innovation playground Idris Mootee

Apple's Biggest Challenge Is What To Do With $100 Billion. Just Write A Check And Buy Sony Before They Further Destroy More Value.

Apple's current biggest problem is not the next iPhone. It is the 100 billion dollar problem. Microsoft had been criticized for years for having too much cash and not putting them to use. They eventually started paying dividend starting 2003. It is not easy to deploy them in a way that creates the expecatation of return Apple's investors are expecting. I think they will eventually start paying dividend.

With Apple's war chest hitting $100 billion soon (currently around $98 billion but was originally estimated to be $60 billion) investors are asking the same question: What are you doing with the money or return it to shareholders? Putting that kind of money to work is not easy. It is over $100 in cash per share. $100 billion is roughly the same as California's 2012-2013 state budget and can literally buy a few countries or pay for a year of student loan for every college student in America.

Apple's core business is like printing money. Apple recorded a $16 billion increase in cash sequentially and there is no sign of slowing down with 66% rise in revenue with 36% rising expenses. That makes Apple the most valuable company at $300+ billion, which is close to the sum of the market cap of three computer giants: Microsoft ($200.2 billion), HP ($72.5 billion) and Dell ($29.2 billion).

Unfortunate big acquisitions don’t always work because of many reasons. And there is no magic formula for successful strategic transformation post acquisitions and most companies ended up underperforming post acquisitions. The problem is the inability to articulate the strategic logic of an acquisition and developing an organization and cultural integration plan.

At Idea Couture, we help acquirers in visualizing the future state and show how the pieces fit together in a very tangible (and credible) way. The future strategy is manifested in a well-articulated way showing its value creation potential. It is done through applied design thinking. Power Point cannot do the job. We bring the future state to the present to excite shareholders, employees and customers.

Apple’s history of acquisition has always been late stage start-ups that bring unique capabilities or technologies rather than revenue. With $100 billion you can literally buy up every early-stage start-up you want. Google has $44.5 billion for comparison.

Apple can use the money to purchase all patents over the years developed by Kodak, Research In Motion, Xerox Parc and Erickson and that can only account to a maximum 15-20% of the cash that they hold, but that patent portfolio allow them to sue anyone competing in their space in the next ten years.

Or Apple can use the money to buy up HP and Research In Motion and swiftly end Windows dominance in the enterprise market? Or buy Amazon and Netflix to reinvent and dominate content distribution.

Or Apple can just buy Sony? Funny Sony was looking at buying Apple when the company was at its worse shape in 1995. I still have a strategy deck I produced in 1996 about how Sony can leverage pieces of Apple and how the deal can create value for Sony. Now Apple could easily afford to buy Sony with its market value around $18 billion. If I am Apple’s CEO, that’s what I’ll do. Sony has been poorly managed from a corporate strategy level but does have great technologies, products, brand and talents. I would sell the studio business and concentrate on entertainment appliances. This deal can immediate further increase Apple's enterprise value. The integration part would be a nightmare.

Or just make it easy, Apple can acquire with cash HTC, Sony Ericksson, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola, Nintendo which together has a combined value of roughly $93 billion. That's a lot of fun to figure out what you can do with these companies. And you still have $7 billion left to play with. Perhaps acquire New Balance for $400mm, Jobs probably would like that idea if he is still around. We miss him.

You Think Innovation Is Hard. Business Transformation Is A Hundred Times More Difficult. And In Fact It Is The Number One Barrier For Strategic Innovation.

People think innovation is almost just about new ideas. Funny how many think Blue Ocean Strategy is a big wake-up call when all it does is communicating the very the basic and simple idea of strategic innovation – how not to compete with your competitors in the same game and instead create a new game.

A strategist has the choice between getting back into the fight with existing competitors or creating a new space when there is no competition AND no proven customer demand. This is the hardest part - "no proven customer demand" and let's see what the board has to say when you tell them that your strategy cannot be validated quantitatively. New game strategy is extremely difficult to make happen for a number of reasons:

• It is hard to convince the board to bet on a market that has yet to exist
• Successful founders CEOs are stuck seeing things with an old mental and underestimaing the threats
• It is hard to change the minds of people who wanted (and have vested interest in) the old business to work and not willing to give up
• It is hard to make the switch as it requires new mindset, capabilities and organization design
• It is hard to be credible using the the current brand entering or creating the new market space
• There is the question of how sustainable the new value logic from a customer and market perspective

Looking back at the history of industrial revolution or our information or technology revolution, red oceans vs. blue oceans or a better way to describe it is “today cash flow" vs. "future cash flow" or "defender vs. "attacker" etc. Avoiding competitions in the red oceans give rise to innovation opportunities that create new market space and could triggers a new round of industrial transformation. The author did not address the dynamics of the industry transformation.

