innovation playground Idris Mootee

Forget The 4Ps Of Marketing. Let's Talk About The 4Ps of Sustainable Business Strategy: People, Planet, Purpose and Profit. Now That's Business Transformation.

Whether we are talking about innovation,, technology or public policy, we often come up with solutions that creating more problems than they are supposed to  solve. Given the enormous complexity and almost un =manageable challenges ahead, what do we need to do? What seems to make sense doesn’t do it anymore.

How do we make the 4Ps of working in harmony? People, Planet, Purpose and Profit is rapidly becoming the new mantra of a new generation of managers, they are now challenged as never before to deal with a myriad of issues that go far beyond creating shareholder value. What good is shareholder value when we are selling our future short? What good is shareholder value when there are no jobs? Some argue that outsourcing to some lower cost countries can help a company to make money. When there are no jobs, there won’t be any pension funds to provide capital for these corporations? When we run out of natural resources there won’t be any customer or markets?

The 4Ps are the framework to a more sustainable world, corporations are beginning to understand the importance of adapting this new “sustainability” business paradigm—one that focuses on creating a better balance between social, environmental and economic factors for short- and long-term performance.  Innovation is not creating more products that no one wants or brand extensions that only the brand managers know what it means. Innovation needs to be about new business model; new partnerships and new social behavior.

Our economic system is not designed that way unfortunately.  How can a "sustainable" business climate ever be possible in a quick return capital driven economic system? Do we continue to reward those who design and manufacture products that only serve the purpose of making money at any costs or laughing at those who design “green” products that no more than a quick green wash?

We need to start at the shareholders level.  Here’s a story. When Jeff Bezos was addressing shareholders in Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting this week, the sustainability issue was raised. They questioned some of Amazon's business seem very un-eco: It's an online retail company that sell products with lots of extra packaging to prevent breakage and it relies on delivery trucks to deliver to people's homes. But Bezos was well prepared and he was quick to show the company's greener sides:

First, he said, consumers will drive a 2,000-pound car to buy a 5-pound item from a brick-and-mortar store. "It's much more efficient to use a full truck to drop off packages than when everyone does point to point delivery," he said, noting that delivery trucks use an optimized route.

Second, Amazon's investment in the Kindle – and it is indeed still in investment phase, he confirmed – is one that could lead to less paper printed later on.

Third, Amazon unveiled "frustration-free" packaging last fall that eliminates the need for dozens of wire ties and hard plastic encasements.

And finally, Amazon has dubbed hundreds of employees as "Earth Kaizens" who identify waste and look for more energy-efficient practices. As a result of the Kazien recommendations, Bezos said, the company eliminated light bulb in its food vending machines company-wide, saving $20,000 per year on energy costs.

Bezos was giving a lot of funny one-liners during the meeting, I’ve seen him doing that in the past. When he was telling about his company's philosophy… "Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service…” That was a good one. He made the comment during final part of addressing a question about Kindle's competitors.

Sustainability is a wicked problem, with high energy and food prices, the debate about biofuels, water stress, agricultural subsidies, deforestation, and environmental degradation is proving too difficult for anyone to handle. The short-sightedness of some some government and big institutions money continue to push us down the wrong path.

And for businesses, we need to stop thinking more products. Let’s think better products. Better means products that are socially responsible. It starts with planning, not with marketing. Decisions such as what to make, where and when to make it and where to locate inventory are focused on profit or revenue maximization,, it needs to extend to include carbon emissions and exploring options to education customer to participate-even means doing more work. I think consumers are happy to do that provided we can put a compelling case together. This is the future of business. As least I hope it is the case. Have a great weekend.

The Six Most Common Approaches To Innovation. Tell Me Which One Works For Best For You?

Here's a picture of my notes which is part of my presentation next week on innovation and organizational change. I was on my way from the airport to the hotel. I was thinking about many of the challenges my clients face internally due to the lack of a burning desire to make the change. Does companies need to have near-death experiences in order for them to act?

I just came back from innovation sessions and they were very fruitful. The participants were very energized seeing into the future and its possibilities, they also have a very pragmatic view of how to make innovation happens.

Innovation is not only hard but also requires a set of new skills.  You need to see "change" as an opportunity but not a "problem."  Some people welcome bigger problems otherwise they get bored. And most innovation dialogue takes two paths 1/ a visually stimulating sense-making dialogue to create a deeper understanding of the problem space 2/unstructured, playful and open-minded dialogue about the problem face

People often ask me the question “What’s the best approach to innovation?” There is not best way. But there are many toolkits, practices and metaphor to making innovation more productive.  Innovation doesn’t have to be unproductive, spending days or brainstorming doesn’t necessarily get you’re the big ideas. There are many secret weapons to make innovation smart and productive. I’ve shared many of those here in previous posts.

So here are the 6 most common approaches to innovation:

Find-New-Ideas-To-Power-Up-Growth-Strategy approaches to innovation – An approach to innovation in which organization make the most strategic use of innovation. Linking innovation to a growth strategy is wise for organizations. Every organization should institutionalize innovation and use it drive growth and this include an integrated processes linking their innovation group with marketing and corporate strategy.  The innovation plan should be given the mandate to explore and provide as many ideas as possible to form key pillars of growth.

Find-Customer Needs-First approach to innovation – An approach to innovation in which companies relentlessly uncover customer’s unmet needs through a “Jobs-to-the-done” lens.  Then devise solutions to address those unmet needs and often unarticulated needs (things that traditional market research often fails to uncover). There are situations this approach can be less effective when dealing with very new technology or products that yet exist, as customer cannot articulate what don’t know. There are ways to get around that by showing consumers mock-ups of future products and services.

Find-A-Killer-Idea-First approach to innovation – This works well particularly in an entrepreneurial way. Sometimes people just want to look for the next big idea (VCs for example) and don’t care about the industry or scope and scale of these big ideas. The best example is the famous story that Jeff Bezos was driving across the country and came up with the ideas of Amazon.com.

Throw-Plenty-Of-Ideas-Around approach to innovation. This usually doesn’t work well due to a lack of focus and strategic intent. Often ideas are left there without any follow-up action or ideas are not attached to business. Funny enough this is the most common way companies are trying to get new ideas.

Define-The-Problem-First approach to innovation. This is another good way to start. Spend more time on framing the issues and understand the problem context before you start innovating. This way the outcome is usually very relevant to the problem and at the minimum you will get a comprehensive views of the problems even if you can’t get to the right solution.

