UnderstandingLab-Visual thinking to accelerate innovation

Their claim: Constructing, Communicating, Untangling Innovation. Worth a look.

UnderstandingLab: " "

Design the World

There is an emerging field of design called "geodesign," which is the use of design as a method of dealing with organizational, behavioral, and cultural problems. Since design is in many ways synonymous with innovation, it really means the use of design as a tool to for social innovation.

For example, a project by designer Bruce Mau that is documented in this week's International Herald Tribune is intended to help Guatemalans think positively about their country's future. (The project itself can be found here (in Spanish), although the web site is a bit sparce.

Mau's larger project is called Massive Change, which "explores the legacy and potential, the promise and power of design in improving the welfare of humanity."

Starting this Saturday, Sept 16, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is running a beautiful show on Massive Change: "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design is an exhibition that changes the way you think about design just as contemporary design is changing the way we live in the world. Design affects all aspects of our lives and holds the possibility of changing the very nature of human life itself. Massive Change is an exhibition grounded in a provocative proposition. It is a celebration of the human capacity to change the world and a call to recognize both the power and the responsibility of design."

More concisely, "it's not about the world of design, it's about the design of the world." Wow!

Another Mention

A nice article about the book: Permanent Innovation and a recent press release.

Innovation is being good at failure- Paul Saffo

Vision of the Valley - Paul Saffo: Innovation is being good at failure | GoingOn Home

In this interview from the AlwaysOn Innovation conference at Stanford in August,Paul Saffo, a principal of Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future describes Silicon Valley's culture of innovation. Click to see the video.

Permanent Innovation Mentioned

Permanent Innovation has been mentioned in a couple blogs recently:

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog and eMergences: the workshop of the future (French).

Bringing Smarts to a Diseased Brand: Can Mulally Save Ford?

Well, now we know what was happening in Ford's executive suite during July and August. While the company's market share has been tumbling, William Clay Ford was getting all the rotten news out there so that the new CEO, Alan Mulally, wouldn't have to be the bearer of bad news when he takes over. Over the summer Ford announced further declines in sales, plant closings, layoffs, the need to close dealerships, an overture to Carlos Ghosn of Nissan, and finally the admission that someone else's hand was needed to steer the company away from the precipice.

During Ford's tenure as CEO from 1999 until now, sales declined from about 4 million units per year to about 3 million, so the edge of the cliff is coming more closely into view. The value of the Ford family's stock holdings have declined by about half.

This is a powerful example of how the economy is driven forward by what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction," the emergence of new companies and the decline of old ones.

There are some compelling issues of corporate strategy on view here. For example, over the last few decades while Ford has been gobbling up old auto brands - Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Mazda, and Aston Martin - its own Lincoln and Mercury brands have been slowly fading away, suffering from product innovation neglect. In contrast, Toyota hasn't been acquiring existing brands, it's been building new ones from scratch to meet the new needs of today's markets. Lexus has captured the top of the market, the Prius hybrid has pioneered a new hybrid market market niche, and Scion is a winning entry brand. So far it looks like Toyota made better choices.

What will Mulally have to do to save the company? Innovation will certainly be high on his list. And how many brands will Ford have to dump to get the cash it needs to reinvest in the innovations that the company will need to survive? As of today, I'd bet that both Lincoln and Mercury will be gone within 5 years, and if Mulally can't turn it all around the entire company could be part of Nissan-Renault by 2015 or 2020.

Physical and Digital Media

Building upon Dave's post about the future of the magazine, here's an innovation that demonstrates the blending of both the physical and digital worlds. This magazine is available in print form and is also available as a 'flip book' online.

NEW! Digital Edutopia
JUST LIKE THE PRINT MAGAZINE. DIFFERENT DELIVERY.
Check out our new electronic magazine presented in a flip-the-page format. Edutopia can now be viewed anywhere, anytime on the Web. Instant delivery, easy to read, portable, searchable text, and environmentally friendly. To get on our list for upcoming information on how to subscribe, send an email to digitaledutopia@edutopia.org.

My Customer, My Co-Innovator

My Customer, My Co-Innovator: Michael Schrage, ever the innovative thinker, in this article says: "The business goal, however, is not to make a profit by selling internal techniques; it’s to alter the innovation ecosystem, making it easier, safer, and more advantageous for suppliers and customers to take a chance on one another’s work — and to learn far more about each other, and themselves, in the bargain."

Michael provides some interesting stories to illustrate his point and describe why some companies are afraid to enlist their customers as co-innovators.

The Innovation SWAT Team

Clorox's new CEO Donald Knauss takes over in September, and he says he plans to focus on innovation. Here's a suggestion for him: Instead of relying on a top-down approach to innovation strategy, which he implied is his intent, use approaches like the Innovation SWAT Team, or i-Team, to capture great ideas and bring the spirit of innovation throughout the organization at the same time.

This team, the practice of which was pioneered some years ago by Brigitte Jordan and her colleagues at IBM, is a group of roving innovation specialists who move throughout the company partly according to a plan, and partly directed by their own ears to the ground, looking for ideas to evoke and enrich, and for creative people to engage with. Their mission is to link top-level strategy, problem areas in the company, and innovation methods and tools with people at all levels, so that they become lively, engaged, and enthusiastic co-inventors of the future.

iTeams find venues of activity anywhere and everywhere by engaging people in thinking and talking about what’s happening inside and outside the organization, about what they do, how they do it, how the results of their work create experiences for customers, and how innovation in all its many guises can lead to improvements.

The iTeam uses all forms of interaction to bring forth latent ideas and interests, to help people at all levels of an organization to give shape to their ideas in a useful framework so that they can contribute to the ongoing improvements that changing markets demand.

For more on the i-Team see Chapter 5 of Permanent Innovation.

Eat your own children? - Forbes.com

Although the Main Stream Media(MSM)has been slow to adapt to the challenges of the Internet, here is a good example of the use of the internet by Forbes in meeting the challenge of drastically declining subscriber base and advertising revenues from the paper version of Forbes.



This map at the Forbes.com site will lead you to a slide show picturing the top 30 cities in Forbes' survey of wired cities.

The "liveliness" of the Forbes.com site provides a strong illustration of the difference between Forbes online and the paper version of the magazine. A great example of how printed business magazines are dying, and how Forbes is innovating to retain subscribers and offer advertisers more qualified reader attention than could ever be captured by the paper magazine. Mark Anderson has a related article at Strategic News Service entitled Bizmags: Sexy Dinosaurs Losing Their Grip??!!