Straegy is never that simple as red and blue oceans, organizations are increasingly inter-connected as they leverage brand, patent, talent, technology, knowledge, channels, products and services from each other often located in disparate parts of the world. These complicated inter-connections often prevent companies to reinvent themselves even the opportunity is obvious.

There are many hurdles and barriers for transformation including cognitive, resource, capabilities, motivation and political ones that prevent making a new game strategy implementable. Idea Couture Brand-driven Strategic Transformation goes beyond creating, communicating and maintaining a sense of identity and belonging for the employees, we bring foresights into the process and connect the align the brand with the business strategy and the strategic futures.

The brand is used like a savings account for emotional equity while we develop an engaging and energizing feeling of commitment to the organization by creating and co-creating a shared destiny; this is where it creates the highest impact. Conventional visioning and mission writing exercises often fall short to drive transformation. The idea is to get executives and senior managers in front line employees to move beyond empty, slogan-driven communications, which are more likely to lead to detached cynicism than to engagement, and to help them develop a clear personal commitment to an organizational purpose that will reflect in all aspect of managerial actions.

Business transformation is the execution of an integrated, corporate-wide program aimed at aligning the present and future as well as the organization, strategy and brand, it ensures alignment and internal consistency by reshaping the leadership, strategy, finances, organization and operations of businesses as a whole. It is not a Power Point, it is the energy flow of an oranization.

On Building The Creative Culture And Learning How To "Forget" Creatively.

We had our Idea Couture Christmas staff part last week. Looking back there were a lot being accomplished and a lot more to do. What started as a little experiment bringing multi-disciplinary design thinkers together and now becoming a key driving force and intellectual engine advancing the practice of design thinking in innovation and business applications. Idea Couture is where multidisciplinary thinkers come together with shared purpose and where creativity flourishes. I am looking forward to have our London and Mexico City offices running in 3-6 months. I feel I have the right people in place and that's a great start.

At Idea Couture, creativity means more than just novelty ideas. It means new ways to frame problem, using new lenses and developing new perspectives. I am so happy when I see happy people in the company doing great things. I am happy to see people growing and that's gives me tremendous satisfaction.

At the end of the day, we're in the business of producing the non-conforming super smart and creative thinkers and doers. I am pushing the envelope everyday and so far no one is complaining. Heartiest thanks to my management team who did a great job of putting togther the first Idea Couture Award.  You guys rock!

On the road this week and spending time with people hearing them talk about their innovation challenges and how they apply design thinking. Lots of great meetings. We're aware of the big changes coming ahead. Every business, government and instirutions will be impacted. Change does not creep up on us every 10 or 20 years, it is an ever-present business and organization phenomenon that is disrupting industries and causing firms and industries to disappear. Although the degree and velocity of change is unprecedented.

Everyday we’re dealing with more and more unknown and unknowable, but decisions still need to be made. Many of the challenges today are unique and have few or no precedents, so textbook solutions (and no guru don’t waste time buying whatever best sellers) or trying to find aHarvard Business School case study. Past solutions do not necessarily apply today. The external environment is constantly absorbing shocks from technological advancement, cultural change and systems failure.

Creativity is needed everywhere to rethink and reimagine products, experiences, companies, processes and even industries. Top executives are looking everywhere for new thinking and solutions that are outside the routine of orthodox strategies and old paradigms. So where can you look for new ideas? And how can you design an environment in which creative people can survive, thrive and flourish? We can begin by asking, how can you make people creatively forget what they know in order to reinvent the future? This is where sensemaking comes into play.

A big part of sensemaking is creative “forgetting” and it is first thing you must do. We all create our own environments and then constrained by them. Being able to aware and realize the impact of our own behavior in creating the environment in which we’re in is a very important first step. Forget who we are is something worth practicing. There may not be any scientific evidence to suggest that those who know what to forget can think more creatively about the future, but in the formulation of business strategy, creativity can be seriously constrained if it is burdened by the past. The problem lies in the notion of “core competencies,” which suggest that companies should stick to what they know best. If that’s the case, then why many of those once great companies should still be around.