Hide-In-The-Dark approach to innovation. This is when people want to innovate under the radar-screen for reasons such as there's a lack of support from senior executives or not ready to expose the idea until they’re ready. This is often a pretty effective way, people come up with creative ways to do skunk projects and these projects will ultimately benefit the organization. The challenge is getting the resources you need since you’re don’t have proper resource allocated to it.

It is inherently flawed approach to innovation is when you start with the creative generation of ideas and is followed by different evaluation and filtering methods that determine which ideas customers like best or best fit the business without ever explicitly understanding the two most important factors: 1/ customer unmet needs 2/ future scenarios 3/technological foresight. Stage-gate is the most popular but it is a product development process and not an innovation process. Many get confused.

Although this approach is popular, the chances of coming up with an idea that precisely addresses all the unmet needs of a target customer are near zero. This approach is kind of like a sharpshooter trying to hit a target without knowing what the target is or a doctor prescribing a treatment without seeing patient symptoms. Innovaiton is not guesswork.

Intuition Is Important To Innovation. So You Ask Yourself Are You "Intuition" Gifted? If Not, Here's A Few Practices To Help You Improve It.

We all understand why intuition is important for innovation, and it is least understood. I was trained to apply intuition but follow up by fact-based analysis to back up the hypothesis. Intuition is generally define by 1/ immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning. 2/ immediate apprehension by a sense. 3/ immediate insight that points to the direction of a solution.

Intuition is actually a basic psychological function, much like thinking, sensing and feeling. It is not associated with psychic abilities. It is probably not correct to say that intuition is a single narrow function of the human psyche. it is more of a full integration of several faculties. And when you're using all your senses (known and unknown) all together functioning at an optimal level, that's when your intuition at work in its most powerful state.

Philosophically speaking, intuition exerts a paranormal or magical influence on everything new. In Educating Intuition Robin Hogarth describes various ways that intuition might be improved or educated. The two most notable impediments to the education of intuition are:

1/the presence of confusing or “wicked” environments where feedback is unreliable and there are no factual information to support decision-making;
2/the limited scope or “domain specific” nature of intuition and intuition can therefore inhibit innovation because such obstacles exist. Intuition is an idea we often take for granted without considering what we mean by it.

Innovation requires intuition not to help create more ideas, but to make sense of them. It is most needed when evaluating ideas and in particularly transformative ones. Big ideas often seem stupid at a first glance, the tiny little voice from your intuition is the one who is telling you “wait a minute, there’s something here..”

Is there something called “strategic intuition” and “tactical intuition”. I don't think so. All breakthrough ideas happen in all realms of human endeavor. Can you lean to improve your intuition or you are simply bored with or without it?  I don’t have the answers. I think only to some degree. Intuition is closely link to the ability to sense-making. The act of sense-making is to discover new terrain as you are inventing it. In the very process of mapping out the new terrain, you are actually creating it. Here are three tips for sense-making:

1. Seek many types and sources of data (including raw data)
2. Do not just apply your current frameworks, try to overlay them on the problem space
3. Try to use different or as many metaphors, pictures or stories to try to capture an communicate critical elements of your map.

Applied intuition, there are three things you can do to make it work better for you (Puzzles designed by George W. Hart):

1. The search process – you need to abandon your preconceived notions of what solution might be. Open-mindedness is an invitation for intuition to kick-in.
2. The flash of insight – it is about making the most of stimuli, whether they are music, visual, a personal story, a physical environment or smell etc. Shower works best for most people.
3. Seeing the forests – looking at a problem narrowly doesn’t help with intuition, sometimes distancing yourself allows you to see the whole forest and allow your intuition to kick in.

It is not difficult to see the connections between optimum intuitive and innovative conditions. Are the skills associated with intuition also likely to prompt innovation? Are you “intuitively” gifted? I think most people have a sense if their intuition has been working for them or not. What are the best practices? Hogarth identifies the following skills or practices demonstrated by the intuitively gifted. If you do all of those things, the chances are you’re probably “intuition” gifted:

1. The capacity for visualization
2. The ability to acknowledge emotions and learn from them
3. The willingness to speculate and consider alternatives
4. The habit of testing perceptions, emotions and speculations

The Myth Of "Experience" Towards The Success Of Innovative Start-ups. Forget About Serial Entrepreneur.

It is a good week for Better-The-World as they are gaining more traction and gearing up to launch a number of new features over the coming months. These people work so hard and try to move as fast as they can. The team is not only growing in size but also in learning about user behaviors and partnerships. It is one of the most original idea and make senses for all parties - user, non-profit and advertisers. Called it "Free-raising". 

Start-up is never easy and sometimes you wonder what is more important - passion or experience? For any innovative start-up, you can only have so much experience otherwise it is not an innovative start-up. VCs like to back people with prior experiences, is that a smart practice?

We’ve talked so much how failing is part of building a foundation for future success (that is if you will stop failing one day). Why is it often bankers and VCs are more willing to back those who back those who succeeded the first time than those who failed a few times? The gurus are all saying let’s fail more and fail often. Who is right? I personally don’t like failing, unless it is planned for as part of the strategic learning in an uncertain technology or market environment. Otherwise failure is failure. But pushing failure up-front and making them small is smart. Fail big and fail late is tragedy,

Paul A. Gompers et la.(Prof at HBS) has just finished an interesting working paper on the subject titled : Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship:

All else equal, a VC-backed entrepreneur who starts a company that goes public has a 30% chance of succeeding in his or her next venture.

On the other hand, first-time entrepreneurs, have only an 18% chance of succeeding, and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding. But why do these contrasts exist?

Such performance persistence, as in the first example, is usually taken as evidence of skill. However, in the context of entrepreneurship, the belief that successful entrepreneurs are more skilled than unsuccessful ones can induce real performance persistence. In this way, success breeds success even if successful entrepreneurs were just lucky. Success breeds even more success if entrepreneurs have some skill.

The key idea is that there is evidence for the role of skill as well as the perception of skill in inducing performance persistence. This is consistent with the view that if suppliers and customers perceive the entrepreneur to have market timing skill, and is therefore more likely to succeed, they will be more willing to commit resources to the firm. In this way, success breeds success and strengthens performance persistence.

