innovation playground Idris Mootee

Friday Morning Ramblings: The 5 Myths Of Design Thinking In Business Applications.

Myth #1: Every creative person is a design thinker.

So you’re creative but doesn’t mean you are equipped to be with design methodologies and trained to be a design thinker, and even so you may not be able to apply them effectively in business decision making. Design Thinkers can imagine the world from multiple perspectives (a creative person see themselves as the center of the universe)—those of clients, end users, and customers. By taking a humanistic first approach, Design Thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. I don’t know how to a label who is a “design thinker”. I guess I know one when I see one.

Myth #2: Design Thinking can replace strategic planning and designers can be good manager.

You’ve drinking too much Design Thinking Kool-Aid while Design Thinking can help companies to be more innovative and more customer-centric, it does not equate strategic planning. The idea is to use Design Thinking to power up your strategic planning. And no, designers generally don’t make good managers, just the opposite.

Myth #3: There is value in learning best practices in Design Thinking.

For many consultants, it is such as easy sell for best practices in Design Thinking,  “look what’s Apple is doing and you can do that too?” I don’t know if Apple knows what’s Design Thinking is although they practice it well. For decades, the hope and goal of managers has been that by studying and adopting the practices of organizations reported to be the best or “benchmark” in a given area  (i.e. Design Thinking and Innovation) they will realize commensurate success. In truth, this activity has historically yielded very little of value. In the world of Design Thinking and Innovation, there is little value in best practices – only next practices. While out for firms that have written books about it and sell you yesterday’s theories.

Myth #4: Your market research companies can provide insights to support Design Thinking.

That’s not usually the case, and in fact almost never the case. Most of these firms came up with fancy name about their research methodologies and in fact it is the same old same old. Most hardly understand what Design Thinking is but happy to send a few 20 year olds out with a Canon camera and gives you ethnography, it is photography they’re giving you – not ethnography. You notice the two words are spelled differently.

Myth #5: Design Thinking is for senior managers only since they have a bigger responsibility for making important decisions.

The more senior you become, things become less black and white. You need to deal with many managerial dilemmas. Senior managers often have far less freedom to act alone and they have to deal with a more complicated political environment plus lot more paper pushing, and less freedom. Design Thinking can be helpful for organization as a way to develop visualization of new possibilities, prototyping, and refining and facilitate collective decision making which is often painful. It is can be a good painkiller and not only for senior managers and decision makers.

If you're interested in Design Thinking in applied everyday decision making, Idea Couture will be running a Design Thinking Seminar in NYC in the last week of May 2011 in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education. Look out for more info when we officially open for registration.

When We Look Back After Ten Years From Now, We Will Call This A Facebook Decade For Sure.

Maria Jesus Galan, a nun who has spent 35 years with the Santo Domingo el Rea convent in Toledo, Spain has been spending a lot of time on Facebook and digitizing the Dominican convent's archives.

When the local government gave her a prize for her hard work and she has over 600 Facebook friends, but she is not making any friends in the convent. Some nuns reportedly claimed that Sister Maria's Facebook activity "made life impossible" for them. So she was therefore asked to leave the convent and now back to live with her mom. There are still so many who are afraid of technology, not just the crazy leaders of Iran or Libya.

Today the keyboard is mightier than the sword. It bought down Tunisia and then Egypt and not sure who is next? Libya? They wish there is a kill switch but even there is one there is still no use. There are always channel for information to leak and eventually you cannot shut down the world’s Internet and mobile networks.

The Egypt case has proved the power of social network. It sparked biggest challenge to the regimes that are not democratically elected but also to corporations and brands. Twitter played a less important role this time, but it is till part of the social networks that power up revolution.