Creativity And Innovation In Small And Medium Size Firms

I am in Egypt this week and trying to finish three big Power Point decks, writing 6 documents and finished reading 63 documents with a slow Internet connection. And trying to finalize the editorial content for March 2012 issue of my magazine. It is not easy.

The December issue of M/I/S/C/ is the big "Creativity" issue. It will be out in 25 countries in the second or third week of Dec. This is thickest issue so far  and will also available on iPad. I like the idea of "Creativity" as a magazine theme but also wanted to make sure they are relevant to business and not just pure creativity.

People often ask what is creativity? How does it happen? How do we prepare ourselves for it? Or can you be prepared for it? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker, or do you only need the right side of your brain? Does it require for other profession that are usually not associated with creativity too? There is no simple answer.

Creative individuals have a few features that distinguish them from their peers. First, they possess both a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and with well-developed skills to express them through different medium. And second, they find their work intrinsically motivating and enjoy the creative process not only interested in the outcome.

Creative people also tend to have a “discovery” orientation, which leads them to view situations from different perspectives, to find problems, and to ask novel questions and to avoid group-think. Almost every entrepreneur/start-up person is a creative person at heart, because it requires a lot of creativity to start and manage a new business (with the exception of franchise business). It is harder to find creativity in large firms not because there are not enough creative people, but the organization design and business processes make it almost impossible to be creative. And for them, creativity means finding ways to work around the system but not creating new ways to meet customer needs.

For that reason, many believe that small firms are more creative and innovative than larger firms. Not only they are more creative, they are more agile and nimble. But what about mid-size firm? There are companies that are too small to be big and too big to be small?

Medium size companies tend to lack resources and expertise whereas larger firms tend to have more resources and knowledge (including hiring consultants) but more vulnerable to external shock and any radical change. People think the sheer availability of resources means larger firms should be able to innovate along product, channel, process, and paradigm more effectively. That's not true at all. Any large established businesses carry their own old mental models and operational legacies make them hard to adjust to any changes - in particularly new ideas that cannibalize their core businesses.


I am not saying it is easier for small firms to innovate, it is not for the lack of creativity. Small medium companies tend to suffer a lack of knowledge cross-pollination and carry a higher degrees of path dependency. There are basically three strategies for innovation for small and medium size firms:

1. Advancing creativity and technological competitiveness based on new processes to deliver better products
2. Advancing technological and design creativity to design innovative new products
3. Advancing creativity and design thinking to turn products into experiences

Generally these three distinct models identify three trajectories for innovation that are largely separate from one another, although some complementarities exists. Medium size firms often suffer due to a lack of strategy or expertise to develop a robust strategy.  Their innovation in processes are often the results of the need to search for greater flexibility and minimize resource requirement. The high performance small and medium enterprises are usually the results of access to strategic advice combined their speed and agility in execution.

Apple Is Gearing Up To Attack The Living Room And To Turn Siri Into The Next Google?

I am exciting seeing the advance copy of M/I/S/C next issue - "The Creativity Issue". It will be in bookstores in 22 countries sometime first week of December. Now starting to work on the next one - the "Big Insight Issue". I have a few great ideas and now looking for some good guest contributors. Publising is painful but fun and thank you for those 50+ emails that compliment our effort. It is great to see that people are really liking it.

I’ve been following and speculating how Apple will be using Sirri acquisition strategically to compete in the next white space. Imagine Apple is now working on creating the next home entertainment experience, a place that is still not occupied by Microsoft?

I can’t wait for the day that I throw away every remote control that I have in my living room. First it is hopeless for me to figure out their functions and second they are ugly and don’t fit in my modern and elegant living room. What I want to see is I can just say a command and the TV or the controller will translate them and activate them.

The Siri in the living room will be different from the one on your iPhone. It will be your personal entertainment assistant and understand whether you’re in the mood of a movie, convert, news or just some soft jazz. I think this is the killer app for TV and will give Apple TV a real chance to take off. Up till now Apple TV is just a little experiment. I think we are 18 months away. There are still a lot of challenges such as bandwidth in some cases and voice recognition accuracy. May be there will be a tactile interface control or gesture-based control in additional to the voice command. The beauty is Siri doesn't need a rigid set of voice commands an able to interpret natural phrases by picking out keywords and some other cues.