What does it tells us? One interesting observation from the authors is that the very best and the very worst entrepreneurs do not become serial entrepreneurs. That makes sense. The very best entrepreneurs are either too wealthy or too deeply involved in their business or too lazy to start new ones. The successful one either become partner of VC firms or decided to pursue social ventures to contribute back to societies, both are good. And there aren’t too many serial entrepreneurs anyway. Any who failed decided to just to back to work for a large company.

So what are we left with, smart first timers or someone who failed recently, you still get roughly the same 1/5 of a chance for succeeding.

What's The Future Like For Wieden + Kennedy? Where Walking In Stupid Will Take Them Next? Dan Wieden Is No Ordinary Ad Exec, He's A Very Different Breed.

My people told me we had a problem. There was an error on the printing side and our 60-minute Brand Strategist Book (Limited Edition) was now changed to 80-minute (no one was telling us). I thought may be Morgan decided to further enrich the content, hmm he definitely too busy to do that. Probably not him. I jumped off the roof (actually the plane), went to the office and opened those boxes, fortunately it was only limited to the boxes. They did not add 20 min of content to my book. Who knows, someone just decided to add 20 pages of reading - sort of bonus chapter. So many things can go wrong.

I want to write about W+K. I think it is a very special company both work and culture.  Wieden+Kennedy is no question one of the world's creative advertising agencies if not the most, has a very unique culture and cool office spaces, you don’t hear me saying that often, there are usually more criticism coming from me. The question for them is where it should go the next 20 years. Are they on a selective building mode or packaging for sale mode? Or they are going to play in the social media sandbox and reinvent advertising once again?

When Dan Wieden founded the agency 20 years ago with David Kennedy, their motto was just one of many slogans found in this strangest of workplaces. "Fail harder" and "Welcome to Optimism" are two examples. I remembered I’d like their print ad so much that I put it up in my office in my LA office.  It is more than an ad. It meant something more to me.  It reminds me of what do I need to stay competitive. It has an emotional connection to me even though I am hardly a sportsman. They are no question one of the finest creative ad agency founded during the last two decades. There are lots of creative shops out there, but not one that institutionalize creativity like W+K did.

I love their offices, there’s a little weirdness but still quite traditional looking (unlike Mother) and there’s a padded cell for creative thinking on the top floor and a giant polystyrene statue called Nicola (crafted by the artist Wilfrid Wood). So what’s W+K’s future? In an interview with The Independent, Dan says the agency thrives on a culture "built around a friendly relationship with chaos", a concept represented by Blender Man.

"I think it's important that if you're going to be innovative, that there's not a process for everything. Sometimes it seems that if you're never lost you're never going to wind up any place new. It's only if you're willing to be completely fucked-up that you're going to do anything important.” That’s a spirit of innovation not commonly found in advertising agency.

The funny story about the Nike slogan “Just Do It’, he said it was no more than something to link a few commercials and never meant to take off like that. They just typed it out on typewriters, then blew it up, and put it on a board. It surprised everybody involved because it apparently spoke some truth that was larger than sport or advertising. It is a big idea even though they didn’t really expect it.

W+K is late in the digital game and I can’t speak to their current digital capabilities. Sure they are playing with it and have the same challenges as other larger agencies. The digital or now known as “social media’ challenges is a different game and probably clashes a bit with the way things are done there. They reckon that the most exciting creativity will happen in the mobile and social media space.

The good news is they are a little ahead than the JWTs of the world which are at least 3 years behind. I think the future of W+K will be very different from Ogilvys. David Ogilvy’s  goal was to professionalize the advertising business and create an enduring and respectable institution. David is more of manager in a traditional sense. On the advice of his banker grandfather, he adopted J.P. Morgan’s phrases — “Only first-class business, and that in a first-class way” and “gentlemen with brains” — as guiding principles for his agency. He is more of a system and structure person and understand the importance of growing leaders.

Dan is a very different breed. He strongly believes that the advertising discipline is not about money and business – it’s about creating a place for people in a compound way. It’s got to do with art and most importantly, building culture. He takes risk and willing to accept failure. In his words, “The secret of my success is failure and uncertainty”. That’s the perfect motto for innovation.

I look forward to seeing how they overcome the social media challenges, developing talents in the development world (India and China) and finding the people to power W+K forward into the next 20 years as the advertising elephants will continue struggle to learn to dance. Can you teach an elephant to learn to dance?

Dan believes that his job is to “walk in stupid every day” - to keep challenging the organization and himself, to seek out unexpected ideas, outside influences, and new perspectives on old problems. “…..but it’s the most important thing. Whatever day it is, something in the world changed overnight, and you better figure out what it is and what it means. You have to forget what you just did and what you just learned. You have to walk in stupid every day.”

Great Advice From AG Lafley: What Only The CEO Can Do? The Four Most Important Things To Stay Focus On.

I’ve not been reading much for a few months, hardly any magazines of even blogs or my investment statement. Just don’t have the time. But I did decide to pick up one of the 50 magazines sitting in a corner unopened; it is the latest copy of HBR. So I took it with me yesterday for my Sunday brunch reading. 

Skipped over pages and found a really good piece. “What only the CEO can do?” by A.G. Lafley.  So I read that one. It is one of he most practical piece I’ve read in many years and is written in plain English, not consultant buzz words. Lafley has offer good advice that are not only narrowly written for the CPG world, but for executives at large. He gets to the heart of issues in a laser sharp way (most important quality of a strategy consultant), the article addresses the most important roles a CEO should play in an organization.

Lafley states that the “CEO has a very specific job that only he/she can do. that is to link the external world with the internal organization. According to Lafley, “The CEO can see opportunities that others don’t see. You should find a copy if you don’t have one sitting somewhere. Here’s am excerpt:

Task 1: “Defining the Meaningful Outside” - This means that if you take a look at all the outside influences that impact your company, which ones matter the most? It is easy to all of them are important, capital markets, regulators and suppliers etc. But the simple answer should be the “consumer”.  Everything should revolve around the interest of the consumer. Often people get confused.

Task 2: “Deciding What Business You Are In (and NOT in).” - The question of where should you play to win and where should you not play at all. This is the most important strategy question but never an easy one. There is not magical framework to help with this important decision.  How far a company should expand beyond the core and how much they should stick to it? There’s no simple answer and depends in the business context and where the company is at from an industry lifecycle perspective.

Task 3: “Balancing Present and Future” - It means striking the right balance the short and the long-term goals and it should comes from judgment and experience and not from facts. This is a tough one as there is always a conflict between the two and the art of balancing the two requires commitment.

