innovation playground Idris Mootee

10 Big Reasons Why Most Innovative Products / Services Fail? How Many Of Them Are Avoidable?

Why innovative new products fail? Because marketers believe they know the industry, the product market and the customer and their needs.  And after going through cycles of input gathering and any orginal innovative ideas were ultimately turned into something that a lot like their existing products with minor improvisation. Sounds familiar?

Too many firms “innovate” with very few real insight about the market, their customers, or customers’ aspirations, needs or wants. Rather than go out and understand what customers need and expect, they rely on anecdotal evidence and market research, or simply perform some "ethngographic" study performed by traditional marekting research companies. "ethnographic" field work performed withour an anthropologist is like goging to bungee jump without an instructor.  This is a ley failure point of the first order, like jogging on the rooftop blindly down a path that ends off the building.

What leads some innovative products and servies to succeed and others to fail? The answer to this question encompasses a number of different factors. In some cases, the product cannot deliver the promised performance, capability or attract sufficient interest.

Even if potential can be demonstrated early on, it may take a substantial amount of time to reach the projected adoption figures. Or the product’s innovative feature is being replicated by an existing product as an added function and there is no need for a stand alone new product. Or the economics of the new product is not attractive enough and cannot hit a critical mass. Insight into the minds of the early adopters can greatly reduce the risks of failure, which is generally due to one or more of the following reasons:

1. The innovative new products are not shown in the right user context thus creating a misunderstanding of the applications
2. The new technologies behind the innovative product are not linked to an exciting and worthwhile market opportunity or are too niche
3. The innovative new products are not positioned within any product category and also fail to open up a completely new category
4. There is insufficient knowledge and resources for marketers to drive consumer adoption
5. The core functions of the innovative new products cannot support themselves as stand alone products and only work as features.
6. The promised performance of the innovative new product does not materialize and does not provide enough customer value
7. The innovative new products were distributed through the wrong channel and compromise the value propositions
8. The innovative new products perform only a small function and can be included by others in other products as an additional feature thus diminishing the demand
9. The expectation of consumers adopting the new products is over estimated
10. Products are pushed to a skeptical customer group and fail to neutralize the perceived risks associated with the new product.

The innovative new products require an ecosystem of support which did not exist or were not built fast enough. Determining the suitability of market research for innovative new products or services is a challenge. Insights are not only needed in the early phase of ideas gathering, it is equally critical at the pilot stage. Many traditional market research methods are inherently more tactically focused (orientation on the customers of today) and lead to the development of small improvements in existing products and the big ideas eventually diluted. Read more of this in the next big INSIGHT issue of M/I/S/C available in bookstores in 28 countries.

The Dirty Secret Of "Creativity"? And What They Didn't Want To Tell You. Welcome to the M/I/S/C Creativity Issue!

What is creativity? How does it happen? How do we prepare ourselves for it? Or can you at all? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker, or do you only need the right side of your brain? Can you be rational and logical while being creative? I dedicated a whole issue of M/I/S/C/ to "Creativity" and this is now in bookstores in 25 countries.

Scott Adams, a popular cartoonist suggested, "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Mistake is part of anything and applied creativity is no exception, so I can be doing something uncreative and still makes mistakes.

Someone once suggested, “Creativity can never be achieved by imitations, and what is already been introduced.” That’s also not true. Some of the best creative pieces in science, art and engineering are results of imitations and experimentations. It is naïve to say creativity means not imitating.

Creative people usually have a few features that distinguish them from others. First, they posses both a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and well-developed expressive skills (verbal, body movement or drawing or combination of all). Academics and creative managers like to describe creativity as a process, I think that is just nonsense. I belong to the school of Vinacke, which believes that creative thinking in the arts does not follow any models.

Gestalt philosophers like Wertheimer have also asserted that the process of creative thinking is an integrated line of thought that does not lend itself to the framework implied by the steps of a model. There is no process. It is your brain working. Despite that, many design or creative companies will tell you that they have a four-step process. Don’t be fooled: these are marketing constructs designed by marketers to make clients feel comfortable with what is essentially a messy, inscrutable phenomenon. Leave the boardroom and ask the creative department if they follow a process and you’ll get a very different answer. Or no answer at all.

Trying to reduce creativity to a linear process is counter-intuitive. Real creativity emerges from managed chaos and applied fuzzy logic. It’s never about careful calculations. It is something we will never be able to understand for a long time.

Lots of crazy things happened in this world in 2011, we cannot change the past, but let's use our creativity to make everyday a productive one and make a world a better place. Wishing all readers of Innovation Playground and all my Facebook friends 2012 a year full of HAPPINESS and BLESSINGS!!!

The Tablet War Is Moving To The Next Level. It Is Not Just A Game Of Interface And Content, It Is A Service Platform Game. It Will Be Google, Apple And Amazon.