And then the whole idea of “search” will bring Google into the game. It is reported that they are throwing resources into a refreshed Google TV and Apple has bought its third mapping company, beefing up its cartographic portfolio with eye-popping 3D imagery based on declassified missile-targeting technology.

Apple will be playing the same new game strategy as it did to the music industry creating an industry breakpoint. It will be a hardware, software and integration play powered by the iCloud. They still need to soft the gaming piece which Xbox and PS3 are the last defensible positions. I hope the Apple TV set will be available in black other than silver and white.

Innovation Is A Discipline Like Marketing And Finance. It Needs To Be Designed, Managed And Optimized.

I am writing about a few articles on creativity for the next issue of M/I/S/C The Creativity Issue. The editorial deadline is this week so I am now selecting the pieces that goes into this issue and art directing the design. I am still not sure what to do with the cover yet, I have a few days to think about it. May be 2 or 3. Busy week with cocktail paties and b-school alum events. Here are pictures of IC end of summer party, but arn't we just a week away from end of fall?

Creativity is an easy subject to write about but also a difficult one. Creativity is too heavily linked to novelty rather than purposeful creativity that powers up innovation and create positive and sometimes disruptive change. I am looking forward to finish writing this and move on to my day job – which is helping clients with design thinking tools, frameworks, processes and organizational design to make innovation a discipline.

The key difference between creativity and innovation is that while any idea can be an expression of creativity, it must create both customer value and economic value, and preferably social value, for it to be considered innovation. Innovation is a discipline. It is not a group of people pumping out ideas (which is the easy part); innovation is essentially the application of high creativity, applied across different disciplines from product design to marketing and channel strategy.

How can innovation be turned into a discipline? It is the discipline of getting deep customer insight;the discipline of sense making from different data sources; the discipline of managing ideas along the innovation life cycle; the discipline of capturing the imagination of customers and employees; and the discipline of managing internal resistance and stakeholder expectations.

The discipline needs to crossover with strategy, marketing, insight and product development in order to create breakthrough ideas, to fuel growth, to completely transform the ways that companies are managing themselves on the front end and the back end of their processes.

There is an interesting event Optimizing Innovation 2011 (3rd Annual Cross-Industry Event) to be held in New York City, Oct 19th and 20th. A very interesting speaker list includes Fabienne Jacquet (Director, External Innovation Global Technology at Colgate Palmolive), Pascal Mignolet (International Marketing/Intelligence Director Coffee & Tea at Sara Lee),Jorge Carbo (Senior Innovation/Project Director at Nike), Dondeena Bradley (VP, Global Design & Development at Pepsico) and Hannes Erler (VP Innovation at Swarovksi). It is a great opportunity to get to learn the secrets of success from the most experienced innovators so to put these ideas into practices. See you there.

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 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.

Great M/I/S/C Launch Party Last Night! Post Party Radom Thoughts On Innovation, Organization Design And Design Thinking Cuture.

Great party last night for my magazine M/I/S/C lunch party held at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. And Karin Wall (editor-in-chief) from Innovation Management joined us all the way from Sweden to co-launch their hard copy of Innovation Management with M/I/S/C. Cool people and great venue and not to mention good food. Exhausted after talking to 200+ people and there were about 20 people whom I last talked to was 7 years ago and actually never met in person and then there were some friends whom I have not seen for years. Oh what a night! And the girs at the office did a great job. I am thinking we should add 'party planning' to our innovation offerings. Anyhow, I have a lot of treat feedback on the magazine. Onto the next one!

I was watching the film ‘Inception’ on a long flight last week and I remembered one interesting dialogue from the film “How do you translate business strategy into emotion?”. I was not really watching as I was editing the next issue of M/I/S/C magazine, but the line caught my attention. I rewound it back and tried to make sure if I’ve heard it right. Yes. Translate business strategy into emotion!

That’s a great question and I am not sure people realize how important that question is. We’re human beings. And it is our emotion that makes us human. In business, we’re taught in business school about rational decision-making and fact-based decision making etc. etc. When it comes to design thinking and innovation, we realized how little we could apply these decision-making models. It is about the organizational culture as much as it is about process, framework and creativity.