Task 4: “Shaping Values and Standards” - Values establish a company’s identity and they are about their behavior. If a company is to win, these values must be connected to the meaningful outside and relevant to the present and the future. The two most important questions to answers are: Are we winning with those who matter most? Are we winning against the very best?

Task 2 is the most basic function of business strategy, a business needs to grow and generally through economies of scale, it is about the benefits gained by the production of large volume of a product. Economies of scale were the main drivers of corporate gigantism in the past century. At the same time the growing its product or service offerings, termed economies of scope is linked to benefits gained by producing a wide variety of products by efficiently utilizing existing capabilities.

If a company expands itself both in scale and scope, it is strengthening its market power and positioning but also increasing its vulnerability.  Economic of scope is becoming more important (and more and more least understood) than scale in some instances because there are so much abundant capacity in manufacturing, This refer to the potential advantages of integration between product lines or even categories.  Social technologies and connectivity changes many of fundamentals and provide plenty of innovation/disruption opportunities for companies to leverage economic of scope in new ways.

Three Secret Weapons Of Innovation: Sensemaking, Weak Signals Reading And Futuretyping. Which One Of Them Do You Currently Practice?

Welcome to the 24hr Innovation Marathon! That’s right! This post is part of “My Half Time Pep Talk for 2009,” a collection of posts about innovation on a variety of blogs, as part of the Board of Innovation’s 24 Hours of Innovation event started 3am May15 (Central time) to 3am May16. 

2009 marks the 27th (correction not 25th) anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence (1982) by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Their ideas shaped new management thinking for more than two decades and inspired many young managers. The thing I like about Peters is that he is not a philosopher and he doesn’t have any all-embracing theories of the world of organizations or any formulas for change. I’ve heard so too many management thinker/academics talking bullshit about what companies should do and be organized around. They have no clues of what is needed to make innovation happen in complicated large organizational settings. There are only a handful of people truly understand what innovation means and why it is so hard. Peter is one of them. Peters once wrote: “…Perhaps the biggest implication of the Internet is that it has caused the half-life of old, giant companies to go way down.” He didn’t tell you it is happening that fast.

Peters’ advice to companies is “Strive for Strangeness”: Creating a portfolio of the weird and encouraging "freaks" to flourish in the company will help ensure the steady stream of innovative ideas necessary to survive in a hyper-competitive international business environment.  How do you encourage people experiment with Lego-like products and services to create innovative business models. Prototyping  can help organizations evolve as rapidly as the opportunities that arise and disappear around them. Executives have many resources at their disposal – capital, technology, channel, and brand – but none are as valuable as their ability to use their own imagination and will to innovate, and empower their managers to do so.  Organizations that want to develop a capacity for continuous, game-changing innovation need to equip themselves with a new toolkit.

When the Economist called innovation the “industrial religion of the 21st century.” So what exactly is the new thinking about innovation and why is it so important? Why does it need to be taken so seriously by business and government? Very simply, innovation is the engine of economic progress. Without it many of our firms will go out of business, and those that remain will become second-rate, subservient to international leaders in decision-making and profit taking. Without innovation there won't be new businesses and jobs that are necessary to support economic growth. There are many ways to go at it, basically there are five schools of innovation:
1.    Foresight-powered vision-driven innovation
2.    Modification and sustaining innovation
3.    Open collaborative (industry) innovation
4.    Jobs-to-be-done or user-driven innovation
5.    Exploration and experimentation-based innovation

Does it matter which innovation schools you organization decides to follow, there is no one best way to do it. It depends on industry competitive context, leadership styles and organizational design and dynamics. The same way that there are many ways to compose a piece of great music.

Innovation has a bigger mission than finding the next great product extension. It is an institutional capability.  It is more than just one successful new product. We have many problems to solve and so many opportunities for innovation. Look around us. The world’s population is exploding and this population growth drives deforestation, the expansion of agricultural land, the pollution of air, water and soil, and suburban sprawl etc. Human activity, such as urbanization and development, spoils wildlife habitats and makes many species extinct. Changes in our landscape are occurring faster and on a larger scale than ever before. Our population could pass 13 billion in fifty years.

Never before in the history of earth have so many people shared the planet earth. At the same time, we are persisting in developing “labor saving” technologies to automate everything. Technology is dragging us into unknown and dangerous territories by accelerating social change. Business, societies, nature and policies are struggling to keep up and probably 4-5 years behind. My point here is that all innovations have unforeseen consequences - even when they are done for the very best reasons. It is not just more products. Do we really need more products?

The next Innovation is about solving bigger problems and innovation that are transformative in nature. How do we make sense of all these complexities? The three most important toolkits that help create transformative innovation in Idea Couture’s toolbox are 1/ sense-making 2/ weak signals reading 3/futuretyping. I will explain more here.

What’s Sensemaking? Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible visuals that rationalize what people are doing. Using a visual language to help unfold as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively. We are not limited to one identity when we do this. In a human complex system, an agent is anything that has identity, and we constantly flex our identities (both individually and collectively) and behave differently depending on the context.

Sensemaking is a metacognitive strategy, it is clear that people recognize patterns in the data in ways that they can’t talk about. That kind of inarticulate recognition (meaning that you can’t express it easily) is what we perceive as intuition. We’ve all got it, and good sensemakers have good intuitions about how things go together. Boundaries are possibly the most important elements, in sensemaking, because they represent differences among or transitions between the patterns we create in the world that we perceive. The exercise can effectively serve as the springboard to action.

What’s Weak Signals Reading? This is about the strategic management of surprising and potentially impactful (not necessarily bad) events, or call it card management system. Wild cards refer to sudden and unique incidents that can constitute turning points in the evolution of a certain trend. As the first of the two components of such a wild card system, a weak signal methodology to take into account those wild cards that can be anticipated by scanning the decision environment. The second component, the nurture of improvisation capabilities, is designed to deal with unanticipated ongoing crises as part of a broader agenda on how to manage in conditions of continuous but unpredictable change. Seeing the unseeable and thinking the unthinkable.

What’s Futuretyping? It is about prototyping different strategic futures.  It is a far more effective method than scenario planning. It allows the key stakeholders to be able to touch a tangible future and create excitement so they can channel their energy and imagination. Prototyping the future business model is not a spreadsheet exercise. It borrows heavily from system-dynamics.