Idea Couture San Francisco was excited to sponsor and host the Tofu event last week. The Tofu Project is a nicely curated boutique program created by TokyoMango journalist Lisa Katayama and designer Tomo Saito that brings 10 of the most innovative young entrepreneurs from Japan to the San Francisco Bay Area for a 7-day design thinking and innovation boot camp.

These isn't just another Silicon Valley-meets-Japan tour or incubator. It is not just a start-up meet and share, it is more of collaborative think tank where cool Japanese people and experts on Japanese culture from all different sectors gather together to re-imagine the future of Japanese innovation and globalization. I wish I was there. Here are some pictures to share.

A busy day driving to Waterloo for a several meetings and everytime I stopped at a book store I wonder how the tablet war will evolve in the next 12 months. The tablet war is moving to level two and there are only 3 finalists. Samsung and Amazon are the only two that are strategically qualified to play this game. Sony’s new tablet may have a small chance; if it does it will be domestically. Sony has been sleeping at the wheels and has no idea what the world is like.

Amazon's forthcoming Kindle Fire tablet will be hurting the sales of iPad and put price pressure on Apple. They might end up having to reduce the price to keep shares. I don’t see any new features that can keep iPad ahead of the game or sustain the growth. Many will hold off the purchase of iPad for themselves or chose to buy Fire because it is a great alternative.

Kindle Fire, launching next week at a price of $199. They are using a Gilette strategy of subsidizing the tablet and make money from content. Apple will never do that. And for the Nook, I am not sure. It is nicely designed and engineered product, a lot of good thinking on the UI level too but lacking a strategy to play this game. Yet the sales jumped 140% the first quarter due to overall demand growth.

Amazon Fire will have a dual-core processor, a fast browser, a good display, and lots and lots of content. Preorder is already tracking to exceed a million. Amazon will build a big user base and leverage this to launch a service platform. They are not viewing the tablet as an eReader game like Nook, they see this one piece of a larger emerging strategy to go against Apple. Amazon just purchased a voice startup Yap few months ago, a technology that could transcribe voice commands into text. Amazon is quietly building out its voice-recognition service platform and will be competing with Apple Siri. That’s the next big game.

Interactions Design Will Enable New Social And Cultural Behavior. How Do You Research These Emerging Behavior And Their Implications?

Back from London and a very productive week. Many are still sadden by the loss of Steve Jobs. I quote Ginsberg: "I saw the best minds of my generation... angelheaded hipster raging or the ancient heavenly connection, in the machinery of night...". The world misses Steve Jobs.

Apple said he had been "the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives" and had made the world "immeasurably better".VC and ex-Apple executive Jean Louis Gassee - who Jobs recruited to Apple - said that Jobs should have 'seven statues' built for him - 'One for the Apple II, one for the Mac, one for Pixar, one for coming back and reviving Apple and the Mac, one for the iPod and iTunes, one for the Apple Stores and one for the iPhone. This picture of Steve was taken in an emotional moment knowing this was his last keynote.

Everyone is obsessed with Apple and how to disrupt the master disrupter, but what everyone is doing is either copying each other or try to make small changes to Apple’s designs without the power of the Apple brand/user experience and the powerful Apple ecosystems behind them. Let’s say if your army has the same uniform, equipment and the same Hummers as the US military doesn’t mean you can compete with the powerful military intelligence system linking everything. Apple is a system with central command and control with highly sophisticated logistics system and deep R&D budgets. It is truly a textbook example of sustainable competitive advantage.

Most companies got it wrong when they believe 1/They think Apple is only about clean design and nice features 2/They think what they do is easily replicable 3/They think people are willing to save some money buying a non-Apple substitutes. Look around how many MP3S out there and how cheap they are, anyone buying them? The same can be said about tablets.

We’ve spent a lot of time on researching the future of ‘devices’ or ‘personal technology’. It will be the single largest growth opportunity for the coming 10-15 years and will eventually be bigger than the PC business. It is the next game. I am not talking about mobile phones, smart phones or tablets. I am talking about a convergence of these portable devices that utilizing haptics, gestures, facial, biophysical, voice, movement or any combinations that could create novel ways of interacting with a devices or entertainment appliances.

There is simply no way to predict what would become the dominant interactions paradigm of the future and which one will prevail and which one is transitional. Is multi-touch transitional or something will come and leapfrog this intereaction paradigm?

Apple is milking everything ‘multitouchables.’ One of the latest idea is the Apple's Magic Mouse may include multitouch display. Earlier this year Apple filed a patent application on a multi-touch mouse that can display information and allow users to input directly from the mouse such a number keypad. The screen would then change to a different functionality for each application when they're switched between active and non-active and depending on whether you’re play games or chatting with friends. I think the next one would be a multi-touch Macbook cover that let you do things without opening the laptop. That would be a nice crossover to bring some tablet functions to a laptop. If I want to play music with my Macbook I may not need to open it.