The concept of organizational culture has drawn attention to the long-neglected, pretty subjective or the ‘soft’ side of organizational design. And many aspects of organizational culture, emotion and its relationship with design thinking have not received enough attention. Instead, emphasis has been placed primarily on the cultural and symbolic aspects that are relevant in an instrumental/pragmatic context. Organization culture is treated as a management tool and a instrument designed by management to shape employees' behavior. The idea of emotion is largely ignored.

The method of identifying organizational culture characteristics that foster innovation through design thinking is an interesting one. The more visible and tangible manifestations of culture are the artifacts. These may be easy to identify and observe but difficult to decipher. Values and state-of-mind tend to remain hidden and may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations. So often design thinking values are hidden deep within an organization and there are those who should design thinking and innovation and there is nothing beyond marketing slogans.

Can you pick a piece of documentation from an organization somewhere that can elicit some tacit aspects of design thinking and innovation culture? The idea is to provide a stimulus back to the organization so that they can reflect on an interpretation that is based on their cultural framework rather than on the corporate ethnography? What stimulus is required for the corporate ethnographer to get the dialogue flowing and what is need to provide a specific context but leave enough latitude for interpretation. This was achieved by asking the team members to discuss the concrete examples of successful and less successful application of design thinking in the context of their everyday work.

Starting with data gathering and analysis, the idea is to gather data for any example of design thinking applications experienced by the team and allow the team members to talk about their experiences of application. The interviews were semi-structured and cognitive mapping techniques were used to capture the views of each participant.

The individual cognitive maps were individually validated and conflated into a single map to represent the company’s collective cognition. The single map was further validated and refined. In a parallel process each of the transcripts was analyzed and codes were produced from transcript content analysis that represented the aspects of organizational culture that influenced radical product innovation. This resulted in the clustering of codes into aggregate themes (higher level codes) that represented aspects of the design thinking culture that were collectively considered to be positively associated with the facilitation of innovative outcomes.

This type of work is still in an early stage but I believe it will be extremely useful for organization to understand how design thinking (and to what extend) is embedding in an organizational culture. Without this understands, they are talking about more design and prettier things, not more design thinking.

"Build to Fail" And "Fail To Build" Can Have Different Meanings. To Fail Is Part Of To Build. To Fail Is To Hep To Build To Last. I Hope I'm Not Confusing You.

In London this week, fully packed with meetings. Staying at St. Marins Lane and it is one of my favourite hotels in London. Both for style and location even I am not the saturday night crowd that hangs out in the cocktail lounge. I am getting a lot of work done writing and editing for the next issue of M/I/S/C. Deadline is a few days away.

We love to read successful innovation and design stories of how a cool idea turns into great success story. The reality is most cute or good ideas don’t make it to the executive’s desk and even for those who did, most products and services launched to the market ended up failed. What good is innovation if the failure rate is so high and how we wonder how it would impact our credibility or career future? Is it a good thing after all? Do we know why we fail? Most don’t have any idea.

How do we anticipating failing as part of design thinking? How fast should be fail? How soon should we fail? What’s the right mindset? “Dream to Fail” or “Fail to Dream?” Or should be thinking about how to “Build to Fail” or “Fail to Last?” What is right approach to embrace a culture of failure? Fail often and fail faster is a bad idea, I know how easy it is for people to say, “oh you should fail more and fail often”. That means you’re no good in innovation management or don’t understand how to manage innovation risks.

Business schools do not celebrate failure and design schools spend too little time understand how not to fail. If you've failed too much and too often then it doesn’t reflect well on you. And if you’ve never failed, it means you never tried anything innovative. And if you tell me your innovation success rate is 70% or 80%, you don’t know what innovation is all about.That's part of the reason I wanted to publish M/I/S/C Magazine.

So what design thinking has to do with failing forward? Design thinking is about helping business managers (with no design training) to understand “play” and "exploring white space." We should question the practice of segregating design thinking solely for use by so-called “design professionals.” What’s the social bases of separating design and business?

There are semantic gaps, conceptual blocks, and social and definition barriers between design and business. What are the first stops teaching business managers the concepts of design thinking? And what’s design thinking? Most common description includes application of ethnographic research, strategic foresight, sense-making, multidisciplinary teams, strategic framming, visual mapping, strategic prototyping and iteration and form-giving. So how can entire organizations benefit from design thinking in their everyday jobs?