Continue onwards to the 24 Hours of Innovation marathon event. Happy reading.

Innovation Is So Un-MBA. Tomorrow I Will Share Here Three Secretive Tools For Innovation: Sensemaking + Weak Signals Reading + Futuretyping As Part Of The 24Hr Innovation Marathon.

Strategy is not what it used to be – or what it could be. Innovation is distancing itself from being thought of as just invention. Strategy for many becomes tactics. Innovation becomes adding more products.  Strategy is nothing without innovation; innovation is just product development without strategy; the two are strange bedfellows.

We hear the words Strategy and Innovation casually thrown around a lot, “We need an innovation strategy.” Or perhaps, “We need a more innovative strategy” which, of course, is a different animal. But we don’t hear people asking exactly what we mean when we say these things. It’s as if we all agree already on what we mean by strategy and innovation, and that they just fit together automatically. 

Only few organizations understand what it means, let alone what it takes to develop a culture of innovation and how to systematically and effectively bring ideas to life in a strategic manner.  Many of them don't have the right tool kit or processes. Many just use a standard stage-gate approach borrowed from product development, there are simply too many limitations for stage-gate.

How to win the battle over where to look for ideas, how to link innovation to customer and business value, manage development risks, drive company-wide innovation initiatives and sustain efforts over the long haul are battles that challenge even the most adept leaders. It is pretty complex and not easy to  make sense of it. That's why sensemaking is key to innovation. It is the process of moving from situational awareness (both individuals as well as in groups) to share awareness and understanding to collaborative decision-making. It is a socio-cognitive activity directly impacted by the social nature of the exchange and vice-versa. Call it "social-strategy making" Will talk more on this tomorrow.

A lot of design firms are quick to say that design can help solve many types of problem. How? By designing more products? Or designing better products? That's not enough. This is a simplistic way of seeing things. Although designers are better at understanding the relationship between business and user contexts, and finding patterns in seemingly chaotic situations, they lack a system views of all relationships in organizational context.

Innovation is where MFA meets MBA. Innovation brings the intelligence of nature, together with a human's technological and production capabilities, to create products and services that in turn create economic value. . It would be easy to think that innovation is ‘just-add-creativity’ without understanding that we’ve trained generations of MBAs to operate in a command-and-control mode. We have to rethink how organizations discard decades of management orthodoxy, and how to balance traditional management discipline with practical experimentation to produce new, innovative management models.

Business schools are set up as functional silos because they are focused on producing leading research that gets published in academic journals. They delve deeper and deeper into narrow silos. There is little collaborative research across disciplines; integrative creativity simply does not exist. Innovation is the result of taking lots of existing ideas and putting them together in new ways, and generating unexpected results. It’s the “Where else would it work?”

We don’t need more products or more brands. When people think innovation immediately they think about new products. Innovation is about solving bigger problems and driving transformation. How do we make sense of all these complexities?  Tomorrow I will be participating “My Half Time Pep Talk for 2009,” a collection of posts about innovation on a variety of blogs, as part of the Board of Innovation’s 24 Hours of Innovation event from 3 am tomorrow. I will write about the three secret weapons of innovation which we use at Idea Couture. You don't hear a lot about this nor they teach them in business schools. Check back tomorrow at 5.25pm EST 24 Hours of Innovation. If you have a topic or additional things you want me to write about, please let me know.

Here are the three most secretive secret weapons that I will share tomorrow:

1. Sense-making
2. Weak signals reading
3. Futuretyping

"Is Design Too Important To Be Left Only To Designers?" The Question Posted By Bruce Nussbaum. Advances In Knowledge And Complexity Have Led Us To Pursue Multifaceted Problems That Cannot Be Resolved From A Single Academic Discipline

Bruce Nussbaum's (Business Week) post "Is Design Too Important To Be Left Only To Designers? " raises an interesting question. It echos many discussions in the filed of design as well as education. There are two camps of designers, one which welcomes the escalation of design to a strategic level and another camp wonder why business people are talking about design as if they were designers. Here’s the post:

There is huge anxiety among designers and design educators at the encroachment of business, education, health, energy, transportation and other fields into Design. The evolution of Design from an individual working intuitively to shape beautiful things into a collaborative process of discovering what can come next and making it happen is attracting people to Design for new ways to journey through these confusing and uncertain times. The failure of existing modes of delivering services to consumers, students, patients, travelers, etc., is making Design a hugely important system of reframing old problems and creating new answers. Design Strategy, for example, is new—evolving out of simple design.

But in all these discussions and in all this stew of intellectual debate about Design, where are the voices of designers and design educators? Where is the body of theory in Design that you see coming out of Architecture, for example? This is a question that Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, asked recently in a talk at Parsons School of Design. Anne pointed to business, the humanities and even physics (at MIT) as embracing design and using it without much input from designers. She said that discussions about Design as a Literacy, Design as a Discipline, Design as a Way of Knowing were under way at various universities—without much input from designers or design educators.

My eldest son is in the processing of deciding which university to attend. He’s accepted by 8 universities and wondering if he should go for a more liberal arts or some business program that eventually improve his readiness for the job market. My advice to him since he plans to attend business school later on, it would be more beneficial to have a broader education.

Today’s education system is either completely focused on results-oriented education or entirely the opposite. I wonder if really the best way to organize things in the future is to allow interdisciplinary study across liberal arts, design, business and engineering. I firmly believe that people working in business or engineering “should” be deeply educated in the liberal arts and/or social sciences as well. America and Canada already suffers from a culture of people who think that market instrumentality and personal well-being are the end-all and be-all of their existence. This is part of our problem.

Patricia Cohen (published in NYT) explored the growing perception among university students and administrators that the humanities are of questionable value in a world where technological advancement is the measure of progress and economic stability. As she noted, many universities are reducing or eliminating their humanities classes, and students are increasingly moving (or getting pushed) toward more useful, vocational majors. Everyone wants to be an engineer.

Although I agree that there may be too many programs that are pretty useless (not specifying which ones here), there is a need to provide education that are relevant to what’s going on in the real world. Take social technologies and media as example, it is about sociology more than just technology. The basic idea was that, while the sciences power the future, the liberal arts explain it; thus, even as the one keeps the world moving, the other gives it meaning and purpose. This is a tough sell for college freshmen and their parents whose horizons are fixed on career alone.