And Apple is getting close to offering cloud-based movie streaming,working with Hollywood studios to get movies streaming through iTunes. LA Times this week said that Apple was hoping to get that service off the ground by the end of this year, or early next year. Apple now streams TV shows and movie to devices like the Apple TV, but Apple TV has small penetration. This would add that feature to purchased content, and widen the range of devices that could stream and most importantly iPads.

Functionality available through the input device is something worth exploring. When we do research work on how devices (or tools) from both an anthropological and design perspectives evolve and how they shape our everyday interactions, we see emerging complex cultural artifacts that connect different kinds of social and cultural practices.

The increasing emerging interactions and sociability makes the behavior hard to research using conventional research approach. The three main central affordances of the personal technologies for social actions are 1/the very personal nature of these devices (at least more so in the west) and getting more personal with increasing access to critical information and 2/ the idea of anytime anywhere always on, everyone and always connected 3/ the sensing and reacting capability of future devices. Like many I carry my Blackberries around in the office, at home and everywhere I go. Many of us are tied to our iPhone/iPad/Android phones/Blackberries and must carry a functioning smart phone at all times. For our research, we focus on how multitouch can interact with geospatial information and on how other modalities can be combined to enrich the interaction with spatial differences. We have a lot of very interesting findings. I may share some here next week.

Does Management Needs Creativity? Is It A Gift Of God Or Product Of Preparation, Practice And Training?

This has been a very crazy week between meetings, conference calls with London, Mexico City, Shanghai, Seoul and Paris, magazine deadline and cover shoot, staff party, a number of other social events, and London Business School's worldwide alumni celebration took place last Thur in over 80 cities, and it was great to catch up with many familiar faces.

The next issue of M/I/S/C is the big "Creativity" issue - the magazine is doing so well and it is putting some pressure to keep up the quality. I started them magazine in a few weeks and operate it on a "zero planning" basis - meaning I do not have an editorial calendar, or editorial meetings and everything is sponstaneous. Scary thought for some. I was wondering what should I do about the cover last Monday. Decided to use a dancer instead of a model for the cover on Tuesday. Picked up the phone and called a dance school the same day and talked to Karen Duplise of Ryerson Theatre School (Performance Dance Degree Program) and went in for a quick casting the next day. Studio booked and shooting session scheduled on Thurs. Friday was for picture selection. I am pretty happy with it. You have to wait 10 weeks to see the next cover. Here's a peek.

Dance is like design, the question is always about how much art (the craft) and how much creativity. Celebrity choreographer Twyla Tharp choreographed Push Comes To Shove (1976) which featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and is now thought to be the best example of the crossover ballet. The crossover was a perfect example of creativity in a highly disciplined art. 

Tharp has written a book about creativity - The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.  In the book she shared what she has learned about creativity and how those lessons apply to anyone with creative impulses. She believes that creativity is not a gift from the gods, but rather the product of preparation and effort. Some truth here but not sure I torally agreed with that.

 

Like to share a reprint of my interview with London Business School Alum News on new thinking that is crucial to innovation, first apprared in LBS Alumni News and then LBS IMPACT.

What do you see as your impact on the world? My LBS degree was my second graduate business degree. I was able to have the luxury to put more focus on the quality of the learning in one specific subject area rather than multiple foundation components. I was excited about learning from inspiring teachers such as Sumantra Ghoshal, Tom Stopford, Jules Goddard and many others. They inspired me to think about deep management and leadership and helped me to realise the difference between good managerial practices influenced by bad management theories and good management theories applied through bad managerial practices.

Business and government leaders are experiencing a profound crisis of trust and even legitimacy and that has triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of ‘managing’. The very core of many management theories is being questioned and ‘management’ is close to, if not passed, the point of failure. My mission is to help Fortune 500 companies make sense of what’s going on and to rethink, re-imagine and reorganise for a future of unprecedented uncertainties and opportunities through applied design thinking. I operate at the intersection of design thinking, competitive strategy and organisational change.

What indelible mark do you want to leave on the world? As a side project, I publish a design thinking and innovation magazine called M/I/S/C/ (Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity), the idea came to me when I was in Milan trying to decide what magazine I wanted to read on the plane. I really wanted one about innovation and change but the ones on the shelf were not hitting the mark. So I decided to start one. It is doing amazingly well selling in over 22 countries. Now we’re doing a Spanish edition as well as an iPad edition. I hope it can take on a life of its own and leave a mark by inspiring future managers and business thinkers.