With some exceptions, both design industry and business community is lacking an understanding of design thinking and its potential role in business strategies and decisions making. Design thinking is a mind-set, common languages, a practice, a set of tools as well as a framework to generate more and better solutions or options. It is where D-School meets B-School.

It is not creative brainstorming; in fact it is quite the opposite of that. Design thinking is a systematic way to identify and frame issues; develop multiple solution options; test them with rapid prototypes; and iterate on them. To prototyping is to strategize.

Apple iPad Is More Than A Tablet, It Is A Window To New Behavior That Has Yet To Fully Emerge. And I Want A New MacBook Pro With A New Design Before The Summer.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies for different reasons and operate under very different philosophies. The interesting thing is as Apple grows bigger and bigger, will it begin to behave like other large mature organizations such as Microsoft or IBM? Ever since Apple market cap surpassed Microsoft, it signified an indicator that the investment community was sending a message to the industries..

But Microsoft is still a much bigger company from both topline and bottom as well as other measure. What it means, now Apple is given the currency and blessing to go out and play the next game. Who’s the next big target? I don’t think is Microsoft, I don’t even think Apple sees Microsoft as competition. They are onto the next game.

I have three companies in mind that I think Apple will be out there trying to push out. Apple was set out not to beat Microsoft, but IBM. Are they still on that mission? Apple is still a fraction of IBM’s. Both companies have significant customers lock-in for different reasons and both are tied into the fabric of our economy. Let’s face it, the primary reason for Apple's stellar growth and valuation was due to their track record of repeatedly innovating and creating new products while at the same time maintaining a long-range vision – most companies do one at the expense of the other.

Apple's advantage is that it has a good view of the end game and driven by strategic foresight – not by today’s balance sheet and they can afford to be strategic. The iPad is not important not as a tablet, there are enough tablets out there. It is the first member of a growing family of 21st century computing appliances from Apple that co-creating a new behavior. Much like the first generation iPod. I think there will be a wave of innovation from the industry as people realize this is not just another computing device to fit between a phone and a computer. Many still don’t get it when I talked to people in CES. Tablets are dead, iPad is an appliance.

I am looking forward to the next gen MacBook Pro and I hope we will see something in 3 months. For sure it will be thinner, Light Peak will replace firewire, and the DVD drive will disappear (it should) and equipped with solid state drive. he next update to its MacBook line to make way for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. There is 90% chance that Sandy Bridge processors will be used on the 13” MacBooks Pro, it is the first to feature a graphics chip grafted atop a processor. I hope they provide a choice of different colors (unlikely) such as silver, white and black. I will take black. I don’t think they will upgrade the 15’ and 17” until later in the year. I don’t think MacAir will survive long when the MacBookPro gets thinner. It is too pricey.

I am interested to see when the revenue stream from the iPad will eventually overtake the Mac's -- much as the iPhone did a few years ago and the iPod did before that. MacBook will eventually become just be a small business unit of Apple.

Powerful And Affordable Real Time Data Mining, Visualization And Interactions Are Powering Up A New Culture Act - And Enabling "Infovation".

Just landed in Rhode Island and spendin the next 2 days in Providence, long working sessions ahead, expect to some productive knowledge exchange. The topic will be around where arts meets science, design meets technology.

We talk about how information changes our life and how it affect the way we make decisions both as individual and as a team or society, I think we are still unaware of the true power of change information visualization can have and the impact when applied in an interactive and social mobile settings.

Imagine a scenario everytime a politician suggests an idea and you can see realtime information in simple graphics visual data to confirm his/her coment or when a company makes a statment you can see how other respond with an instant trust index? That's a very likely future, an idea which I am working on. Can't say more.

And I don’t mean just data visualization such as bar chart and 3D chart etc, primarily it is the study and application of the visual representation of quantitative data, meaning "information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information."

Infodesign of infographics is actually different (it is like when I was trying to explain the differencne between customer experience and user experience/usabiity 10 years ago) from data visulaization. Information graphics (or so called infographics) instead of visualizing data, it is the strategic use of data by incorporating interactions, icons, charts, diagrams, graphs, tables and maps to present information that could bring new knowledge and sense making. Not only it helps to explain oterhwise difficult to understand data, but also illuminate and explain system complexities or system relationships in an easy to digest manner.