Universities must take their responsibility of educating the entire person more seriously. Academics are important, but so are social and cultural skills. University is a place where one discovers himself a space between the intellectual wasteland he/she has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him/her after the baccalaureate. One must do this, that is, if he/she is to have any hope of a higher life. Advances in knowledge, together with an awareness of the complexity of today's world, have led researchers to pursue multifaceted problems that cannot be resolved from the vantage point of a single academic discipline.

Take MIT as an example, students and faculty frequently work together in a multitude of interdisciplinary centers, laboratories, and programs that cut across departmental or school boundaries. At Carnegie Mellon, they offer a Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts (BCSA) interdisciplinary degree program combines the strengths of the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science. This degree provides an ideal technical, critical, and conceptual foundation for students interested in pursuing fields which comprehensively meld technology and the arts, such as game design, computer animation, computer music, recording technologies, interactive stagecraft, robotic art, and other emerging media. Students choose their arts concentration from among the five schools in CFA: Architecture, Art, Design, Drama or Music. Students choose their computer science concentration established by the School of Computer Science. This is a good sample.

When can we expect schools beginning to offer a Bachelor of Design and Business interdisciplinary degree?

Innovation Is Quickly Replacing Manufacturing As The Engine Of Our Economy. Companies Will Scramble To Equip Themsleves With New Innovation Capabilities. The Key Is How Fast And Selective You Can Forget The Past.

Innovation is never easy. But then there are so many ideas such as Google, satellite navigation, cloud computing, OnStar, Kindle, Blackberry, YouTube, Facebook... that made to innovations that change the way we work and play forever and created hundreds of billions of shareholder value. But what inspires their creators?  How did these great ideas happen? What is the next big thing?  Will Geo-engineering sparks many of the next big thing?  From engineered crops to fertilized oceans, anything that can help our Earth quickly in the face of a climate emergency. Or are we actually creating more problems?

What were the great ideas of the last two decades?  A few that come to my mind include digital theory, futurism, the uncertainty principle, social technologies, industrial design, space shuttle, fast food, television, the marginal productivity theory of wages, consumerism and modernism. Many of these ideas grew in a world with fundamental economic convictions (namely the mass-production and mass-consumption of goods), but these assumptions are fast becoming obsolete. Mass is not the same mass anymore. Those goods are now produced in China and the great legacy manufacturing of the West are mostly in a parlous state.  Even you have some really great ideas (and patents), there’s not guarantee that it can be reversed engineered in Shenzen (the manufacturing concentrated part of southern China).

Innovation is hard. Imagine an organization that operates as five business units, with a staff of tens of thousands and where the corporate strategy is incomprehensible, the marketing effort is massive but not customer-centric, where there is an over-abundance of information, most of it of very low quality, and where the marketing environment is often out of sync with the purposes of interactions and innovation. Such an environment is very common in large complex organizations.

Executives understand that innovation is necessary in order to stay ahead or just to survive, yet only a handful have the conviction, discipline and energy to act on that understanding. Very few have the will to change and even fewer led their organizations through disruptive change and discontinuities. Over decades, business schools have developed a language for talking about business, from marketing to finance. We hear this corporate jargon all the time in the boardroom and see it in annual reports and press releases.  It helps us to understand and communicate. But because we don’t have a language or framework for innovation, the word was used loosely and even improperly, confusing many people. Innovation needs processes, languages and visual metaphor.

And for the next 10 or 20 years, the ability to create innovative ideas will replace manufacturing as the core engine of our economy. Every organization will need to rethink their core capabilities. These manufacturing jobs will be gone for good. Another way to see it, our flattened world is dematerializing. Production lines have been replaced by a satellite uplink; experiences are better than possessions; advertising replaced by communities and social media and social technologies replace enterprise resources management systems.

For some corporations, if you are making tons of money out of what you’re doing today, why border to create something new?  For the once big mighty corporations, when you were making so much money out of cables, newspapers, steel or railroads, why take a punt on some wacky creative idea? The DCF model just doesn’t look right.

I met Vijay Govindarajan (Tuck School of Business) briefly last week at the World Innovation Forum in NY. Vijay describes the fundamental difference between the organizational DNA of the established company and the new innovative business unit. The mother ship is all about capital optimization, leveraging core assets, delivering on customer needs, efficient processes and clear growth path and ROI metrics.  His view of innovation is typically organization’s investment spans across three boxes: Manage the present, Selectively forget the past and Create the future.

Stating that “Future is Now”, VG impresses upon the point that strategy must revolve around the last two boxes for an organization to sustain through. I guess this is called “change”.  I love academics, because they can creatively come up with different ways of saying the same thing.

Saying that innovation is about the future is not helping anyone. It is really not the “what” but the “how”. Of 10 people that talk about the “what”, usually only one can talk about the “how”. Back to the question of how did these great ideas happen? What inspires these innovators?  What are these people like? They are never academics, rarely they come from the industries that they disrupted. These are people with ideas that tend to be both illogical and contradictory.

Explaining his discovery of relativity, Einstein said: "I just ignored an axiom." Nothing defines creativity better than the ability to defeat habit by originality. There seems to be a physiological source for new ideas. We have 10 billion brain cells, each one is capable of making 5,000 connections, but it is making unusual connections that provide a basis for new ideas.  Sometimes it feels like we need to shake our brain so the cells can make more connections. Innovative new ideas are sometimes at odds with the stern disciplines of business management. In some cases, you need to temporarily (just temporarily) forget what you’ve learned in B-schools. One good example is what Christensen always use, when conventional wisdom asks you go after big established market, you should ignore it and find market that yet exists.

How Much Do You Know About Low End Disruptive Innovation? What's The Secret For Incumbent To Defend Against Low End Disruption? How's Christensen's Disruptive Innovation Theory Holding Up?

It has been more than 10 years since I’ve seen Christensen presented his ideas. It is good to see him in good spirit and health at the World Innovation Forum. Clayton Christensen (HBS Professor) is known for his theory on disruptive innovation and he literally owns that word. He has recently co-authored a new book Disrupting Class - How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. His idea is practical provided you handle it with care.  The idea is that you almost have to ignore the size of the market or the cash flow that you might generate from it. Find a pathetic market that you can sustainably serve, and then hope serendipity kicks in and you will be able to grow from there.