Called it "Social Revolution Networks". Ideas flow back and forth in real time and momentum multiplying every second. No one can control or dictate these voices anymore, they echoed through Facebook and it is the ultimate freedom of speech. Facebook is probably the number media today, more powerful that TV for sure. But I still like my New York Times. And for Linkedin, I won’t sleep well if I am running the company. It is easy to tell your staff and investors that people want to keep their professional and personal profile separate; I think it is a false sense of security.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner thinks many of us prefer to keep their professional online personas and their personal personas distinct. Weiner argued that while LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are often lumped together in a broad social networking category, all three represent separate social platforms that serve different needs for people. Well, yes and no. I think linked in missed a lot of opportunities to go beyond what they do and the interface is pretty bad. They can use a lot of help.

Here is a big idea. The next big magazine should be entirely Facebook based. There will be a print version but online context is entirely available through a FB app. The stories gathered all the feedback and perspectives from the users and fully incorporated into the content.

I have one more killer feature to make this work……. but I will keep it to myself as I think I have a buyer for that idea. Think about it this way, FB reminds us that everything in this world is organized around people. Somehow people forget that. If we rethink our business and organize them around people, I think we can come up plenty of new ideas to leap forward. Businesses are transforming how they relate to people and operate. CMOs that can throw away their notion of mass media and start recognizing and embracing this shift will gain strategic advantage over competitors. I think this is the new theory of marketing, time to write a new book. But I don’t have time.

A man in Egypt wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to name his firstborn girl "Facebook" Jamal Ibrahim, The girl’s family and friends gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. Facebook hold a special place in Egyptians' hearts because of its role in the revolution. I don't know anyone named their sons or daughter Twitters or Linkedin or Skype. Do you?

Officially Launching The First And Only Design Thinking And Innovation Magazine - M/I/S/C. Available In 18 Countires. Now Reviewing Proposals For Foreign Language Editions.

Great lacunch party last night for M/I/S/C, second launch party in San Francisco in a few weeks..and then Shanghai. 200+ cool people showed up. Food is good..and the cupcakes too. Special thanks to the folks who pulled this off in such a short time..Ashely, Lucy, Marla, Sherry, Jessica, Christian, Brooke and a few others... great job! The food was great, food catered by Caplansky's Delicatessan, speciality bite-size cupcakes by Cutlepiecupcakes. Speical thanks to Umbra for hosting us. Let's do another one soon.

I was once a "magazine junkie"; now after rehabitation I am now a very selective reader or not having the luxury for not being one. I cut my magazine subscriptions from 105 periodicals a fewyears back to 10. I have to cut one if I want to add a new one (I learned this from someone...). So it will always be 10.

Last year we’ve seen the changing hands and closing of some of the most prestige and long established business magazines including Business Week and Newsweek and some new one such as Portfolio which I find the positioning odd. So people ask me if I am crazy or foolish publishing another new magazine.

I am kind of both I guess. I think there is a future in magazines, but it won’t be like the old one. I love Business Week, but it is not a sustainable business model. It is an educated-consumer read: venerable, timely, credible, respected, well packaged and produced. Which is another way to say, in new media: slow, old, closed and expensive to produce. And it is still based on an old publishing model.

Newsstand sales for the almost 500 consumer magazines in the US measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations have been on a steady decline last three years between 8-12% for consumer magazines. Many publishers didn’t make it through the rapid decline in advertising dollars and struggling with integrating with the Internet thing. And the iPad thing turned the publishing upside down and changing the game quietly.

I have been having problems with mainstream publishing anyway so I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. The whole thing about “culture of mass media” or “popular culture” is moving our society backward or at least stopping us from moving forward. Let's take the "mass" or "popular" out of "mass media" or "popular media". Just look at what magazines they are selling at Walmart and you understand what I am talking about.

To some extend it is the same case for TV. JTV and JP (Junk TV and Junk Publishing) are hurting us and thanks to the Internet, many of us can do without TV and same for these poorly produced magazines. Many don't worth the trees they killed.

What is M/I/S/C magazine? I came up with the idea one night flying redeye. I said to myself I am trying to pick up what Bruce Nussbaum left behind at Business Week. I really like that supplement when he was the editor-in-chief of that section. 