This is not new, in our human history our ancestors created cave murals and giant paintings to show us what was happening including what their understand of the the world, an event or even the universe. The power of infodesign lies in its effectiveness in simplifying complex data into understandable visual representations that can be universally interpreted.

The power of real time interactions with live data brings the potential to a whole new level. The human minds are real time computing machines that works to constantly changing and creating value and meaning of objects; the interactions between human brain and semiotics is conducted every time we see a visual representation of a scenario and makes possible of expanding our human cognition to absorb large amounts of data at just one single glance or click.

Here comes the most interesting part, infodesign is powering up an “infoculture” where massive real-time socailly digitally distributed (useful and useless) information is enabling a new form of cultural act. It is where science meets arts, and will continue to power up new possibilities as we learn how to use them. I will be the first one here to call it “Infovation.” Remember you hear it here first. Will write more about it next few days.

One more thing, how many schools out there actually teaches information design? Not many. We are still training people yesterday's skills for yesterday's job. No wonder it is hard for designers to find work. I think design schools should be paying for the continuous education of their graduates, becasue they never trained them enough or properly in the first place.

The iPhone Is A "Creative Destruction". So Is An iPad. So What Do We Mean By "Creative Destruction"?

Earlier this month Michael Tompert, a San Francisco digital imaging artist, violently destroyed some brand-new Apple products for the sake of art and the results are a collection high resolution prints with a statement "our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage.

The collection of giant prints including one called "Targeting" that shows a 3G iPhone that's been shot with a Heckler & Koch handgun. I guess we can call it “creative destruction.” What’s “creative destruction?” It is of communist origin --a term originally derived from Marxist economic theory which refers to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism. These processes were first described in The Communist Manifesto and were expanded in Marx's Grundrisse "Volume IV" (1863) of Das Kapital.

It is about economic innovation, the way in how capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order. Only since the 50s the "creative destruction" has become more readily identified with economist Joseph Schumpeter who popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and progress. The idea is company needs radical innovation (radical new proposition and business design) and even the most exceptional, enduring corporations cannot continue to beat the capital markets indefinitely – there is no built-to-last. In order to continue to maintain excellence and remain competitive, they must adopt the dynamic strategies of discontinuity and creative destruction. In a simple word-innovation.

Foster and Kaplan (McKinsey) in the late 80s examined more than 1,000 companies in 15 industries and discovered that even the best-run and most widely admired companies are unable to sustain market-beating levels of performance for more than 10 to 15 years. This was in the 80s’, with today’s technological progress, we are talking about 5-8 years.

Their research suggested that: "Corporations are built on the assumption of continuity; their focus is on operations. Capital markets are built on the assumption of discontinuity; their focus is on creation and destruction. The data present a clear warning: Unless companies open up their decision-making processes, relax conventional notions of control, and change at the pace and scale of the market, their performances will be drawn into an entropic slide to mediocrity."

Every company should engineer its own “creative destruction” while they have the resource based to do so and have the luxury to examine and explore new organization design and new mental models. At Idea Couture we use strategic foresights and scenario development to show clients the future of "creative destructions" that could happen to their industries. They are so real and executives can actually feel the future. May be an idea is to take a framed copy of their vision and mission statement, shot it with a Heckler & Koch handgun and hang a giant high resolution print in the board room to remind them. More business for Michael Tompert and his digital print shop.

People Talk About Building An Innovation Culture Mainly By Cultivating Creativity. Culture Of Innovation Is A Lot More Than Just Creativity.

Long week in our SF office running our Innovation Masterclass and it is extrememly intense and people are overloaded with ideas and learnings. Post sessions discussions happen in the evening in the bar unsupervised. We covered the whole innovation process from the fuzzy-front end to opportunity mapping to strategic innovation and social innovation, everyone is now well equipped to bring our core capability to the filed including our new team members in San Francisco.

The office is coming together very nicely and when I walked in I felt the positive energy. We may open up this training to outside people later in the year. First thing this week we started with defining strategic innovation as an organization’s ability to adapt and evolve repeatedly and rapidly to imagine, capture and execute on opportunities that emerge. To do that, not only you need all the mechanism to collect, socialize, deposit, filter conversations and stories, at the end of the day, you can have all the processes you need, but without a culture to empower it, it will not work.

