I’m working to get a card deck, posters, and a mobile app designed for my Nine Innovation Roles and I have a simple question for my readers out there:
Do you think I should use 99Designs or Crowdspring for my design challenge?
Or does someone out there already have an awesome design idea for a deluxe tarot-style approach for the visuals to go with my Nine Innovation Roles product offerings?
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Every time I see this logo I cringe.
If there is one logo in the world that is definitely in desperate need of updating, it is the logo of Sherwin Williams.
My stomach turns at the site of the earth dripping with paint and the slogan “Cover the Earth” only makes it worse.
Is there anyone out there that would actually like to see the earth covered in paint?
Especially paint that looks like blood?
Sherwin Williams, I implore you, please update your logo as soon as possible to reflect the changing world we live in, where people are concerned about toxicity and where sustainability and being green are increasingly important.
If you could do it before Earth Day on April 22, 2012 that would be even better.
You may not realize the negative logo your logo is having on your business because your stock price is moving up and to the right, but imagine how much better it might be doing if you updated your image to reflect your surroundings?
Come on Sherwin Williams, you can do it!
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Innovation comes in all different forms, and there is more than one way to boost profits in organizations.
Layoffs are not the only way to improve the bottom line when times get tough. Often asking the right questions can uncover new revenue sources in areas that previously had only been seen as a source of costs.
There is an article in Fast Company from 2007 when I wrote this article that talks about ways that companies are greening themselves. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur and manager read it. It’s not a hippie and granola, look at us aren’t we great type of article but instead highlights loads of different ways that organizations are becoming green. This article highlights lots of different ways that organizations are improving their bottom lines, while greening themselves at the same time.
There are many reasons why trying to make your organization more environmentally responsible has the potential to improve the bottom line:
Finally, there is no escaping the fact that becoming more environmentally responsible as an organization will either gain you additional sales now or prevent you from losing sales in the future. as the standards of government and corporate procurement departments begin to shift towards purchasing from more environmentally responsible vendors.
So, what does your organization have to gain from trying to identify areas of environmental opportunity?
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Traffic is a problem for drivers and bus riders alike. When traffic gets bad, it gets even worse for buses downtown. Here is why:
Transit agencies, in their quest to put more capacity on popular routes, have added long “bendy” buses to their fleets. The problem is that these buses require twice the available space before an intersection to be able to move from one block to another. They also have more difficulty changing lanes and negotiating corners than standard buses. During periods of heavy traffic this often results in “bendy” buses being unable to move to the next block for more than one light cycle, backing up traffic behind them and delaying other, shorter buses that might have fit into the smaller space in front of them. The answer?
Seattle and other communities should take a second look at double-decker buses for popular routes that traverse the city center or look to banish “bendy” buses from downtown routes altogether. Double-decker buses are only slightly taller than most standard buses, have a smaller footprint than bendy buses, and give riders a nice view of the city.
Now I must say that I did one time see a double-decker public bus cruising through downtown Seattle the other day. It was a route 417 on its way to Mukilteo and it effortlessly cruised through a yellow light to get the last spot in the bus zone (one a bendy bus wouldn’t have fit in).
I don’t know if the regional transit bureau serving areas north of Seattle has more than one double-decker bus in their fleet or whether this is a test bus for a future purchase, but it sure looked better cruising through downtown Seattle than a bendy bus bouncing up and down. There is nothing quite like the view from the upper-deck of a double-decker bus as you cruise through a city. I hope this is the sign of more to come. Bendy buses may be a newer concept, but double-decker buses are a better one. Oh yeah, and keep the WiFi coming, people love their WiFi on the buses. 🙂
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I was flipping through the throwaway coupon circular the other day to see if there were any coupons for anything that I buy anyways, and I came across a couple of items that for me it wasn’t immediately obvious what they were. At the bottom you have an item that looks like a cross between a milk bottle and a flower, but is in fact a room freshener spray, and at the top you have an item that almost looks like a night light but is a room freshener. Both of these are part of the new Glade Expressions line from SC Johnson. I love it that more companies are paying more attention to not just the function of their products, but the form too. And after all, doesn’t everybody deserve a little design in their life?
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There have been several recent product announcements or launches that move a step closer to the future vision of computing that I began advocating two years ago. That vision that moves computing to the pocket, home, or office and envisions display and input devices relevant to the context the person is currently in.
I believed two years ago and still believe that what the world needs is not more smart devices, but more flexible and plentiful dumb devices that are driven by the one smart device to rule them all – an extensible smart phone that can not only drive multiple display and input devices wirelessly, but also augment its processing and storage capabilities via wireless devices or the cloud.
Here is a flashback to what I said the Apple iPhone should become two years ago:
“People don’t want a fourth screen. What they want to do is extend the screen they have in their pocket.”