His first book, The Innovator's Dilemma, examines the process of innovation as it attempts to answer the question "why do most new technologies seem to come from start-ups and not from established companies that are also familiar with the technology?" He used a few examples, including tube table radios (displaced by transistor radios), cable-driven steam diggers (displaced by hydraulic diggers), and disk drives (where successive waves of technology were represented in shrinking form factors) that brought new companies to the fore at each new wave. In each of these markets, according to Christensen, innovation shook up the established way of doing things and propelled new market entrants past companies that had dominated the previous technology.  Many of readers hear have probably read the book or come across his ideas somewhere, so I am not writing more.

10 years later, let’s see if this theory still hold. On of Christensen’s idea is that new technology improves over time until it is functionally equivalent to the existing product, but is still available at a lower price point. Then the market shifts dramatically, and the existing dominant players are forced out of the market almost overnight. He is suggesting that our energy solution will come from the developing world players. He told an interesting story about his trip to Mongolia where his daughter was working with local missionary. While solar panel is anything but mainstream here, in many developing worlds such as Mongolia many people are selling them in the market bundled with TV and radios, because there’s no electricity grid there.

I think low cost disruption will accelerate as technology continues to drive production and service cost down. Low-end disruption represents new contexts of consumption and competition, which are new value networks. These constitute either new customers who previously lacked the money or skills to buy and use the product, or different situations in which a product can be used—enabled by improvements in simplicity, portability, and product cost. I can think of 6 industries that you can apply his theory and come up with a viable disruptive innovation.

But I can also think of many examples how this won't work. One example is we have yet seen this is happening to Microsoft as they continue to dominate both the OS and the Office Productivity Software market. There are many versions of open-office software but they fail to gain any traction. Unlike Salesfroce.com who successfully took over the mid-market CRM.  Why?

Even when the product is free, take Google doc (SaaS) is the 2nd most popular free productivity app, used by 1% of users according to recent survey. Google docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app (compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word), and the fewest average days used. Although 1% of users had Gears installed on their machine, there was no evidence of its use in conjunction with Google Docs, nor did any user click on “Offline” or “Get Google Gears now” in their Docs account. Here’s an example a low-end disruption strategy failed even thought the incumbent has clearly overshoot in terms of functionality and performance.

The secret lies in “integration” as there are many third party vendors offering add-on solutions to SharePoint, we haven’t seen any office productivity software integration other than MS Office. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see the likes of Google or Xythos provide integration points. If a product can continue to find ways to integrate tightly with other components, the chance of it is being disrupted is less likely.

When Christensen suggested that iPod will soon be disrupted by cell phones, I don’t think this will likely be the case. The reason is iPod’s integration with all these apps and iTunes will not be replaced by camera+music phone. My Prada phone and Blackberry Bold both has music function, but I still use my iPod Touch.

Christensen also talked about barriers that stand in front of the manager seeking to create growth through innovation. Conventional wisdom works in conventional circumstances, but it misleads when circumstances change. This difference tilts the advantage toward the entrant and forces incumbents to work hard to create the organizational space they need to succeed through disruption.  Simply placing a disruptive idea squarely in the middle of any current operations can consign it to failure. Companies seeking to unlock the transformational power of innovation disruption need a common language, a process that treats different types of innovation projects differently, and demonstration projects that show the value of different approaches. This remains the very reasons why many innovation projects got stuck.

The New Age Of Innovation: When Every Global Industry Will Be Restructure. Not Many Companies Can Survive. What About Yours?

Another rainy day in NYC. I was invited to the Global Innovation Forum this week in NYC and meeting many fellow innovators and thinkers so I will probably be blogging about many of my thoughts. I also have half a dozen of meetings in between, between answering emails and socializing, the day was quite intense.

Stanford’s Paul Saffo (photo above on the left) delivered the opening session on forecasting and followed by CK Prahalad (another prominent management thinker and author of “The Core Competence of the Corporation” and "The Future of Competition," with Venkat Ramaswamy. His new book with co-author MS Krishnan is called The New Age of Innovation.)

CK began his presentation by talking about the need for amplifying weak signals and connecting the dots. Sounds easy but very difficult to do.  Weak signals is still a very foreign thing for many business executive. I’ve shared a few ideas with people on how to do weak signals scanning and what to do with it. 
CK also pointed out that you should not take your eyes off value creation. I’ve seen on so many occasions the innovation team having difficulties linking what they are doing to the both the short and long term performance of the firm. If you think getting the idea is difficult? Think how to work within current constraints are making the jobs almost seem impossible. But it’s not.

In additional to the four questions (diagram above) that leaders must ask, here are some of the takeaways (not surprising these all the things you've been reading about here and that's what we practice at Idea Couture):

Companies must radically rethink the entire business model — technology choices, distribution, pricing, scale, workflow, and organization. Fine-tuning won’t work as they are only bandages. It is not enough to simply restructure, most organizations and business model are outdated. Radical rethinking is the only choice, not an option.

Rather than researching markets, companies must immerse themselves in the lives of their target consumers. At the bottom of the pyramid, there are tough challenges in access, awareness, affordability, and availability, and only those who are grounded in the reality of their consumers’ lives will understand their priorities. The consumers themselves may not have the ability to articulate their needs.

When companies innovate must accept constraints. They cannot do all things; they must do a few things very well. Many people have come to believe that creativity must be unconstrained; in practice, however, breakthrough creativity requires an explicit acknowledgment of limits.” My experience is that most managers struggle with the innovation under constraints and when to selectively override them. This is an art itself.

Companies must not innovate in isolation. Breakthroughs occur when there are clusters of innovations, taking place continuously over time, in small experiments from which companies learn rapidly, and in an ecosystem involving many collaborators and partners.

CK uses the term “Velcro” organization (borrow from Joseph Bower). The idea is to create one that can adapt to changes without constant restructuring, Restructuring costs money and destroy morale. The idea is to get people to work together and engage and disengage after the tasks are done. Businesses need to change portfolio based current core capabilities as well as new ones.

I use the word Lego Corporations, essential the same meaning as “Velcro” organization, in this world of disruptive change, a company's infrastructure needs be like Velcro, cohesive and workable when in place, but capable of being easily re-arranged when circumstances and strategy call for it. But developing a Velcro-like infrastructure requires formidable mastery of the basics.

Joseph L. Bower (Harvard Business School) was the first to use the word “Velcro” many years back. His idea was that the nature of the organization design problem becomes clear when we try to apply the classic prescription, that structure should follow strategy, to the list of the strategic needs of a modern multinational.

