innovation playground Idris Mootee

Another Great Innovation To Prevent Breast Cancer: A Portable Scanner That Works With Your Laptop Or iPad.

Breast cancer touches many people every year, and it is not just women. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 207,090 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in women in the United States alone in 2010, and an additional 1,970 cases in men. Deaths are projected to be 39,840 in women. There are also a lot of misdianosis.

A professor at Manchester University is bringing hope to women worldwide with his new innovation--a portable real-time breast scanner. Using radio frequency technology, the scanner can show either malignant or benign breast tumors on a computer screen in real-time. Scanning in a hospital to detect breast cancer is not a pleasant experience.

The beauty of the device is that it is simple to use, hook up to your laptop and you can see real-time imaging and the scan is even accurate if women are wearing a bra. Imagine making this available in the developing world due to its affordability and portability. The portable scanner is about the size of a lunch box. It is a great idea, although it can use some design.

Unlike mammography, which presses a woman’s breast (that’s a painful experience for most people), the scanner works when a woman places her breast in a cup. While mammography detects density, radio frequency works on dielectric contrasts between diseased and normal breast tissue. As soon as the breast is placed in the cup, any abnormality, including a tumor, shows up in red on the computer screen. That’s because the sensor can detect the difference in tissue contrasts, with malignant tissues having a higher permittivity and conductivity than normal tissue. Introduction of the new portable scanner for breast cancer detection could be a tremendous breakthrough for women, allowing them more accurate, faster, and easier access to screening. Professor Wu submitted his invention to the IET Innovation Awards, and winners will be announced in November.

Another interesting idea is using art to help cure breast cancer. British artist Samira Harris and Samsung hope to do just that with “Everyone is Art,” the first giant collaborative artwork to be made and auctioned for breast cancer. “Everyone is Art” is a re-creation of the face of Botticelli’s famous painting, “The Birth of Venus,” featuring the faces of more than a thousand men and women collected through a website.

What Designers And Design Thinkers Can Learn From Complex Adaptive Systems?

Early 1995, I was obsessed with the new science of complexity and have spent a lot of time on cellula automata and was looking for new clues to illuminate strategy making when emerging technologies were causing uncertainties in the world of business. I questioned the relevance as well as applicability of many social science theories and economic theories in understanding the nature of change bought by complex systems.

Complexity science seems to shed some lights on the behaviors of network effects of people/computers, immune systems and termite colonies. I was intrigued by what I was seeing and ended up writing a book on its complexity theories and business strategy. It helps to explain the role of network influences and behavior, connections and interactions. Fascinating to the business applications of concepts of emerging orders, self-organizing, nonlinearit, I realize the value of pattern recognition, difference between the whole and the mere sum of the parts, the value of outliers and diversity, and the way some very small inputs can lead to big changes.

15 years later, now when I revisit the ideas, these concepts seem to make more sense as we see with what’s doing on around us. It is important to understand that this science is not a single theory or a theory of everything. It is a lose combination of different ideas, theories and concepts from a variety of disciplines--biology, anthropology, economy, sociology, management that together helps explain complex adaptive system.

What does it mean for designers and design thinkers? The new science (or art) helps us to understand how complex adaptive systems work the patterns of relationships within them, how they are sustained, how they self-organize and how outcomes emerge. It is highly relevant when we are dealing with introducing a highly innovative products/technologies to the market where different elements interact to create a new behavior. Until they use the products, it is hard to see how it will be actually used rather than what was envisioned. It invites us to examine the unpredictable, disorderly and unstable aspects of organizations and human behavior.

Think social media and think sustainability. Think how activities at a local level can shape individual change and activate organizational capacities of communities and ultimate affect structural change. If Blockbuster understands these ideas, they might have a good chance of not letting Netflex eats their lunch. If GM understands these ideas, the might have come up with a new business model. If Visa understands these ideas, their market cap could be doubled from the current market valuation. If LG understands this, they can create the next tablet that beats iPad.

Sustainability: What's Is The Right Thing To Do? Transformable Space Or Minimalist Living? Is It About Consuming Less?