What would be most valuable for people, what they really want, is an extensible, pocketable device that connect wirelessly to whatever input or output devices that they might need to fit the context of what they want to do. To keep it simple and Apple-specific, in one pocket you’ve got your iPhone, and in your other pocket you’ve got a larger screen with limited intelligence that folds in half (or quarters) and connects to your iPhone and can also transmit touch and gesture input for those times when you want a bigger screen. When you get to work you put your iPhone on the desk and it connects to your monitor, keyboard, and possibly even auxiliary storage and processing unit to augment the iPhone’s onboard capabilities. Ooops! Time for a meeting, so I grab my iPhone, get to the conference room and wirelessly connect my iPhone to the in-room projector and do my presentation. On the bus home I can watch a movie or read a book, and when I get home I can connect my iPhone to the television and download a movie or watch something from my TV subscriptions. So why do I need to spend $800 for a fourth screen again?
So what are some of the devices that show that we’re getting close to realizing this vision?
Motorola Atrix – A dockable 4G smart phone that while apparently it makes a pretty good smart phone, the lapdock that it connects to in order to give you laptop type functionality has received pretty poor reviews – making it sound like it’s not very-well designed or compelling.
RIM Blackberry Playbook – RIM’s entry into the tablet market is the Blackberry Playbook. RIM failed to take the full leap and release an inexpensive dumb screen that connects to the user’s Blackberry. Instead it appears to be a fully functional (and priced) 7-inch tablet computer that uses the bigger screen to display the user’s email from their mobile handset without cables. RIM’s lack of commitment to the vision I’ve laid out has resulted in a ‘stuck in the middle’ device that is unlikely to catch on in the marketplace.
Nintendo WiiU – Nintendo is launching an oversize motion sensing controller that also has a display for game developers to utilize to extend the gaming environment out of the TV and closer to the gamer. This opens up the opportunity to either remove some of the visual visual clutter from the big screen onto the little one (creating a more immersive experience) or to leverage the second screen to deliver more game information (imagine flipping through pages of item inventories, maps, etc.). In this case the Nintendo Wii has the smarts and delivers the images wirelessly to the WiiU controller.Now, let’s discuss Apple’s efforts in advancing the vision I laid out a couple of years to hopefully encourage device manufacturers to make it real so that we can all enjoy a more flexible, useful, valuable computing experience across multiple contexts.
Apple is launching Airplay Mirroring in iOS5 (PICTURED AT THE TOP) which allows you to display what’s on your Apple iPad2 (or part of it in the case of specially programmed games or other apps) WIRELESSLY. Apparently Airplay Mirroring works with all 90,000 iPad apps. There is one catch – you must have an Apple TV connected to your TV. Taken a step further, the next Apple iPhone will have the same (or better) processor that’s inside the Apple iPad2 and will run iOS5 so it may have Airplay Mirroring as well. These latest developments may also be part of the reason we are hearing rumblings of Apple and Samsung possibly partnering together to bring out a line of Apple branded televisions. Personally I think that would be the wrong way to go. Apple should focus on selling the minimal hardware necessary to facilitate an Airplay Mirroring connection to anyone who wants to build the connection capability into their televisions (or tablets or monitors or conference room projectors or laptops). Here is a video that shows all of the Apple Airplay Mirroring capabilities:
As you can see Apple is getting very close to fully realizing the potential of the vision I laid out a couple of years ago and it’s all very exciting. Of course they will probably make it work with only Apple hardware, so that leaves a huge opportunity for someone like HP or Dell or Samsung to take this and run with it in the way I’ve described now that the major hurdle (the video transmission) seems to have been solved, and to bring it to the mass audience. Here’s one company that has a conference room flat panel solution. Hopefully the big players will get together and build a standard so we can all enjoy the benefits of mobile-centric, extensible, flexible, context-sensitive computing very soon. Come on folks you’re almost to the finish line, just a little bit more innovating and you’re there!
How exciting!
P.S. I still believe there is an opportunity for someone to subsidize the cost of a bigger screen (to drive massive adoption) by allocating a portion of the potential incremental media purchases or search advertising that it would drive but nobody has done that yet.
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I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Seattle office of design firm NBBJ yesterday. The event featured Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of “The Design of Business” and “The Opposable Mind.” I’d like to share a video interview I did with Roger before the event:
Interview – Roger Martin – Author “The Design of Business” from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.
I’d also like to share some of the key insights from Roger’s talk at the event:
My book review of “The Design of Business” can be found here.
My previous interview with “The Design of Business” author Roger Martin can be found here.
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A few weeks ago I received “The Design of Business” by Roger Martin in the mail. “The Design of Business” is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read.
The main premise of the book is that our organizations, and the business schools that fill out their top leadership ranks, are too focused on analytical thinking at the expense of intuitive thinking. This focus creates too much emphasis on reliability at the expense of validity.
“The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking.” – Roger Martin
One of the key concepts of the book is the introduction of the Knowledge Funnel – a visual element that shows how knowledge progresses from mysteries to heuristics to algorithms. It all begins with a question at the top of the funnel, and at each stage transition, knowledge and execution can typically be transferred to lower cost labor (and possibly handled by a computer when they reach the algorithm level).