Inpsired by Nussbaum's vision, M/I/S/C will be a new global media brand designed to take over when he left unfinished at Business Week, the mission is make design thinking and innovation practices accessible to a broader readership; the magazine will be positioned on newsstands alongside the other cutting-edge cool titles such as Monocle and Fast Company. I can't name another cool magazine, there are a bunch of good design and architecture magazines and not much that gets me excited. Bring me back Industry Standard, not sure if anyone remember that short-lived one. 

M/I/S/C is basically organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity, M/I/S/C blurs the boundaries between business, innovation, design, technology, art and culture. I want to show the world we can produce a world-class product in 30 days with limited resources. M/I/S/C will always be in Beta. I never promise you a finished product, there wont' be one.

Theodor Adorno said it right, "Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer's inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration."

Actually Adorno's critique was not directed against popular culture per se, but the specific kind of mass culture produced under monopoly capitalism which our system is designed to encouoraged in order to get market power. Consolidation of industry that drives efficiencies also takes out the heart and soul of the culture business. Take a look around us and see how popular culutre media = junk.

Popular culture posses a threat to innovation by destroying niche and novelties and sensibility of micro-cultures, which are essential to innovation. Many of today’s mass culture was not ‘mass’, these mass culture was imposed from marketers and media owners rather than derived from the people. Is there something called "mass culture" or it is just the advertisers that liked us to believe that.

I need to get back to my day job and this weekend I will start looking at content for the next issue.  Now onto the next one – the Future issue. The future is exciting.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Creative People Can Learn From Jazz On Time and Rhythm Management. There Are No Reasons Why A Creative Person Cannot Also Be A Professional.

I was talking to a publishing veteran from New York and showed him my new magazine M/I/S/C which will be in stores this week in US and next two weeks in 18 countries, he loved it and believed we have a winner here. Then he asked me how big is the team working in this and for how long? I quickly answered 4 people including me and all part time and it took 4 weeks. He looked surprised and said it would have taken him 5-6 full time people for 6 months to produce one issue, he couldn’t understand how we could move that fast. I said that’s the speed we operate. He was very impressed.

One thing that many creative people don’t understand, they assume that 1/ they are as the only individual tasked with coming up with the ideas 2/they have all the time in the world 3/they are thinking of something that no one has thought of it before. All three are wrong.

I don’t believe any good ideas come from one person (rare exception). It might be sparked by one person but immediately followed by other people’s ideas and then the idea begins to take shape through dialogues. It is easy to think that an idea come from one individual but that's never the case.

Then when given a task or problem to solve, they would assume that it is the only thing they do and then the world stops and wait for them to come up with the answers. Sorry, the world continues to move forward while you spin. Some design schools are very good in teaching people to spin than to produce.

And then the last one is it is simply a foolish notion to think that whatever you come up with has never been considered before. It is not out there doesn’t mean no one has come up with the ideas. It is like the first time a kid visit Disneyland and everything there were new, only to them. Most of the characters have been around for decades. I’d like to talk more about the second one in this post – time management. This is the worst one.

Time management is common among for us who are in the business of ‘ideas’. For most creative folks, being organized, having defined objectives and some structure seems to threaten their creativity and take the mystery out of the box. There is no mystery. They hate to be bound by time allocation and don’t know how to manage it. That’s why project managers are needed. It shouldn’t be the case, but they have become the necessary evil. The project management role is critical dealing with complex co-ordination of multi-disciplinary teams and technology projects, but less in the creative process. It is not the best use of their time to manage creative folks in the early phase and creative folks should understand what ‘deadline’ means. I think it is unfair that their lack of self-discipline continue to be a burden to others and other has to accomodate it. A creative person can be a professional. I don't buy the artist BS.

So how can creative people improve their time management? The truth of the matter is that focus and self-discipline is vital to the creative process. I know many world-class design thinkers who are also excellent time managers – from architects, urban planners to industrial designers.

Creative people’s main challenge is they don’t have the habits of planning ahead and very bad is dealing with interruptions. These interruptions and the many tasks at hand stand to eat away their productivity and their discussions often steer them to other out-of-scope areas. I am saying you should have a calendar with time allocated by the hour. You need to think like a play producer. There will be a time you need to rehearse whether you finished the script of not and there will be time when audience start entering the theater whether you’re ready or not. And you can’t ask them to wait outside.