I am at a stage when I really have too much stuff. My house is full of furniture from Philippe Starck’s Costes chairs to Le Corbusier lounge chairs to Barcelona day bed and Eileen Grey stuff….  and then there are a collection of French country and New England styles Ralph Lauren furniture in the basement. These are stuff I accumulated from my days in LA, HK, Boston, London and Milan.  Now I don’t know what to do with them. My basement is filled with things from art pieces to cameras; high tech gadgets to old French magazines date back to 1980s. I seriously think I need less, but I am getting more everyday. I carry an iTouch, iPad and iMac to work, plus my Leica, solar charger, Blackberries and portable GPS and all chargers and cables. My life is dependent on all those things.

When Graham Hill (founder of Treehugger) tells everyone that less is more, he has a good reason. He is now inviting people to submit design ideas to Life Edited, a design competition for a 420 square feet apartment that embodies this philosophy and demonstrates how we can "radically reduce our urban footprint, while living better and saving money."  I am sure people who live in Tokyo have plenty of proven ideas for this. You don’t need to have a competition, just fly to Tokyo and check out those tiny apartments. I am heading to Tokyo in two weeks.

Life Editor’s idea is to get people to think about transformable space furnished only with the essentials and digitized media. The idea is to own less. Now we have plenty to learn from Buddhism philosophy. The Heart Sutra espouses the doctrine of “emptiness.” One of its famous lines teaches  “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Design schools should design a new elective called 'Buddhism and Design.' I like that idea. I will teach that.

Don’t misunderstand that emptiness here in a nihilistic, nothing-exists sense. Rather, it means that nothing is absolute—everything is relative and impermanent, and everythng in a constant state of change. Therefore, there is no point in becoming irrationally attached to things. Don’t get upset if you can’t get your hands on the latest Louis Vuitton limited edition bag. I feel that embracing “emptiness,” rather than clinging to the material aspects of existence, opens us to a more direct, genuine, and fulfilling experience of life.

Graham is using his own 420 sf apartment as a reference for what the space ought to include living space, a home office, a work area with a rolling tool chest, and a retractable kitchen.

Is it less? In a paper recently published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives, Paul Ehrlich joined a group of nearly a dozen of the world’s most ambitious ecologists and economists to try to put some hard numbers behind sustainability. They boldly entitled the paper “Are We Consuming Too Much?” I suggest you get a copy of that.

The authors suggested the problem is not consuming too much. It’s that they’re consuming far too little. Think Africa. Consumption is obviously inadequate when people are dying of malnutrition. But insufficient investment also means that the next generation of Africans will have less than this generation, and the generation after that still less. This is a death spiral of declining consumption and investment, two keys to well being and sustainability.

But what about us? The answer Ehrlich and his colleagues came up is a surprise to many.  It turns out that even we with our Priuses and SUVs and venti lattés might not be consuming too much, as long as we are investing enough in the future to ensure that generations to come enjoy standards of living at least as high as ours. And that suggests that we might be worrying way too much about how much we consume and far too little about how to invest in the poorest regions of the world, many of which are home to some of the earth’s greatest biodiversity as well as its most desperate people. I definitely buy the idea, investing in biodiversity is the most important step to secure our future.

What Is The Future Of Mobile Phones? Will There Be A Physical Phone? The Future Is Interesting.

Where is mobile going? It is the hottest space right now to be in and will remain so for another 10 years as it evolves and converges. Not sure what mobile means when most devices will have the wireless networking capability be it 4G or 5G. VOIP will remain a disruption for years to come as it takes over older telco infrastructures now threatening mobile operators that have yet to embrace VoIP and will suffer the consequences. Frost & Sullivan sees a bright future where mobile VoIP will generate $29.57 billion by 2015. iPhone and iPad and the apps that are now allowed to make VoIP calls is a series threat to carriers’ revenue and they will try every way top create barriers including surcharges on VoIP usage over the data networks.

And for the banks, the adoption rate of mobile financial services is surpassing that of other financial service innovations such as online banking and ATMS. So it will soon take over as the main channel with ATM being the second. Come the year 2015, the United States will have a penetration of some 149 million WiFi enabled mobile phones according to a recent study performed by Coda Research, it means the US will account for 66% of all WiFi enabled mobile phone shipments in the year 2015 with a growth rate of 25 percent CAGR between now and 2015. 
 Obviously a big part of that growth will be in the smartphone sector with two thirds of WiFi hotspot connections coming through smartphones in 2015.