At the same time, there are other tensions in our organizations that managers in the era of the creative economy will have to become attuned to, and these include managing an appropriate balance between exploitation and exploration and not falling victim to the false certainty of the past when making business development decisions.
Ultimately, the exploration of the mysteries at the top of the knowledge funnel and exploitation of the algrithms at the bottom of the funnel are equally important. Companies that focus too much on one, at the expense of the other, risk their very future.
Creating a design thinking organization is not easy, and several pages are devoted to describing the struggles of A.G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka in transforming P&G;’s organizational culture to be more design-centric.
In addition to other examples of organizations pushing themselves more towards design thinking, there is also a great deal of focus in the book on the transformation of mysteries into heuristics and heuristics into algorithms.
Overall, the book is another way of looking at the challenge facing innovators everywhere who are looking to embed design or innovation (or both) into their organization.
So, are you ready to tackle the challenge of achieving a balance of analytical thinking with intuitive thinking in your organization?
My interview with “The Design of Business” author Roger Martin can be found here.
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Interview – Roger Martin of “The Design of Business”
I had the opportunity to interview Roger Martin, the author of “The Design of Business” about the challenges companies face when they fail to balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking. We also discuss a variety of other innovation topics including: barriers to innovation, education, and risk taking.
Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since 1998. He is an advisor on strategy to the CEO’s of several major global corporations. He writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek.com’s Innovation and Design Channel. He is also a regular contributor to Washington Post’s On Leadership blog and to Financial Times’ Judgment Call column. He has published several books, including: “The Design of Business” and “The Opposable Mind”.
Here is the text from the interview:
1. When it comes to innovation, what is the biggest challenge that you see organizations facing?
It is the dominance of analytical thinking which holds that unless something can be proven by way of deductive or inductive logic, it is not worthy of consideration or investment. No new idea in the world has been proven before being tried. So as long as analytical thinking is allowed to dominate, innovation is deeply and profoundly challenged.
2. Why is it so important that organizations teach their leaders to be design thinkers?
Design thinkers are capable of balancing the inductive and deductive logic of analytical thinking with the abductive logic of intuitive thinking. So they are capable of both honing and refining the past and inventing the future. Thus they can overcome the innovation challenge. Without design thinking leaders, an organization is likely to slowly but surely stultify – like most large corporations over time.
3. Why is it so hard for hard for managers to take valid risks?
Two main reasons. First, they live in cultures that value only analytical thinking. And second, they get Stockholm syndrome and begin to believe that is right. First they get dissuaded from innovating by others, then they dissuade themselves.
4. What most impedes the risk-taking necessary for innovation?
The problem is processes that imbed requirements for proof through inductive or deductive logic. And then the culture that this breeds.
5. Since the book was published, have you come across other leaders that have transformed their organizations to take more of a design approach?
Leaders from two of the world’s largest companies read the book and both have asked me to help them transform their organizations to take a design thinking approach. So far, so good. They are very committed.
6. People often talk about not having time to innovate. How can people find the time for themselves or their employees?
That is a lame argument. People have time to do anything for which they are passionate. People blame lack of time for every single thing that they think they would like to do but lack the sufficient passion for. Innovators innovate regardless of their environment. Some get fired for it and go somewhere else and start over again. A leader can make it harder or easier for employees to innovate. But the innovators innovate regardless and the non-innovators complain about the difficulty finding the time to innovate – regardless.
7. What skills do you believe that managers need to acquire to succeed in an innovation-led organization?
They need to nurture their originality. Very few people in life are good at anything without practice. If you practice mastery all your life, you will be masterful. If you practice originality, you will get good at innovation. Most managers spend their time deepening their mastery and not nurturing their originality. Over time, they become fearful of innovation.
8. If you were to change one thing about our educational system to better prepare students to contribute in the innovation workforce of tomorrow, what would it be?
Make art a required subject for as long as we make math a required subject. We send a powerful signal to students that analytics are important and artistry is not. Artistry is the foundation of innovation. Most technologists will never innovate a single thing because their training drove out any artistry from them.
My book review of “The Design of Business” can be found here.
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Here is another video from Tim Brown of IDEO, this one is “Innovation Through Design Thinking” from a visit to MIT (skip ahead three minutes if you’re pressed for time):
According to IDEO, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation.
This video highlights how companies use design thinking in their businesses, from Motorola thinking about strategy to P&G thinking about moving into new markets to Microsoft thinking about the application of new technology.
I’ve always believed that:
Innovation = Invention + Insights
It was good to see Tim reinforce this core belief when he says “Insights are the fuel for innovation.”
Some of the key things to consider when looking to use design thinking as an approach to innovation:
Finally I’d like to leave you with one thought from the video:
“Many great ideas fail not because they were not great ideas, but because they could not navigate the politics and processes of the organization.”
What do you think?
Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)