A "Velcro" organization provides a firm, clear connection for managers to work with when appropriate, but permits rapid shifts in configuration so that managers can exploit different connections when those are needed. Like Velcro fasteners, the relationships should be tight when managers are in operating modes, but be capable of being loosened quickly for reassembly, when managers have to work in temporary groups on projects, studies, or tasks like new business development with strategic horizons. It requires a lot of rethinking on organizational design.

Forecasting Is A Dangerous Business. How Useful Is Scenario Planning? What's The Art Of Sense Making? And What Makes A Good Forecaster?

Forecast is a tricky business. Paul Safron was running a workshop organized by the World Innovation Forum today to show how forecasting is done; mainly the art of defining the “Cone of Uncertainty” and mapping the scope of future possibilities. Paul is a professor at Stanford and a forecaster with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society.  It is not an easy business and Paul survived 20 years. Forecasting is a dangerous business.

Throughout history, we have turned to prophets and gurus in a quest to unlock the mysteries of the future and how it is unfold. Particularly in today’s highly uncertain climate, businesses show a big appetite in getting a peep into the future. Paul doesn’t like the word “futurist” for reasons, which I fully understand. But there’s a place for this role, although we have to be smart to know how to use them. The problem is not them, it is us. We are using them the wrong way. It is part of our tool kit, not a prediction process. Paul made a good point saying “ to understanding the past in order to understand the future.” We need to go back far enough to help explain why things are happening as they are. Some of Paul ideas are:

The hardest part is defining the edge of the forecasts. He uses the word “cone’ to describe the scope of scenarios, and point out that most wildcard sits outside the cone, The art is to define the cone to include possible outcomes and not wasting your time – it is a way to communicate that to others.

Forecasting is not a way to predict the future, it is a systematic way to apply common sense. It needs to be believable, support by minimum amount of data. Starts with naive forecast and then move outside.

On using wildcards for scenario planning. Wildcards are of low probability of occurrence or the probability cannot be quantify but with big impact. The question is can it happen or does it really have an impact? (Paul and I have different viewpoints on the applicability of scenarios and I find it less useful in its traditional role)

Good forecast usually Looks like bad research (I find this funny but true). The way to get to good forecast is to get many bad forecasts and find out why I’m wrong. So there are jobs for bad forecasters. Not bad if that’s profession you’re considering.

With information proliferation continue moving to a faster pace, exacerbating the burden on forecasters and strategic planners to make sense of vast amounts of data. New tools for visualizing data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns.  It is harder and harder to make sense of data whether they are weak signals or disruptive forces. May be the next killer app is to have an application to collect and interpret all these data and provide some form of sensemaking to help redefine forms of knowledge, knowing, and assessment.

It is becoming more and more important (and more difficult) for organizations to foresee the blending of new organization and management models with social technologies happening now and for the next decades, to foresee the driving of the 21st century social technologies powered enterprises. These organizations will need to engage their managers and workforce as whole persons bringing their future-seeing skills to work to help ignite innovation. Forecasting will just become another core capability.

There Are Three Types Of Businesses In This World. Either You Are Selling "Bandages", "Snake Oil" Or "Transformation". The Problem Is It Is Never Easy To Tell The Difference.

There are three types of businesses in this world. Either you are selling "Bandages", "Transformation" or "Snake Oil". I guess 50% of products out are are simply "Bandages" but they have places. Big solutions is about selling "Transformation" and all innovative products, services or business models fell within this category. The remaining 15%-20% are "Snake Oil". The problem is it is hard for us to distinguish between them because there are so any things we don’t know.

Take sustainability as a example, the German branch of the environmental group World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has finished a study together with IZES (German institute for future energy systems) on the environmental impact of electric vehicles in Germany. Germany is years ahead in green policy compare to US and Canada.

Germany has an ambitious goal of introducing electric vehicles. Germany, which today has 41 million cars, aims to have 1 million electric cars or plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2020. The conclusion of the study is that these electric cars only reduce greenhouse gases marginally. Despite all those investments.

The surprising result was even in the best-case scenario, the WWF assumes that the 1 million electric cars or plug-in vehicles running on renewable electricity and used at maximum mileage, the reduction is only 1%. The overall national carbon dioxide emissions would only be cut by 0.1%.  And these cars will drive the demand of electricity and that means more power plants. It doesn't really solve any problem?

Nathan Shedroff (a designer by training and the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco) has just released his latest book, Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must Be Sustainable. It deals with many interesting dilemma of design. He believes designers should be pro business.

His point is designers have to be "pro-business" if they want to make change happen, it's only because we have to reset the conversation from those who are "anti-business" in order to have the real conversation, which is: What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can we do to encourage this to happen.

According to Nathan, “’Business’ is never bad or good. So, it's ridiculous to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ it. It's a really great, helpful, powerful, and (because of all of that) problematic endeavor but it's not something to be for or against. Government, NGOs, unions, non-profits, and individuals all have their own, similar issues. So, when I say designers have to be "pro-business" if they want to make change happen, it's only because we have to reset the conversation from those who are "anti-business" in order to have the real conversation, which is: What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can we do to encourage this to happen.”

In his book, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how designers can bake sustainability into their design processes in order to produce more sustainable solutions. He explains how sustainability isn't as difficult to understand and address as many would have we think and how to insert sustainability into the development process that we're already using. Lots of practical ideas to help designer to create more sustainable designs.

I’ve criticized how the lack of  understand in basic economics and business in the design field in my last post. Over the years majority of designers I’ve come across are either 1/ do not like business 2/ have no idea of how business works.  Can a Design MBA solve this problem? So I asked Nathan the question: Do you think a designer can ever be a good business person?  His response is as follow:

“Absolutely. In fact, our Design MBA program is predicated on the idea that these aren't so much different domains but two approaches to the same issues and concerns. Designers are, typically, divergent thinkers that expand possibilities and "get" qualitative aspects and qualities. ‘Traditional’ business people typically focus on convergent thinking and adhere to quantitative metrics to manage. In truth, both are needed for any venture to be successful and it's easier for designers (who are already accustomed to dealing with ambiguity) to see and integrate both than it is for traditional business people (who tend to run screaming in the face of ambiguous results and squishy metrics). However, everyone can get there if they desire to and apply themselves.”

May be I should talk to a few recent graduates and see how they compare to those other 1,000 traditional MBAs that I’ve hired during my career? May be it will set the stage for new types of MBAs such as MBA in Design Thinking or MBA in Sytem Thinking.