So what is next for mobile? What would the next generation of mobile phones look like? We have been doing a lot of research and prototyping imagining new c=behaviors that drive new design and features. Some of the ideas are so exciting but unfortunately I can’t share that here for obvious reasons.

We have been studying the changing global cultural trends and socio-economic factors, how our lives and communities are changing and how the mobile phone evolves to fit that or drive change to that. 

 Bigger screens or better screen, foldable screens or no screens? Will the ultimate device would be entirely virtual and it follows me, from my sunglasses to my windshield and desktops or bedside alarm clocks? Or something like interactive holographs that pop out like a ghost? Yes augmented reality phones and seeing a video voice mail from someone who has passed away for years?

What about keyboards? Will they disappear with the screen? Or we still want to type? Voice input will make physical keyboards almost entirely redundant but we still want to type if I have to make a prediction. For those of you who like to express themselves with gestures, gesture recognition is another big one. Imagine sending a middle finger virtually? What about eye-focus tracking that will provide virtual full-size keyboards so no more fingers will be needed. So how do we exercise our fingers?

We definitely need to move away from silicon to biological processors, open your phone’s battery compartment you will find a few ants working to produce energy? The computer you inject is more likely to resemble a specialized virus than a tiny silicon chip. This gives you a taste of what Idea Couture’s future mobile experience prototyping playbook looks like. I wish I could share more.

Don't Waste This Crisis. It Is The Best Time For A 'Reset'. Sometimes It Takes A Life Shake Up To Put Us Back On The Paths We Need To Be On.

There were tours visiting our office last week, people were curious about what we do and what kind of people we hire. It is an interesting question. I guess our job is to help large companies go through mid-life crisis.

Crisis is a popular word these days and it seems like there are no shortages of them. We use the term in today's economic, humanitarian, political and environmental climate. The word is much associated with extreme negative 'tests' of our human abilities or survival as a species. This is also a test on our intelligence and also a test of humanities and to what extend it exists.

How do we get out of this crisis and what can we learn from them? How many of our crisis are man made? How many of them are systemic? How many of them are truly avoidable? I think this is the big midlife crisis of capitalism and even humanity. Wherever a crisis occurs there are creative successes resulting from adversity and that’s not what you see when you’re in the middle of it.

Crisis creativity a fundamentally part of our human characteristics. War is no question the worst type of man-made crisis and lot innovations were attributed to war ironically.  Here are some examples: The very first chemotherapy drug was developed from mustard gas, which ironically was the first weapon of mass destruction. Binging hospital equipment to soldiers in the South African conflict medicalized field dressings and X-rays were used, although initially the machines were large and cumbersome and could only be used in hospitals. During the First World War blood transfusions were performed in the battlefield, and saline transfusions for fluid loss were also used. Some branches of medicine, such as orthopedics, plastic surgery and rehabilitation, mainly benefited from the large number of war casualties and lessons learned under these conditions were applied to medical treatment for civilians.

So what crisis creativity can we get from the current midlife crisis of capitalism? Before we can delve right into how to cope with a midlife crisis we have to understand what it is. It is time when you realize your youth has passed by and it creates tremendous feelings of self-doubt. These feelings can lead to depression or worse self-destruction. 

It is exactly what’s happening in the word of business and management. The idea of profit maximization at any cost is creating an imbalance and the many theories of management have proven itself to be flawed. A lot of retrospection and reflection needs to happen here.... assessing one's goals and seeing how far one has come. Many start anew when they are in their mid-40s, the quintessential “mid-life crisis” is really just another manifestation of the search for self and transformation, whether it is for an organization or individual oreven ideology.

What a person needs to do most when he or she is going through a crisis is gain control of his or her own life. Obviously when crisis occurs there is some external force we can't control causing us great stress. Great stress creates great emotion. Double Whammy! For a person going through a mid-life crisis, he or she needs to do is to make change and commit to it. This is the point where it would be wise to actually map out your life. The same thing for business, there is no better time to map out the future of your business, bring in a new sense of purpose and energy to power up the organization.