What is the greatest lesson you’ve learnt? I learnt that it is very important to embrace failure. I should have failed more and more often when I was younger. But unfortunately people did not encourage ‘embracing Failure’. I didn’t take many risks and I played it very safe with every project I started. I did everything I could to make it work because failure was seen something that holds you back. I know now that you learn more when you fail often. Trying to avoid failure only prevents growth but once you alleviate that fear many more opportunities present themselves to you. Slowly, ‘failure’ is starting to gain acceptance and it will make future professionals much stronger and wiser.

What was your biggest mistake? Not listening to my intuition. It’s difficult to trust yourself when everyone and everything around you is telling you something different. Trusting your gut is one of the most important things you can learn. Also, not leveraging the opportunities that come with any crisis. Every situation presents obstacles but also opportunities – you just have to look for them.

What is the next step for you? I’m very excited about helping companies power into the future through design thinking. It is the reason I go to work (or the airport) every morning. Our company started as an experiment and is now fast becoming the most talked about innovation firm. The next step is to secure a global presence and build the next generation of leaders that will propel our growth. The future is exciting.

Random Thoughts On Muggles, Magic And Design Thinking.

For those of you who are not familiar with Muggles, they are people who are incapable of magic, and who are usually unaware of the wizarding world. Design Thinking is sort of like wizardries, it takes certain type of people with the certain type of training, Hogwarts or Harvard.

When Muggles think Design Thinking, they see nothing new there and they believe it has been around for a long time, it basically means they still don’t get it and may never will. They hardly see the real challenge, it is simply not to invent a better mouse traps. We care capable of doing more and being more innovative. The power of our imagaination is what it is.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

Design Thinkin is alot more than lateral thinking and creativity de Bono style or ad agency style brainstorming. Design Thinking fills the gap created by management theories and business schools which analytical thinking and data-driven decision making override intuition where empathy is never part of the equation.

Companies have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of strategic making, leadership styles and management model. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards Design Thinking. Design Thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. It takes a certain type of people who are comfortable with different thinking styles. I’ve read so much poorly written papers about design thinking and many of them don’t even grab the basic principles and its true transformational power.

Often people talk narrowly about design and prototyping, but Design Thinking is not just bringing the power of empathetic creative problem-solving to bear on a human needs, it is an organization culture, a mindset, a framework and a toolkit to solve complex wicked problems that we created. It provides a balance between the needs to create customer value, shareholder return and social value. Design Thinking is strategic.

Everyone comes to me hoping to join Idea Couture claims they are creative, they have great ideas and can turn ideas into great products and create new markets. Go deeper and I ask the how… there comes the sound of silence. Great Idea, great products, great business is a tagline, not a strategy. Design Thinking can be applied to fill the gaps of traditional strategic thinking. The increasingly complex needs of the business need a new toolkit and Design Thinking is exactly what is needed. It helps to uncover new needs, creatively redefine value, reconfiguration of value-chain activities, develop compelling brand narratives and create markets that are yet to exist. When my friend Roger Martin advocates Design Thinking, he is not talking about ethnography or prototyping; he is talking about a whole new management paradigm.

Everything is designed—from behavior, systems, organizations to public policies. Design is universal. The dirty secrets of why how big corporations destroy shareholder value are actually no secrets. Everyone from the board of directors to the frontline employees knows 'why' a company is 'stuck.' Because their structures and management systems are so rigid and can’t adapt to changing market shifts or respond to any disruptions; their over focus on core competencies and optimization that prevent them to see beyond the core and; fail to see and anticipate the future and even if they see it they fail to act on it. This is where Design Thinking comes into play.

Everyone understands the need to make money and everyone hope they can do magic. And everyday many moguls are trying to create magic with cute packaging and fancy taglines and hoping to make a lot of money, off course it won’t work. The real magic lies in understanding deep human desire and unmet needs and anticipate emerging behavior, not every company truly understands how to do it. They teach those at the Ministry of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design "Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation" Seminar Is Officially Open For Registration. Spaces Are Limited.

I finally have started on designing for the new executive program for the Harvard Graduate School of Design - Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation. I have been getting a lot of request to speak on this topic and beyond curiosity, many are interested to see how they can apply these concepts not in product development or design but in complex problem solving. After three years of practive devopment and finally put them all together in one seminar. Plan to take this to Europe and Asia later in the year. This is what powers a Senior Designer/Desigh Thinker/Creative Professional to gain a seat in board level stragetic discussions.

The seminar allows participants to learn how to apply the framework and cognitive processes of Design Thinking to connect with your own creativity, frame specific problems, generate innovative ideas, and convert those ideas into tangible business opportunities. In terms of pedagogy, Design Thinking is a lot more than just a human-centered, rapid prototyping design methods, in fact Design Thinking should be less about design, more about thinking.