The best way to deal with this is to compose a task list and manage the task list like you manage a jazz session. It is a time process as well as a creative jamming process. Understand who plays what role and make sure it is sticking to the rhythm. Be prepared for these jamming and make sure you have the right people. Jamming with the wrong people is a waste of time.

First, know what I call your "power time". It's important to know what time of day you are most alert. This is high value time and treats it as such. Use a good portion of this time to work on your most important assignments. Each person has a best time. You can discover yours by monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need to manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.

When planning your day, set other times of the day for tasks that don't require as much of your energy and concentration. Know what time of the day is least productive for you and use those time for other non-creative tasks such as prioritizing things that are important but not urgent or cleaning away your admin stuff or expense report etc. Assign a time to read you email (other than the urgent ones) and randomly spending time on your inbox can detail you. And don’t go to YouTube, do that at night. YouTube is the number one time-stealer. Your time in the office should be about interactions; otherwise you should be working from home. Always keep a notebook (or a piece of paper in my case) handy so that you can quickly jot down things that need to be done or your to-do-list. This will keep you focused on what you are doing and keep those things that need to be done in front of you.

Time (or rhythm) management is a skill badly needed for anyone who is in the knowledge business and particularly for creative folks. Here’s a take away for you - six steps to creative productivity:

1. What's the job? - Generating a long list of perceived problems or opportunities relating to the project and to select only the key "problems" to address. Invest your time smartly.
2. What’s the learning curve? – Understand what is needed to get up to speed and it is need to be proportion to the project time. You can’t spend 7 days learning a project and only have 2 days to work on it. Learning should be no more than 20% of the total project time.
3. What's the deliverable? – Think like a consultant, think deliverable, think about the end product not only what they look like but how they will be used.
4. What's the Information we have to work with? – Think about what information you will have to work with and what do you know and what you don't know.
5. Who's Involved? – Need to know who are your team mates and their individual role.
6. What's the rhythm? – Remember to set up the rhythm and get everyone into it. There is a lot you can learn from Jazz. As Jazz rhythms tend to be syncopated, meaning they contain unexpected accents. 

In addiiton to Jazz, it is important to understand the concept of swing, which has to do with creating a sense of momentum and danceability (good ideas dance). Some styles of jazz make use of counterpoint, which occurs when several melodies with different rhythms are played simultaneously. Together, the attributes of syncopation, swing, and counterpoint create a rich rhythmic background that is one of the most important elements of jazz. If you don’t like Jazz, you can’t be a good productive creative person. Hip-hop is the opposite and not recommended.

The Most Important Feature Lacking In ERP Systems Is The Kill Switch. If You Want Innovation To Happen Fast, Look For That Switch.

Innovation happening in different sectors, such as adcanced technology, government, social enterprise, multi-national corporations and non-profits is exciting. As we explore different organizational design that best support innovation, we are always missing an important ingredient for success, the human factor adn the system constrains. Ideas are easy and in many ways a commodity.

Ideas are cheap and the whole concept of a creative director is such a thing of the 80s, who is not creative. Who can afford not to be creative these days? Every design grads tell me they have lots of ideas and want to work for Idea Couture, I tell them we have too many already and ideas are in oversupply. Let’s talk what else you can bring to the table. It is usually followed by a 10 minute of silence.

As we look at innovation from coming up with new ideas to making them work, we have to be equally interested in the human factor and organizational design and structure charged with making ideas actionable. Our current organizational design and management systems were not designed to support innovation. Actually it is designed to work against innovation. Almost most components of our management systems are designed to improve predictability. In an idea world, we know what we want to be; we know how much it cost to build, and how much it cost to sell and how many we can sell. Then we align that with our resource allocation system. In an idea world we can predict out topline as well as bottomline and ideally over a period of 5 years.