Rethink about the past; reimagine the future and preparing for a big reset for it. Don’t waste this crisis, get something out from it. Crisis can create opportunity for change. Sometimes it takes a life shake up to put us back on the paths we need to be on.

Apple Is Considering Splitting Up The Company. Including Selling Of Its Computer Division.

Apple is considering splitting into three companies and selling of its computer division. Yes I make that up. But it was equally crazy If I was telling you in 1995 IBM would get out of the computer and laptop business. The Thinkpad was doing so well and they were good machines. Unthinkable? Well they did.

This is not happening anytime soon, at least when Steve Jobs still the CEO. Like many other Apple fans, I don't think it is a good idea. But what do I know. One day, consultants and i-bankers will be pitching to the board and shareholders that splitting up the company can increase total enterprise value and getting out of the hardware business are a good idea for Apple.

Manufacturing will be outsourced to factories in China (which is already the case) and the will license the MacBook name to multiple manufacturers. That way Apple can focus on competing on high value opportunities such as mobile, software, content and even advertising.

When Steve Jobs spoke about Google’s acquisition of AdMob last year. “Google came in and snatched them from us. We bought a much smaller, but good company Quattro,” he said. Now with iAd, Apple directly targets Google. Jobs thinks user behavior is different on the phone vs. the PC because the 200,000 plus apps currently available on the iPhone “get you into every corner of the internet. I think he is right. The PC paradigm is outdated.

Apple business strategy will evolve and eventually some of their strategic assets will slowly become strategic liabilities. Apple’s war chest will get bigger and bigger (it is already big with almost $40 billion in cash I the bank). A significant accounting change now allows Apple to book revenue sales of iPhones immediately instead of over two years sales as before. This moves revenue to nearly $15.7 billion and per-share profits to $3.67. Think about this: Apple reported more revenue in the first quarter of 2010 than it did for the entire fiscal year in 2005. We can see this trend continuing, just looking around you and see people with all walks of life taking an iPad wherever they go. It is a mass product in day one. Probably the first Apple product that needs zero time for diffusion.

In addition of coming up with the next killer iSomething, now Apple also needs to figure a way to use its cash to provide a decent return. What can you buy for $40 billion?

So how do we divide up Apple? Let’s start with iPod/iTunes, it is a media business. It should focus on content distribution and the business model is a great one. With next generations of Apple TV, this is a great media play. Mobile is a high growth business and will be for 10 more years at least. The Apple iPhone and iPad platform have given them a distinct competitive advantage. Apple’s advertising business? It is unclear their strategic intent to play in the mobile ad space. Apple computers keep the software and license other to produce them.

Deciding On Your Big Strategic Innovation Move? Don't Forget One Small Detail: How Do You Make Money?

Technology-based companies typically make one common mistake: They get too caught up in technological innovation, particularly developing new technologies, or get too obsessed with the next killer technology and thinks the world evolves around their latest invention. Even if they find the right applications for their technologies, they often defer the serious effort needed to figure out how they create economic value – or how do they make money? They did not come up with the answers but insisted sailing forward ending up with business without a business model. I find that funny, a business without a business model should not be called a business in the first place. It is different when a company needs to change their revenue strategy as they move up the value chain or extend their activities in the business eco-system. That's a different story.

A business without a clear idea of how it makes money is like a zombie, and for a business without understanding their roles and purposes is like a zombie without a heart in additional to a brain. Not sure what is the technical name for that? The walking dead?

Traditional technology innovation often leads to a strong internal focus and thus being too fixated on pursuing engineering development and lacks early consideration on commercialization, marketability and industry architecture. As a result, many technologically innovative firms fail to bring their products successfully to the market or create a sustainable business economic model.

Every company should have an idea how they would like to compete (create value) and make money (capture value) and that guides the strategic planning and implementation of all its innovation and planning activities. Strategic innovation should be about highly selective market entry with the intent of subsequent market domination.

There is too much hpye on business model design. The truth is there are only a handful of options so there is no need to glorify the effort. Organizations are increasingly inter-connected as they design, source, buy, make, distribute and market their products and there are many configurations you can play with. But that is not about the business model, that is the business design or value chain or value network (I think this is a better phrase). Business models are primarily about how to capture the economic value by extending the revenue sources. It is not uncommon for companies to operate outside and across traditional industry boundaries and definitions.