The program is designed to show how Design Thinking are used by a remarkably diverse range of global organizations across all industry sectors in creating tangibility in insights, foresights, meanings and strategies. Design Thinking is gaining popularity for many reasons. Mainly corporations are facing crises on several fronts and not only from the obvious such as low cost competition, disruptive technologies, economic sustainability, and social development.

Business executives,non-profit and government leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy and all these factors have triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of planning and doing things. The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure. These leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Large established institutions have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of leadership and management. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards design thinking as a new management wonder drug that will help them make sense of what is going on and secure their next big bonus or promotion.

Design Thinking comes just-in-time. Design thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. You can register here for The Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation Program, please make sure you check if you qualify for affiliate discount. It will held at the Harvard Club in Newe York City third week of May.

This is for executives (both creative and management professionals) who wish to learn how to apply Design Thinking methods beyond the noise and cliché and many of which are myths that are simply not true. It is my pleasure to have Dr. Scott Robiner (Assistant Professor at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons and holds a Doctorate and Master Degree in Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design) as a guest speaker. He brings his perspectives of Design Thinking from a cross-discipline designer perspective and will faciliate an interesting dialogue among participants.

More next few days. Need to board a plane to Frankfurt.

There's Gotta Be Easier And Cooler Ways To Transfer Files Between Devices. A Lot Of People Are Working On It.

When people talk about innovation generally people are quick to refer to something completely new. The question is how many new ideas are really new? Or recanation of old ideas or new applications of old ideas? Or just new ways to package old ideas? It is not uncommon that multiple companies or people are working on the same new idea but no one knows each other are working on the same thing?

So many people are working on innovative ways to send and receive files over a wireless network which is done through Bluetooth or infrared or whatever. Some engineers are playing with the idea of using the optical spectrum that offers better security and higher transfer rates. Engineers from Pennsylvania State University have now succeeded in moving data outside the usual line of sight restrictions at speeds of over one gigabit per second, more than double the max speed available today.

The engineers have developed a system where a high-powered laser diode transmits data by converting electricity into infrared light, which then bounces off any walls and surfaces before being received by an avalanche photo diode, where it's converted back into electricity and translated into usable data. Using it in a room with no windows will ensure that any transmitted signals do not escape and cannot be intercepted or less interferences. Not sure how many rooms are completely closed with no windows.

One creative application could be the "wireless projection of HD television. Currently, two high definition broadcasts exceed the bandwidth of any radio system, but with a 1.6 gigabit per second gigabit system, two HD channels could be broadcast," according to Professor of Electrical Engineering Mohshen Kavehrad.

At Idea Couture we’ve been playing with the idea for more than 18 months exploring new ways to transfer files between devices using simple touch gestures. We called it “Touch-and-Send”. Obviously there must have been dozens of start-ups or labs working on solving file transfer problems or creative ways to do that using similar approach. Currently there is no simple way to move things, plugging into the USB is still the simplest way and requires no set up. 

But a new research project at MIT called Sparsh is also working to fix the file transfer problem. Sparsh (Hindi word for "touch") is a virtual cloud-based clipboard where any data, like a phone number or photograph, can temporarily live until it's "pasted" to another device. It is kind of like the mailroom.

To make it work, both devices need to be Sparsh-enabled and the person touches data on a device, such as a picture or a music file can be sent through the cloud and receive by another device. Right now, Sparsh is at a concept satge at MIT's Media Research Lab. Very exciting idea indeed.

Expect to see many more innovations enabled by the cloud. The sky is the limit.

Design Thinking Is Failed Experiment? How Can That Be Because The Experiments Have Barely Started? Bruce, Not Too Fast!

This is my response to Bruce Nussbaum’s lastest Fast Company’s blog declaring “Design Thinking” is over and that he is moving on to something new. He is calling it "Creative Quotient" which is really his new book, I was wondering why he would make that statement. People hardly fully understand what Design Thinking is, now he wants to introduce another idea. Not too fast! I was writing this while waiting for the airport to clear as President Obama Air Force One was there and they closed down the runway.

Bruce writes “The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ. I am writing a book about Creative Intelligence, due out from Harper Collins in fall 2012…...”

He can move on but for sure but not me (Sorry Bruce, I really can't agree with you on this one.)  Although there is some truth there about consultants quick to turn any ideas or practices into ‘processes’ that companies can buy out of a box and consultants can help them implement in 60 days. Most of the time they don’t even know what they are doing. Even if they do, they often ignore the soft side with an over emphasis on the hard side. On that note, the comment is equally true if apply to any practices. Processes are important and that’s how large organizations function, it is easy to say let’s improve our creative quotient throughout the organizations and we will be fine. For me, Design Thinking is much getting more solid that ever as we develop them further into business practices and if fully integrated in the organization culture decision-making and support toolkit, it can be very powerful.