A culture of innovation (another overused phrase) when done right (different depending on organizational and cultural context), can provide you with a competitive edge because it makes you more agile and increase your organization’s ability to sense and respond to change. A culture of innovation may has less to do specifically with new products, new processes, or incentive system. It is not about more ideas and more brainstorming or dressing something funny to go to work, or those weekly creative events. A culture of innovation is more than new ideas. It needs to be closely sitting next to the core and to some degree to be sustainable. This only happens when you treat innovation like you treat all other capabilities in your business.

If you have it, let the good times roll and you have a lot to celebrate. At Idea Couture, we make sure everyone understand what it means and it is part of our core and reflected in everything we do. Not about creating novel ideas, but creatively framing and reframing issues and challenges for our clients. You almost cannot separate an innovative culture with some elements of fun, but for us, it is more than fun, it is also about our seriousness about innovation. We take it very seriously at Idea Couture. And I am a pretty serious person (my business schools’ legacies). But that never stops me from making fun of other and ourselves. Ask my folks, I optimize every opportunity to make fun of everyone. A good sense of hunor is also a strategic capability.

Our partner in Korea told me that we are really good at bring tangibility to something that otherwise very intangible so people can act on it. So not only we do it well from both substance and style, we inject a strong sense of passion into it and people can feel it. We have so much enthusiasm for new ideas that not just cool but also transformational in nature. And I am quick to get rid of those who do not make sense and people won’t feel bad about it. They are never discouraged, as they understand that’s ok. The notion of experimentation and crazy thoughts are part of our everyday work.

All of us have a portfolio of wicked challenges in the back our heads that we want to solve; we also have a portfolio of ideas that constantly manifesting in our everyday dialogue; and accumulated sleep debt that we have built up over working on great projects and the travel (just learned this from Adam Ruben). There is a lot of trust and I do everything I can to empower them and support them, I don’t mean a few words of encouragement, I mean hands on involvement and showing them a framework to get started. I don’t think many CEOs do what I do. And that's why my sleep deficit is reaching a dangerous level, I need to restructure my sleep debt.

Apple Should Forget The Movie Studios. Go After The Banks Instead. I Want My iMoney.

This sign is up for our San Francisco office. The archtiects and the girls are working day and night to get this right and a lot of furniture are still in the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping furniture from Europe to US is always slow. Hey we need to get the righ stuff we need to wait.

Congrats to Nick Hughes (managing director of Signal Point Partners and LBS alum) for picking up the Social and Economic award at the Economist Innovation Awards a few weeks ago held at the Science Museum in London. Nick was recognized for his part in creating the M-Pesa venture in Kenya, a mobile money-transfer initiative – something that is long overdue in the world of banking unmet needs.

M-Pesa was first launched in 2005, allow people to transfer money, pay bills and save using a mobile phone, without NO bank account. Handset to handset money transfer, you would wonder why we don’t have it here. Now it is widely adoption in different parts of Africa with over 12 million users in Kenya alone. I see this is more than a technology innovation; it is a social innovation to facilitate economic development in the developing world.

Today, it still takes weeks to clear a check, transferring money is still a pain and fees are hefty. It is time for disruptive change. PayPay was great; never really get beyond the web. It should have been Twitter Wallet or Facebook Money that we are using now. Twitpay is one of those; the service has only 15,000 users to date. They are not the only one trying to attack the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the fortress the banks and credit card companies have built to defend their businesses.

PayPal is trying to harness the creative powers of the open Innovation to rethink payments. ClickandBuy's Facebook application allows Facebook users will be able to easily execute money transfers among each other and purchase Facebook apps quickly and conveniently. Another one called Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. I don’t know why Google is not attacking this seriously, big markets and big money. I guess that’s the problem with bottom-up innovation and efforts are not aligned with opportunities.

And I'd rather using Apple i-Money and use i-Tunes to manage my banking. Steve, forget the movie studios..go for the banks!!!! I am looking forward to getting rid of my wallet…so I have more rooms for gadgets.

Off to San Francisco for IC Innovation Masterclass and BTW our street sign is up. Competitors alerted and we are in game. Magazine gone to the printer. New staff starting this week. Partnerships discussions with a few firms. Busy week and now looking forward to catch up with my couple of dozens of frineds in the Bay area.