Any strategic innovation effort could lead to reconfiguration of assets and capabilities. When you hear the name Skype, what do you think? Probably free Internet calls. What is Skype’s business model? Well they never really have one unitl now. It is a great offering and good user experiences and the customer value proposition is compelling—free.

How do you make money by providing free voice calls? At least it looks like they finally figured it out, it is now “free plus paid services” model. Is there any business model innovation here? I don’t think so. They charge you for calls outside of Skype user base. They did try a new innovative experiments including sending money via Skype. However, when your corporate parent also owns PayPal, that won’t work. It was shot down very quickly. I don’t think they will try Skype auction next.

Next they should be putting their innovation effort on mobile, there are lots of opportunity for innovation that brings in new and real revenue. So they end up becoming a telecommunications company? They need to find a real problem to solve? Go back to the unmet needs? money from “upstream” partners. The local cost or free customer proposition limits their abilities to charge more, so they need to go somewhere to find revenue. Serving ads won’t get them where they want to go. The mobile area is still where the money is..at least for now.

I remember the analyst conference last year when Josh Silverman’s presenation was to address the following:

• How does Skype generate revenue?
• What drives Skype’s cost model?
• How will a software company change real time communications in ways that legacy telcos cannot?
• How is Skype structured to address its various market opportunities?

The net message was that they expect to double their revenue to over $1 billion in 2011 from their 400 million registered users. And maintaining segment margins of 18%-20%. Solverman stated that there is a communications paradigm shift going on where hardwired networks and devices are gradually being replaced by software-based networks and flexible devices.

For Silverman, Skype’s “opportunity is to become the world’s leading communications software company. To reinforce his point, Skype will not simply be on familiar telephony devices, it will show up in intelligent TV sets, car dashboards and intelligent public access terminals such as bank ATM’s all tied to a common network. Well that's a nice aspiration, but hardly a business strategy with a business model. At the end of the day, can they just tell me what are they planning to do in the next 3 years and where the revenue will come from. This is not the question people like to address.

Corporations Should Create A New Role: 'Chief Social Engineer' Accountable For The Company Second Or Third Bottom Line.

Very crazy weeks with 8 key projects in critical phases and we're excited on every one of them. MIT Global Challenge is one of my favourite since day one as it is a great idea to bring the brighest minds of MIT alumnis to solve the world's wicked problems. There are no shortage of wicked problems, while we try to solve one, new ones are being created. And I think B-schools need to follow what MIT is doing. I think the true impact is how the MIT Global Challenge will inspire young students and aware of what challenges we are dealing with and true power of communities and purposes. B-schools need to start breeding a different generation of humanitic capitalists and not the old school i-bankers, we don't need more.

Another exciting one is Aviva Change Fund. The last one was a runaway success and this year we expect the same. Great client of ours that truly understand the how the world has changed and it takes real action to build an authentic brand. Building great brands and creating positive change is not mutually exclusive. And there is Recyclebank which we have a dedicated team working day and night for some really exciting change. And there is the Adopt a School project which has jsut come to an end with some fantastic results. 26,960 books raised for children in high-need elementary schools, far exceeding our client Indigo's initial goal. Everyone at IC are so excited about these projects. More to come next month.

Over the years I’ve seen many large multinationals developed a cowboy mentality, where greed, ego and arrogrant aggressiveness took over and they were living on capitalism horsebacks, especially during a long interrupted post war boom. US-dominated international financial order has experienced a series of crises as its flaws manifested and we see one after another-big industries failing. In fact, the current world financial crisis has once again exposed the flaws of the US version of extreme capitalism (I am also a capitalist make no mistake) and it went to the extreme.

Management theories were mostly invented during those period based on assumptions that now seems outdated and some of them were flawed in the first place. Instead of thinking about how we can create more sustainable and humanistic societies, we pushed the other buttons to drive things to the extreme and the world is widely polarized.

Innovation did not happen in areas of how to make business models sustainable and how to develop human capital and social equality as a differentiating competitive advantage, instead money and creativity were spent on how to expand new profits by using "financial technology innovations" to develop financial derivatives and establish a man(not many women)-made "virtual financial world". That world is virtual but the damage is not.

