in the company stock price, profit loses its meaning and self-interest comes to completely dominate collective well being. Peter Senge (MIT) wrote in “Leaders to Leaders” a piece called “The Necessary Revolution” and talked about a regenerative economy. It is another inspiration for us to think about the future of the modern corporations. Here’s a short excerpt:

Abundance of Opportunities
There are many reasons for taking the lead in creating a regenerative economy, starting with building a brand and recruiting and retaining talented people. In a world of proliferating choices, brands that stand for quality and responsibility will be distinguished from those that don't. Moreover, the companies behind those brands are where people who have choices will want to work. As Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, points out, "In my view, the successful companies of the future will be those that integrate business and employees' personal values. The best people want to do work that contributes to society with a company whose values they share, where their actions count and their views matter." However, branding and employee recruitment and retention are not the sole reasons for embracing leadership in the regenerative economy.

Business will be key in our ability to create a regenerative economy.
There is significant money to be saved. Companies in all sectors have saved massive amounts of money simply by reducing their waste and energy usage. By focusing on slashing greenhouse gas emissions along with associated energy use, DuPont was able to save $3 billion while growing by 30 percent over the same 15-year period. By adopting a vehicle-painting technology that applies three coats of paint simultaneously, Ford reduced CO2 emissions from the process by 15 percent and volatile organic compound emissions by 10 percent—while reducing painting time by 20 percent, resulting in significant cost savings. GE Industrial saved $12.8 million a year by changing over to high-efficiency lights in its manufacturing plants.

Edward Tufte's On The Very Very Very Bad Design Of Corporate Web Sites.

Have been to talking to a couple of very senior design practitioners this week and sharing my thoughts on the future of information design. Information design was never considered an important aspect in our societies or businesses. The digital revolution has changed our everyday lives with the constantly increasing volume of information in all shapes an forms. As new behaviors emerge as social technologies advancements in an unprecedented was resulting in the overall changing of our communication patterns and attitude towards privacy. The context of the social media and technologies presents both opportunities and challenges. Information design can be a true competitive weapon for companies who understand the power of social information design. Most people don’t really see the disruptive nature of social information design.

Think information design the first name that pops up in the mind is Edward Tufte. He is a statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University. The New York Times called him the "the da Vinci of Data". I love that title. His interest is in what he calls “forever knowledge,” like his intellectual hero, Galileo. Tufte argues that principles that matter transcend time and culture. The illustrative principles that Galileo used – careful, clear, and accurate portrayal of data he observed are among the forever knowledge to which Tufte adds with his work in what he calls information design. MIT Sloan Management Review just published an interview with him titled “How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them)” and here’s an excerpt:

On the (Very,Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites

The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That's great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called "sharing our values," "participation" and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company's values.

A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don't do that?

The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they're imitating one another in their content and design flabbiness. It's silly. People are inherently distrustul of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.

Marketing and the bureaucratization of design approval are the big enemies of design. There are probably 20 special interests that want to leave their thumbprint on every design. There's accommodating to ISO [International Organization for Standardization] standards. There's accommodating to people whose eyes are getting old. There's adjustments to what the competition is doing. And then there are, alas, the marketers and the lawyers. Many of these special interests have worthy claims, but when they all pile on, it results in compromised, vague and generic — but very expensive — designs.

Design excellence has to defend itself and make appropriate adjustments without losing the integrity and coherence of the hands-on work. In large corporations, it's very hard to get control of design. Thousands of employees are putting vast amounts of visual material up for public consumption: forms, advertising, interfaces, manuals and on and on. This material represents and exemplifies the corporation. It's the direct expression of the corporation.

In his opinion, "Great design is not democratic. It comes from great designers." How much truth is there? I will let you decide.

Idea Couture + MIT Kicking Off "The Global Challenge Project" To Facilitate Multidisciplinary Problem-Solving.

Yes Its Official: MIT IDEAS Global Challenge + Idea Couture! We’re very excited to collaborate with the MIT team on this project. Our team will be in Boston the week after next running several days of workshops. It is a very meaningful project that will involve the MIT global community in innovative, multidisciplinary problem-solving, reconnecting alumni with the spirit of invention and enterprise that pervades the Institute.Yes we need more projects like this to help solve the world’s ever increasing and complex problems.

If you ask me what’s the single biggest challenge, I’d say we simply have too many people. The place is too small for that many people and simply cannot support it. 25 years ago 2 billion people was already too many and soon we’ll be at 9 billion. And in 10 years from now? Can we still feed the world? Can we provide enough opportunities for so many? 

We are fast heading towards outstripping the ecological supply of food in the coming decades. 8 billion of the 9.billion people will be living in developing countries and things are not getting better there. Hungry people whether in North Korea or Africa or Mexico will create disasters of unparalleled magnitude because people will do anything to feed themselves.

In the early 90s, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency produced a sustainable diet. It looked at the implications of reducing the environmental impact of the farming and food production system, and produced a diet that, if implemented, would reduce energy consumption in food production by 30%, reduce artificial fertilizer use by between 20% and 40%, and reduce the acreage needed to produce food. Does it mean we will not be having steaks in 20 years? Or only once a month? May be technologies can solve the problems? Space farming? In 2050, your choices of steak will not be Kobe or Angus, it will be Mars or Venus.

We must first deal with managing population growth and this problem is mostly in developing counties. Any financial aids going to these countries must include conditions in managing population growth together with gender empowerment, education and economic security.

Then we can look at what technologies can help increase supply. Food production is not exactly efficient and agricultural protectionism is not helping. Free trade is good and will help reduce prices, it may put many small farmers out of business. It needs to address this problem. The long distant transportation of food supply does not make sense. We need to think local.