We know all these are bullshits. We all buy into that and B-schools and capital markets all use the same bullshits. So these bullshits are fully institutionalized in our system and everyone ended up playing the system at whatever costs. As increasing regulations, management systems, business processes and efficiency initiatives become less flexible, new organized spaces need to be created in order facilitate product, service, and experience innovation on a global scale.

Any corporation can drastically benefit from a 24-hour open innovation network and the process of innovation can also benefit from this open ideation network – essentially, it would allow for innovation beyond product development functions. It is the new open enterprise. And it is time to press the kill button on your ERP and start thinking what an open enterprise will look like. Think about it, many innovation be in product or service opportunities span industries and business units, things can become complicated.

Even the line between product innovation / development and corporate entrepreneurship will blur and the mission extends beyond conceptualization and prototyping of a product, to new business design and business model. You might be interested to read the piece I wrote for PDMA on product development which was published yesterday. I talked about number of ways companies can organize around innovation and to what extent each model opens up outside the enterprise. Each model has its own merits and pitfalls and there is no one size fits all. It explains why some companies innovate more successfully than others? Please share your thoughts.

Experience Design Innovation Can Use Nostalgic Clues To Create Emotive Connections. Don't Under Estimate The Power Of Nostalgia.

As technology pushes forward and sometimes it is easy for us to forget about the past. I think marketers and product designers could benefit more from looking to the past. I am not ready to claim that many of the classic design whether it is product or interfaces will stand the test of being both functional and timeless, but I can comfortably say that many brands/ products /interfaces carry a lot of sentimental value for many people. And many of these deign will not only survive this lifetime and well into the next generation. 

For me, I am at a stage where the best objects or brands or products are the ones that connect me with my childhood and memories of my time with my Dad when I was a little boy. I have been collecting these objects since a while back and they seem to contain a bit of my past. I guess as we age we will become more receptive to marketers and designers who make use of what market researchers call "a longing for positive memories from the past."

The science of nostalgia isn't yet fully understood, but studies have shown nostalgic cues that can be exploited and the ways in which images from the past can yield favorable attitudes about products in the present. Ask our team of resident anthropologists and they can explain why.

The best examples would be my McIntosh amplifiers, JBL studio monitors and Leica cameras. I couldn’t really accord these (not the top end models) when I was 14 and my dad ended up buying me the entry models. I remember the joy when we bought a pair of giant speakers and we struggled to carry that home. It seems the objects I love most around the house are those that reminds me of him.  He once said to me “You're the most wonderful boy in the world, and doesn’t matter what you choose to do you will do it well. And you can do anything you want to.” 

I’ve heard the saying “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it” and I am not sure who said that. That’s kind of what I feel when I look at stuff around me. I have a thing for McIntosh (picture above my living room) and have quite a few of them lying around everywhere, I think I have at least 3,000 watts of pure clean power to feed to my JBLs. These pretty "Big Blue Meter" McIntoshes are more than sound machine, the classic design and the physical knobs are part of a very simple user experience. I am sick of remote control and I can’t even use them other than power on and off. It brings me the question why machine + usability + style can come in such a nice package then and we hardly see many today (Apple is the exception).

A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad (picute above). It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!

A great brand/product and even interface if stylistically design and adding some nostalgia touches can power up a wave of innovation that has strong emotive connections.  With more and more people entering the boomers lifestage, expect to see collectable toys inspired nostalgia factor. The essence of these brands is very appealing and emotive; something that people grew up with. It is more than Lanvin porcelain dolls and Prada toy keyrings, it is time to visit eBay.

 

 

Does A National Design Polcy Make Sense? Most Activities Are Purely Academic And Rarely Create Any Real Impact.

The idea of how effective a national design policy is came up a few times this week during casual conversation with my friends in the design world. I am generally unimpressed with these acitivites because I am a result-oriented person and I don't waste time on just talking. I've seen many of these paper written up that don't worth the paper that they were printed on.

The European Commission just launched an initiative this month to reinforce the link between design, innovation and competitiveness. The European Design Innovation Initiave (EDII) will have a secretariat located in the Designium Innovation Centre of Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Always Finland!