Take the subprime mortgage credits as a perfect example. They were integrated, split and repackaged into a series of securities-like commodities, which were then sold throughout the world as new virtual financial products after being split and repackaged again and again by downstream retailers. These money machines did not add value to societies. They simply push risks to the mass, which have no idea of what’s going on. The focus on short-term profit over long-term client shareholder and social/environmental value and the lack of consideration for the global impact of their decisions is causing us the pain for a long time.

Large multinationals often profess to have a higher moral vision (at least according to the annual reports) and to be pursuing a world with laudable goals of sustainable economies and environment. On the other hand, it is convenient to ignore the socially destructive behavior of those economies that rely heavily on governmental regulations and state-operated monopolistic enterprises. These economies have incurred extreme rates of poverty, repressed human rights, and excessive or even unreversible environmental damage. I want to see large multinational corporations starting or incubating social enterprises just as they incubate technology start-ups through their venture funds.

They need to play in this sandbox to prepare for a sea change and apply their scale and structural advantage to see what a social enterprise can do. I don’t know when we can see a first multi-national social enterprise with certain scale and scope. May be a first publicly traded social enterprise. That will be next birthday wish. Or my next or last career move?

I suggest every large organization should create a role for a Chief Social Engineer similar to the role of a CMO or CFO, his or her job is to identify systemic problems within the social systems and structures and responsibility for the second bottom line or call it the third if you wish. Just as a CFO is responsible for the financial bottom line, the CSE will be responsible for measuring the positive social impact bottom line. And I am not talking about the fuzzy CSR thing; I am talking about hard-core metrics that show social economic impact. And that should be part of the market valuation.

The Chief Social Engineer’s job (not a PR role for sure) is to create innovative path- breaking new ways to address social problems that are aligned with the corporation business strategy. I will consider taking that that job if GE hires me as the CSE. Or they can outsource that role to our Idea Couture, that's even better.

Developing Communities Of Purposes Will Soon Become The Strategic Mission Of CEOs' Offices.

I was invited to speak to a group of busness incubators from all across US and Canada. My goal was to cut to the point to show them what is needed to qualify as a viable strategy for any start-up 1/ it must not be subject to the same economics as the dominant players, otherwise there is no reason the world needs another start-up. 2. it must answer to very specific customer unmet needs 3/ it must have a purpsoe. A strategy without a purpsoe is like a computer without an OS. I shared my 70 slides power point with them. Unfortunately not much time for interations as I needed to be back in the office.

Before you talk about game-chaning strategies, think what you propose to do would impact your busines model or the industry architecture? How you turn the strategic assets of big competitors into strategic liabilites and how to leverage your strategic agility so their scale advantage is disminishing. Large multinationals not only have challenges with their legacies, they also have a motivation and mobilization challenge. The cubicles and business processes are designed to reduce individual’s imagination to ‘zero’ and these incentives (bonus etc.) are hardly as powerful as other intrinsic motivation. Companies need a purpose or people won’t feel intrinsically motivated on the works that they perform beyond getting a pay check.

Communities of purpose are the business backbone of the 21st Century and this does not end with companies’ employees or suppliers, it also extends to customers. It has profound and far-reaching implications for how companies should be organized to benefit from how value is created and distributed. It makes many management theory looks outdated (and many are very outdated). Any start-up or large enterprise that can consistency maintain a community of purpose would unlock there the true potential of an organization. I think many social enterprises will have an advantage both in attracting talents and customers, and eventually capital markets.

And to clarify, when I say social enterprise I don’t mean just co-ops, or quasi non-profits, I mean privately owned companies with policies on corporate social responsibility as part of their business strategy. It is a particular type of business or value creating activity that sometimes gives rise to distinct organisation forms reflecting a commitment to a social cause working with stakeholders. It’s business objectives is still to mazimizse profits well still aligned with core values. Whereas conventional businesses distribute their profit among shareholders, in social enterprises the surplus (or a meaningful part of it) tends to go towards one or more social aims which the business has - for example education for the third world,women empwerment, environmental issues or for animal rights.