China is doing a superb job feeding a billion 1.3 billion people and it is not an easy task. They are doing a very smart job of developing manufacturing industries and yet not forgetting agriculture development. China is a net food exporter, and its food exports, as well as its imports, are growing. It’s capacity to continue food export growth is constrained by intense competition for limited resources by non-agricultural industry and other sectors of the economy. Industrial and urban growth is increasing the competition for China’s limited land and water. China’s non-farm economic boom means that housing complexes, industrial parks, power stations, and other projects, are being built on land converted from agriculture. 

Competition for land within agriculture will intensify. Increasing production of meat, dairy products, vegetables, fruit, and farm-raised fish competes with grain cultivation for area. Given the continuous shrinkage of the agricultural land base, expansion of one agricultural activity generally means that land must be diverted from another. Chinese scientists are working on developing new crop varieties and production systems that could increase yields and use water more efficiently. China understands the importance of agriculture independence.

Microsoft Latest Product Is Called "Office Without Words". Limited Editions Only.

Microsoft is now “wordless”! A Texas judge has ruled that that Microsoft cannot sell Word in the US due to a patent conflict. You can now buy “Office Without Word”. I kind of like the name.

A Toronto-based company i4i Inc. (a block from our office) that design and develop collaborative content solutions and technologies has won a permanent injunction against Microsoft. The company was funded by McLean Watson Capital Inc., a Toronto-based VC firm that along with Northwater Intellectual Property Fund to take on Microsoft.

The injunction against Microsoft was around the company’s XML patents. In the words of i4i, the injunction “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.

Microsoft was given 60 days to comply. The injunction reads: Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from performing the following actions with Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Word 2007, and Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007 (collectively “Infringing and Future Word Products”) during the term of U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449. This injunction does not apply to any of the above actions wherein the Infringing and Future Word Products open an XML file as plain text.

I am wondering how big this check would be. The court awarded the firm damages of about US$290mm that the future license fees would be another $5-600mm over the next 5 years? Or can they survive Microsoft massive legal challenge in the next 12 months to revert this?

Are Designers Giving Too Much Credits To Their "Ah Ha" Moments?

Over the last 6 months, I have been sharing our innovation methodology with some of most innovative design firms from Boston to Shanghai and London, not only were they impressed but were asking me a lot of questions around process and rigor in design and innovation.  My simple answer is that design is all about context and process, and innovation is more about dealing with the unknowns and unpredictable, both are not mutually exclusive.

There are always two types of designers: 1/ one that believes in the process and see how collectively creativity can deliver results 2/ the second believes that it is all about the one person who happens to have an idea – in another words persona creativity.

Creativity in the design or innovation process is often characterized by the occurrence of a significant event, called it the  “creative leap” or “ah ha” moments. Often such events occur as a sudden insight that designers recognize as significant and important, but often it is only in retrospect that the designer is able to identify a point during the design process. These retrospective accounts of creative events in design and innovation may not be reliable and the process was underplayed and the personal creativity taking most of the credit.

Field research results suggested that the creative event in design is not so much a “creative leap” from problem to solution as the building of a “bridge” between the problem space and the solution space by the identification of a key concept. The creative design process involves a period of exploration in which problem and solution spaces are evolving and mix-matching until they are fixed by an emergent bridge which identifies a problem-solution pairing. A creative event occurs as the moment of insight at which a problem-solution pair is framed: what Schön called it “problem framing” or for some “sense making”. I think “sense making” is a better word.

When presented with today's vast quantities of information how can a designer makes sense of it as quickly and easily as possible? Sense making builds on a core "time-line" interview that is highly structured with open-ended interview that allows the designers to construct a view of the world from his or her own perspective.  It starts with a list of questions and the responses are then "circled," focusing on the gap, bridge, and helps, and probing the manner in which the person has constructed the event and the significance of this event to himself or herself. It is n important skills that are not commonly taught at design schools.

What’s The Future Of Design In China? What Is China's Design Strategy?

What’s the future of design in China? Or will China ever have a real design future? Do they ever need one at all? As part our China strategy I’ve visited half-a-dozen of design firms in China last week and got a pretty good snapshot of the state of the industry while sharing my points of views on how design will evolve in China.

There is a vibrant Chinese design culture (somewhat narrow in scope) within the context of China's industrialization, consumer evolution and technological change. From the entrepreneurial spirit of industrial designers, to society's aspirations for higher quality of life, to the global ambitions of a nation, we’re seeing the emerging of a new design culture in China. But it is not without challenge, majority of businesses in China are on a get-rich-fast mode and their motto is let’s copy and modify what is selling in the west. Their focus is mainly on cost versus functions and that’s it. Product cycles are insanely short and market changes overnight. So planning is not their thing if know what it is at all.  Overall the quality of Chinese design is at least 10 years behind from the west although they cost only a fraction (20-30% of design costs in the US).

Chinese design schools are graduating thousands of young and technically proficient designers every year. The problem is lack of mentorship and exposure are limiting the growth of these young talents. Korea did try to export industrial designers to China a few years back but without success. Korean thinks China would want to have a few Samsungs of LGs. But for the moment, most Chinese companies remain ultra short-term and very pragmatic. China’s economy is largely based on a factory mindset. It will be a 10 years journey for designers and companies to make a leap into design thinking in China.

In the meantime, expect to see more “cheap” rip-offs. One company just launched an iPhone clone with a built-in projector. The Epoq EGP-PP01 projector phone is the world’s first commercially available handset which will allow you the ability to project approximately 2 hours worth of footage (30-inch VGA image) onto your wall of choice; whether it be at the office or doing the elevator pitch in the elevator. Will get one next time I am in China.