On the other hand, “Creative Quotient” is like saying let’s is more creative. Sometimes I wish I could detach the word ‘creative’ from ‘design thinking.’ I know I cannot, but design thinking is not all above creativity. There is a lot more than being creative. When Bruce suggested that the success rate for design thinking processes was very low. I am not sure he can make that statement. It is like saying the success rate for strategic thinking processes was very low. We need to look at the maturity lifecycle of how it is implemented and to what extend it is embraced my organizations and well as aligned with the company’s business strategies. It is large small change effort, not a quick process redesign. Let’s wait for at least five to eight years to make that conclusion. A case in point, it took the academics and the business community more than 25 years before someone publicly declared the “Death of Strategic Planning”.

The increased adoption of multidisciplinary approaches to business problem solving and including the application of “Design Thinking” (but not exclusively) helps organizations fill a critical and often over looked knowledge gaps and solve some of information deficiencies. Problem. By combining the two organizations establish more comprehensive and ultimately competitive bodies of actionable knowledge and insights that reflect and avoid from pitfalls of linear strategic planning. This approach does not discount or diminish the value of traditional business methods in problem solving– rather – by leveraging the best qualities of both business and design thinking- it establishes a more sensitive, powerful and potent analytical tool and resulting in a more holistic perspective and learning experience that is meaningful, valid and agile.

"Design Thinking" is here to stay. “Design Thinking” allows us to provide a systemic response to the challenges that we all face. Not designing bandages or tactics that ultimately create more problems than they are designed to solve. “Design Thinking” brings empathy into the core of strategy making and allows rapid decision-makings with insufficient data, which is where most people structure with in innovation.

“Design Thinking” also has a positive effect on changing organizational culture – reveals and introduces new behaviors and challenges people to communicate and learn in new ways – while empowering them (through the adoption of tools, techniques, and culture) to think differently. But this is NOT the “Design Thinking” they teach in design schools. So don’t be confused.

The world of MBAs likes the quantitative assurance even though they know it is just a false sense of confidence. Microsoft Excel is only marginally more accurate than a crystal ball or tarot cards. I’ve seen many smart MBAs struggle with innovation be in the process or the problem identification and solving approach and most of all they don’t understand very core values of design thinking. This is why innovation is so hard for management consultants. Equally it is hard for the designers waving their banners saying ‘design thiking here’ and what they are selling is raw creativity or cute ideas or prety designs. Not solutions to wicked problems in an increasing complex world. We have enough buzzwords, there’s no need to introduce a new one. Let’s stick with “Design Thinking” for now.

With The Emerging Of The New "Object-Culture" - Meanings Are Sought Through Social Identities, Visual Information and Interfaces / Interactions

There are objects that I love for many different reasons. They range from my Leicas to my JBL speakers, LV bags, Prada shoes and Mac computers. Objects that are highly functional can also be highly personal … expressive, reliable and artistic. Designers, brand marketers and product development executives often have to deal with the philosophical dilemmas such as subject vs. object; humanity vs. nature; function vs. style; and simplicity vs. complexity. Every time we come up with an innovative product design or experience we need to consider all of these things.

When does the value of a product exceeds its functional value and at what point the emotive value reaches a point of diminishing return? What is the value of the emotive premium or should there be a premium at all? Can we engineer emotive elements into the design without adding cost? Whose job is it? Did they teach that in MBA or MFA ? Or neither? It is something we think about everyday at Idea Couture. The engineering of desire; emotive attributes as product features; and interactions as gateways to collective experiences.

We are definitely reaching another higher state of our “object-culture” when consumer electronics such as cell phones and other gadgets replace or compliment our usual “badges” and these new form of badges are more than just symbols of tribes and tastes, they are windows to our other world – somewhere that our identities are developed and validated. It is worth to deploy our anthropologists to study the new role and meaning of social objects (electronics gadgets) and what it means to marketers.

Honestly speaking, I think men need badges more than women and men likes to see the world in groups and believe people in groups (including clubs, schools, sports, tribes, politics, religions or nations) tend to differ from one another to such a degree that they perceive each other as though they were totally different species from another planet. These groups (reflect by badges) provide their members with a strong sense of distinct and superior identity.

As designers and marketers we design objects that wonderfully fit in the palm of our hands; sometimes bring us a sense of confidence and occasionally moments of delights in the form of a text message. This is what it looks like. It’s got a little touch screen on it; you can shake it and it will respond to your command. It is ultra thin and fits nicely into the pockets of your Hugo Boss jacket. Call this the period of late modernity or postmodernity if you wish. We are living in a time when the legacy of the modern era, in which empiricism and utilitarianism rise to prominence. It is simply just part of being human. And that’s why marketing and product design is never a true science despite people come up with useless fancy tools.