The question of what percentages of profits can be retained for future use? Or for redistrubution to shareholders?  Should they enjoy some kind of tax incentives? Can they be public? Can they acquire non-profit and turn them into for profit?  And do we need tp adapt a broader definition which is independent of any legal model. This latitudinarian definition could include not only companies limited by guarantee, and industrial and provident societies but also companies limited by shares, unincorporated associations, partnerships and sole traders. It is complicated.

A Hip Belgium Design Firm Buzzispace Is Collaborating With Idea Couture To Create Sustainable Creative Spaces.

We wanted our San Francisco office to be a community space as much as a creative and functional workspace, and yet all material used will need be sustainable. Our San Francisco office renovation began with a commitment to create an airy, energy-efficient and healthy environment even when we have to look across the world to find the righ solution.

We purposely chose a convenient location so people can easily ride their bicycles to work. And it is a 5-minute walk to the waterfront. Office furniture is a difficult place to start as has the most environmental impact. 90% of office furniture out there is plain ugly. These desks and chairs can do more damage to the environment than just using up energy and natural resources when they’re manufactured. They can also introduce toxic chemicals into the environment, both during their manufacturing process and after their disposal. We wanted something that is highly sustainable.

We also need creative and flexible space that supports ‘explorative’ and ‘coordinative’ activities amongst our multi-disciplinary designers. The space design has to communicate and inspire creativity. Designers like keeping rough sketches, magazine clippings, pictures, design models and other relevant things on their working space and surfaces such as clipboards, white boards and office walls in a way that constantly informs and inspires their design work.

Buzzispace provides the multimodality for spaces that convey information through multiple senses that facilitate rich communications between designers and design thinkers. Additionally, we need to find ways to display design artifacts that are indicative of different phases of the innovation process, the current state and the future state. They serve as reminders and inspirations.

In search for our design solution, Idea Couture is working with a super cool Belgium-based company called Buzzispace, a young Belgium design group with big ambitions, and like Idea Couture, they are being recognized as a 'creative think tank'. Their ideas can be described in three simple words: Ecology, Acoustics and Flexibility. Their designs are winning awards across Europe including the Brussels Design Award for Best Belgian Product for 'Buzzizone' - an acoustic, half high, freestanding wall.

The beauty of the Buzzizone (free standing wall) deisgn is that they are all produced from recycled and recyclable materials. Fit nicely with Idea Couture's sustainability needs. You will be seeing a lot of grey, pink and green in our SF office. Their products are upcycled again and again, and the biodegradable cardboard structure inside can be returned to nature after its use, completley saitisfy the 'cradle to cradle' philosophy.

For chairs, it has to be Herman Miller. The company is known for its highly functional, sustainable, environmentally friendly products that marry functional, beautiful design with high standards for recyclability and minimal waste. The Mirra chair is what we are using across all offices. It is a Cradle-to-Cradle Gold and Silver certified by McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), the global sustainability certification firm.

For us, the work space is important. Not that it needs to be cool and stylish, it reflects the company culture, or the smell of the place. Sustainability is a key criteria. Creative spaces are more than just space to brainstorm or a random unification of desks. They are places where innovation happens, experience is being designed, economy is being produced, and new industry are being created. Our design thinkers search for ways to create innovation, our spaces should be a haven for people with ideas. They should act as idea laboratories where people can experiment with new processes of developing and implementing ideas. There is no need for water coolers.

I hate cubicles. Wonder who invented cubicles? It is the worst thing that ever happened to the modern corporation. I believed several decades ago modernist architects/designers saw walls and rooms as downright fascist and wanted change. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan would liberate office workers. But corporations took up their ideas differently and used it as means to save costs and pack as many as possible into a space. It eventually became the assembly line equivalent for the white collar.

Cubicles were then invented when interior designers attempted to save it from becoming a white collar factory. In the 1950s Quickborner, a German design group broke up the rows of desks into more organic groupings with partitions for privacy—what it called the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape”. In 1968 Herman Miller began selling its system as modular systems, the unfortunate consequence is when people cherry-pick the space-saving aspects of these designs and leave out the humanizing touches which is part of the original concept. And when the low cost manufatuers tried to copy the idea and it became a disaster.