Why Finland? It is because mission of Aalto University is to integrate different creative disciplines, economics (yes it is a creative discipline) and technology, and the know-how and experience of Designium in broad-based utilization of design in creating industries. There had been a lot of discussions on design policy both in US and countries in Asia, the impact is still very minimal. Many countries including Canada, Spain and Taiwan sadly do not even have a design policy in place. There is no tax relief as support or goverment funded design programs and these are generally considered the very basic.

UK and Denmark are the two pioneers in developing a design policy and put serious resources behind to support it. I often find the dialogues in design policy conferences were academic and fail to see the bigger picture. There are no shortages of ideas in these sessions but there is a lack of action. You can talk for days and nothing happen. The design education is in such a bad shape and every year we are pushing more and more people into the market that are not prepared to create economic value through design. It is almost a passé to talk how design touches all sectors of our daily life, and increasing awareness of that is good for everyone etc. That’s too general a statement, it is not difficult to see how design can bolster a country’s competitiveness and creating and keeping jobs. Then what should government do?

The question remains how and it is not about publishing more journals or hosting more seminars, it is rethinking the roles of designers to use design capabilities to enhance companies’ innovation effort and as a result create new growth industries. Not designing better looking products or fancy packaging. So a design policy on that is totally missing the point, we don’t need one. We need an innovation policy to drive the creation of creative new industries. We should not separate design from technology. And further more where is art? We need incorporate art, design and technology and develop a national policy to promote the integration of all that in industries.

Does China have a design policy? Or do they need one? Well it depends what do you mean by design policy. It is very young industry and they are just beginning to understand design and what it means. They see it purely as a means for value add for OEM players. I’ve met with two dozens of design firms in China last year and came to the conclusion that they are 15 to 20 years behind us. There is a increasing demand for designers and a serious shortage but the schools have not been able to catch up. I think it was until 1999 that they first used the term “design” to substitute a fine art degree. I think there are around 412 design schools but mostly are teaching very basic and outdated methods. They have a long way to go. But let's deal with our problems first.

The Next Time You Pick Up The Phone To Call A Customer Service Agent You Might End Up Talking To An Inmate In Tijar, India.

Global customer servicing outsourcing is touching us everyday and sometimes you don’t know who you’re talking to on the phone or online when you call your service provider. I have had good experiences as well bad ones and the business case for companies are obvious and the continuous drive for lower costs are pushing companies to be creative and look for emerging destinations beyond the popular candidates such as India and Philiphines despite their relative advantage in English proficiency.

India is trying to move up the food chain and trying to provide higher value outsourcing jobs while in the Philippines, but moreover in Malaysia, Thailand and increasingly Vietnam and Indonesia, all want a piece of the still gorwing pie. We are seeing some anti-outsourcing sentiment due to the high unemployment rate at home recede to historical norms. The cost saving justification needs to be significant these days but it is not easy as the standard of living in India and Vietnam are quickly rising. That’s when you need to be creative.

Now they are doing a pilot program in India recruiting inmates with some good IT skills to try them doing basic data entry, customer service and support. They need to start with changing the policy of allowing Internet access in prisons. Those who participate will get paid more than what they could earn doing other jobs in the prisons. This is still at pilot stage and I wonder how they will select the people to participate beyond their skills, will they have to say something like “Sir, before we continue on, I’d like you to know that I am special customer service agent and a convict and previously robbed and bank and shot the manager. I need to confirm that you would like to continue on to allow me to help you with your banking transaction here?”

According to Gopinath Reddy, director general of prisons in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, he told the Guardian in the UK that inmates' knowledge should be used for the benefit of "the nation." The pressure to lower cost and perceptions of lowering capital investment make outsourcing an almost irresistible impulse for service businesses and manufacturers. Global access to vendors, falling interaction costs, and improved information technologies and communications links are giving companies unprecedented choice in designing their operations. Theses strategies are too easy for many taking an extra few cents out but it is time to rethink outsourcing. We need the jobs back and let’s talk smartsourcing. The next outsourcing RFPs will go to top prisons in the US, India and Philipphines to competete against each other perhaps. That's innovation.