Philosopher Charles Taylor has offered an explanation of the meaning of these activities within modern societies. He says that in the modern worldview meaning is sought through concepts such as progress, reason and freedom and a sense of meaning in one’s life. I think technology is a clear sign of “progress”, collective thinking and reasoning in mass and real time code is the redefinition of “reason” and “freedom” is reflected through Facebook and other social media. Let’s see what our anthropologists have to add.

Now back to my day job. It is not so fun anymore when my to-do-list is longer than my blog post.

Can You Teach MBAs To Be More Creative? Or Can Creativity Can Be Taught At All? I Think So. Same For Making Good Cupcakes.

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets.  “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.

The State Of Design Thinking And The Future Of Management (And Education)

I’ve a lot of requests to speak to the business and design communities iabout the state of "design thinking" and how it is being practiced. Talking about what that means is one thing but practicing it in the real world is a different thing. Idea Couture is probably the first large scale experiment that was built in day one to apply design thinking in the most sophisticated setting. Here's photos of our SF office. I am really liking it. Still a lot of work needed and new talents to add.

I see Idea Couture as still a work in progress (and will be for another 3 years) and serves as real world laboratories in fostering collaboration between the information design, engineering, foresight, visual art and industrial design in applied complex business problem solving. Our firm practices reflective collaboration – bringing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams tegether to visually model complex systems and industry structures to yield new insights and foresights, the results improve the quality of our thinking in a predominately right-brain biased world of decision-making.

I like to think of our offices as a global network of "encounter spaces” that design thinkers from differing disciplines are assembled together as teams to work on specific projects and share insights, uncover foresights -- it is a collaboration among the arts + design + economics + technology in support of clients who are looking to create meaningful differentiation, economic value and strategic impact through design thinking and design doing. It is basically the future of management. And the future of education.

I see serious challenges with people coming out from design schools (as well as business schools) and I wonder what are they teaching these people at some schools today. The missing interdependency of broader functions and the lack of visual sensibilities are impacting the quality of graduates.

Through art, students can learn to have alternative contact with any kind of knowledge or information about different thematic topics. When a student is interacting with a piece of art, he/she can live a holistic experience, with his mind by the symbols, with his/her body by the senses and with his/her heart by the emotion evoked. A piece of art is a very special because it carries the human history and provoke ways of developing perspectives, which is lacking in MBA education.

Teaching is an art, engineering is an art, urban planning is an art, photography is an art, business is an art, and design is an art. All have form as well as content, like a piece of art; therefore, a business person, a technology architect or a school teacher can be an artist, too. Both jobs can be creative, imaginative and communicative.

A new generation of hybrid-thinkers (art+business) is extremely valuable to companies and they will be hot potatoes. Why? They are hard to find and they are best positioned to solve many complex or wicked problems that are way over the head of people trained with one skill set. These hybrid or design thinkers (design doesn’t mean design as a craft taught in many design school) are the creative forces behind creative industries. They are not the creative types from ad agencies; they are real strategic creative thinkers.

At IC, our jobs are solving complex problems, helping our clients to deal with massive changes in consumer behavior, technological disruptions, global competition and many will face extinction unless they figure out how to innovate their way out of hyper-competitive landscape. That’s why we are recruiting people that we can train to become hybrid thinkers or design thinkers. I use the term interchangly. At the root of hybrid thinking is the ability to transfer - to use knowledge from one discipline in another. That's what I teach them to do everyday.

With The Tablets And E-Readers Race, Wonder How Many Of Those Will End Up In The Landfills Before They Were Actually Being Used.

This week in San Francisco is action packed. New people starting, more furniture coming, a few projects in final stages and magazines. Scott and I were doing some street bodystorming between meetings (photo above).

Since I wrote about tablet last year at the CES, it is still the main battlefield this year as everyone is not only jumping into it, but most have no clue of how to play or win this war. Yes iPad is now the common enemy and this one is not easy to beat, you have to beat them on hardware, software, human factors, interface, and most of all the Apple brand and integration with iTunes and iMac.

The biggest surprise is Motorola, beaten to death in the mobile space and now entering the tablet game in far better than shape that others The Motorola tablet is by far the best tablet, it runs on NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Google's new Android Honeycomb.

Motorola Mobility, the new Motorola spinoff that went live as a separate entity on the NASDAQ. This new company focuses entirely on consumer devices, in partnership with Google and Verizon they just announced the new the Motorola Atrix, a smartphone that doubles as a legitimate PC replacement with both desktop and laptop docks. This company is coming back big time.