Funny enough, there is actually a children cubicle for sale: a baby's first cubicle is one of the most depressing toys ever designed. But having people to switch to the open office is not easy either. One question often surfaces is the benefit of open offices, can you actually make decisions quicker and more efficiently when information are easily shared in an open space working environment? My experience with this is sometimes it takes a little longer for people to adjust to the open space working concepts where people easily overheard conversations. Co-ordination is improved as a result of that and the result is usually better individual and collective decisions.

Elizabeth Gould, Professor of Psychology at Princeton, was working on research attempt to defy the dogma of her field and proved that the primate brain creates new cells, she has gone on to demonstrate that the structure of the brain is incredibly influenced by one's surroundings. The key to Gould's demonstration of neurogenesis was the stimulating environment. Cages stopped neurgenesis, which she describes as "The neurons stop investing in them." It means cubicles can kill new brain cells production and as a result stiffens creativity. And the dull, boring, unstimulating cube life is creating stress for the brain.

I suggest we should have health warning attached to every single cubicle reading “WARNING: Cubicle kill new brain cells” or “The Ministry of Health warns: Use of cubicle decreases creativity”.

There Is Texting For Business, Texting For Emergency, Texting For Health, Texting For Love And Texting For Seduction. We Have Yet To Understand The Effects Of Excessive Texting Impacting Our Communications And Realtionships.

San Francisco weather is perfect this week, yes unusual for late Sept. Exhasuted but a lot of things get done. Will be spending a lot of time here.

I realize I am texting more these days as it is faster and easier. Texting is one of our everyday activities, for the younger generation, it is the primary method to stay connect with friends. I have seen a couple texting each other even when they are in the in same house. And some text while they drive, eat and even in an intimate situation. Imagine that?

It is also becoming a common tool for business as customer services. Airline texts me update on flight status and that makes sense, as it is time sensitive. One significant strength of text messaging is its ability to remain unintrusive, particular we are in meetings or on conference calls.

A company called StartTalking is making texting easer by allowing you translate talk to text. You just talk to it, and have it send what you say as a text. Likewise, when someone sends you a message, it will read it out. Is that a good idea? Are we turning text into phone calls? The thing is free of charge and once installed on your Android phone (and available soon for the iPhone and BlackBerry), it works quietly in the background and listens for voice prompts in order to activate.

The two prompts that are coming in this first iteration of the product are "computer" and "operator," though in future versions you'll be able to program in whatever word you want. It's as simple as saying "operator: text message for (insert name of the name of the receiver)." It confirms you want to send a message to that person, and then you just begin speaking. When you're done talking, it runs that speech through conversion, and plays it back for you.  Works like a voice mail. But other than when I am driving, it is defeating the purpose of texting. People do it most in classes and meetings when they can't talk.

Texting is actually an interesting behavior that is affecting many aspect of our life. There is texting for customer service, texting for emergency, texting for socail causes, texting for security and testing for seduction. It is now ubiquitous in our society. Think about the future of seduction and flirting, texting will be a perfect medium. Just add location based capability and a people matching algorithm.

I can see a bestseller book titled “100 Proven Techniques - Texting to Attract And Seduce?” Think about it, all it takes is one single funny text to makes one laugh and remember you. There is a whole new set of techniques in how often, what style, what teaser, when and that becomes your brand. You can't over do it, too much texting is bad. It is sort of like direct marketing, and sometimes you need a call for action. What we are looking at here is to tantalize and tease her/him. Bring out your brand personality and always leave her/him wanting more. Texting is a great seduction tool if you know the right techniques.

It is easy to envision using texting to engage audience in entertainment, particularly terrestrial radio to interact with live programs, a new revenue stream too. Local politicians can use this to drive engagement with constituents since people can use it to send complains to their local councilors as most would not write a letter and make a phone call after the event.

Here is an innovative idea. You can build a business with this overnight. Starting a SMS–based training services. Whether it is for improving your general social skills, seduction skills, customer service skills, negotiation, self-improvement and even language skills etc. Or an SMS-based MBA? Anytime and anywhere. For $10 a month, you can learn new skills anywhere and anytime you want. And each session can be 5 min while you wait for your burger or 30 min while you wait for your flight to take off. I can come up with a list of 50 ideas to offer. May be this our next start-up incubation idea?