The Motorola Xoom tablet and the HTC Thunderbolt were especially impressive in performance and usability. Both are the only two serious threat to iPad, at least until Apple comes up with iPad2 or iPadthin or iPadsports. With the tablet race, Nvidia looks like is becoming the Intel of the next great wave of computing. Where’s Intel? Samsung and LG folks are sleeping and eating in their war rooms thinking about fighting this tablet war. Both are committed and determined to be a key player, but could use a lot of help.

Where’s Sony? The once mighty consumer electronics giant? What’s the coolest thing from Sony? And when’s the last time you heard about a breakthrough product from Sony? When’s the last time you heard about a market-leading product from Sony? They spend too much time trying to win back the TV war by going full throttle on 3D. I know for them, losing the TV war is hurting them deep, as they have always been the kings of TVs, that is until Korea joined the game.

Sony deputy president Kunimasa Suzuki, "We'd really like to take the No. 2 position (in the tablet market) by 2012. At this moment, the timing of (those tablet) announcements versus (their) availability today is a different story. iPad is the king of tablets for sure. Who is going to be (the) second player?" Aiming for the second is not exactly a good strategy. They are missing the boat already.

The not-so-secret thing is most new tablets are still in design stage and most don't come out until September, if it all--take. And by then Apple will be another 12 months ahead of the game.

Unfortunately for those other 500plus e-readers I saw at the CES last year, most of them are so last season. Since the launch of the iPad early last year, it doesn not make sense not to merge the idea of e-books onto tablet devices that also surf the web, play games, play videos, and do a lot more. What I hate to see is that all those ebooks become ewaste in the landfill, let’s figure a way to do something with them.

We Need To Change The Way We Use Trash, One Imagination At A Time. It Is About Behavior As Much As Economics.

We all love shopping and some do more than other. We love to buy shoes, clothes, electronic gadgets, toys and cameras. We all know we can’t continue on like this, the stuff we buy today is way worse than what we were buying a decade ago, everything has tons of electronic components inside which is really hard to recycle.

I guess if I try to name the top three most frequent purchases outside of food and other necessities, it would be 1/ shoes 2/consumer electronics (cell phones and laptops) and 3/clothing and accessories.

We don’t buy and throw away a TV every 12 months, but we do these days for cell phones. Thanks to Nokia, Apple, Sony Erickson, Samsung, LG and Blackberry. Shoes are probably something that we can rethink. Not by changing the habits of buying less shoes, but the way we manufacture them and discard them. Every time you walk pass a Camper shop (they are nice), you feel like you need to pick something for the season.

Sustainable shoes is not something new, the above is the Nike Dunks made out of old skate decks. Very cool. I remember visiting a Spanish company 15 years ago and they used recycle tires to make shoes. Not sure if they are still around. So how do we reduce the footprint of shoes? Whether it is your Pradas, UGHs or Nikes or Campers.

Company such as Simple shoe has an environmentally holistic approach to their business design. Simple uses recycled and sustainable products such as hemp, bamboo, car tires, wool, silk, plastics and crepe rubber, in their shoe manufacturing process. They also have an Ethical Supply Chain Guidelines that spell out the fair practice that Simple’s manufacturing and distributing partners must adhere to. Companies like Nike and Patagonia have been doing that that for a long time.

Or take a look at Novacas boots. From their mission statement, “Novacas is a vegan owned and operated business that produces, manufactures and distributes leather alternative cruelty-free shoes and footwear.” I like the cruelty-free one, not exactly sure what it means. I think they can use some help in the design.

Nike has something cool to offer, and they have rediscovered a new life for the print media after death. Nike just released the Women's Premium Print Pack, a limited edition set of three shoe styles, all made using shredded magazines. I hope they used the right magazines such as Vogue, Good Company, NY Times and may be Wallpaper. The pack contains the Flash Macro Premium, the Blazer Mid Premium, and the Air Rift Premium. Unfortunately they are only available in Europe and China. Let’s hope you won’t get caught with your shoes made from recycle banned magazines in China.

Idea Couture brings design thinking to sustainability big time. And not in a simplistic way of using recycled material. It is not that simple. The real economics of sustainability is still a work-in-process. Some desiners are naive about sustainability. But we need to start somewhere, Idea Couture just launched a site called Use2, the idea is to inspire young designers and design students (and high school students) to rethink the after life of objects. Thank you IC Use2 team (Sady, Jessica, Simon, Paul, Lily, Emma, Cheesan) for making this real. Please share that with your friends.

Use2 has lots of DIY ideas for people to use in class or to inspire designer to think about the second life of their designs. It is a designer’s responsibly to make sure that even old products can create value and until they become absolutely useless then they should go into being recycled. Recycle is also a costly thing that people are not aware of. It costs us more environmentally to recycle many products than to throw them away. The problem requires real d-school and b-school thinking. It is as much as about behavior as about economics.

Have a Happy and Green New Year!