Design in Davos

Bruce

having worked in innovation environments both in large corporates in Europe, and now small consultancies in New Zealand, I have seen both 'ends' of the innovation/design/creativity spectrum.

It appears to me that design thinking and innovation is the next wave of popular management thinking, and the Davos agenda seems to validate this.

Instead of looking at the current trend, what's next after innovation? Just as TQM has swept the business globe and taken the errors and faults from the manufacturing process, it seems that design thinking/innovation will now feed the factories with fresh new products that meet consumer needs.

So what comes next, and what will be on the 'management trends' Davos agenda in ten years time?

Regards
Roger

Hi Bruce,

indeed this is very good news for the desing (thinking, management, practicing ...) community. Davos, wow! And my congrats as well to your blogging activities here as well as pushing the topic in various contexts worldwide!

Without wanting to push myself too much to the fore here it might interest that design (thinking) has reached other (new & maybe relevant) audiences as well this year. I've covered this in my latest posting on the http://www.designthinkinginstitute.com blog.

Maybe the most two relevant events where I've been able to raise the design thinking voice have been the WorldBlu forum on Organizational Democracy in Washington/D.C. and the integration of "Design Thinking" into the curriculum of the "University of the Mind" supported directly by HH the Dalai Lama! The complete story can be found here, if you're nterested:

http://www.designthinkinginstitute.com/2005/12/22/thank-you-for-2005

Happy Holidays and all the best for your 2006 endeavours!
Ralf.

How long do we have to wait to not just see a reflection of dollarsigns in heaps of contemporary innovation and design? Surely useability, beauty and harmonious integragion with the environment are still the primereward for real excellence in the field. Evidently being creative is a basic need for all of us, where are the general public libraries for design and innovation so we can work together in an uplifting manner?
Someone mentioned once: "make sure that the fortunes you seek are the fortunes that you need" !

Hi Bruce,

I am an early graduate of the MDM program at the Institute of Design that you lauded in an article last year. I admire your writing as much as I do your parrallel interests in Innovation as well as Design. Kudos on your trip to Davos, What a marvelous forum to consider the future of Design and Innovation, and its their abilites for making a better world to live in.

As for questions about Innovation, here's a few:
What conditions need to be present for Innovation to take hold in large organizations? Many appear to invest in it, not all appear to deliver game-changing innovation.

How and when will global consortia of businesses and regulators rise to innovate solutions to some universal human needs; such as the infrastructure needed to develop global standards and elements for housing - or healthcare for that matter?

Why talk to large companies about Innovation at all? How are large companies suited to innovate? And why do they prefer to buy smaller more innovative companies instead? (or will this change with the emergence of Design Strategy?) Other than wealth what resources do they have that smaller companies don't have?

What to make of the findings in a recent Bain and Co. Study: Over 80% of companies claim to deliver exceptional customer experience, but when polled, customers found only 8% of those cited to be delivering great customer experiences.

One final theme of interest to explore... What will be the role of 'open-source' thinking in Innovation? As customers learn to collaborate and innovate among themselves, how will this affect corporate innovation and intellectual property? How are 'Innovation Communities' affecting the work of large companies?

You might be interested to contact Eric Von Hippel at MIT Sloan, who researches and writes on the topic. Keep up the good work.

regards,
Michael

Hello Bruce,
I have just found a sentence,I have written in 1999.
"One major trend in product design is a race to new products on the same pattern than the weaponry race during the cold war."
It means that some countries or economical zones will conquer markets while others will loose any chance to stay in the global competition. The big difference with the cold war is that weapons are a waste of money and new products are a way to earn.
The common point with weaponry is the level of investments required to launch a high value added product. This digs the gap between countries encouraging investments and those which don't!
Best Regards,
Georges de Wailly

Hi Bruce,

Am working for a large company that is famous for innovation.

Am also very interested in human creativity and how organizations come to apply new designs and innovations.

To make better design and innovate faster, one way to look at this for large companies is to draw the parallel with artists and great scientist teams.

Take cirque du soleil. How do they create a new show? What is the strategy, systems and project approach they use to deliver?

Similarly a drug startup can bring lots of ideas into the reseach lab, solve very complex problems and come up with new molecules in a record time.

To be innovative faster, the emphasis will be on focussed recruitment, agility and dedicated workforces,project approach within a strict framework of constraints.

A complex alchemy...
Have fun discussing these topics.
Alex Rotenberg

There are plenty of resources to learn to make brand progress.
Often times the issue is that many small business owners are wearing too many hats;
We would be honored if we could be added to this business blogger. We are from the World Business for sale is the leading independent businesses for sale listing service http://www.worldbusinessforsale.com/

Dear Bruce Nussbaum

Interesting times we live in :-)

You’re right – 2005 has been a tremendous design and innovation year, and as we say over at CPH127, leadership is part of it all, right?

:-)

During the last months we have had a very insightful and fruitful discussion here about exactly the questions mentioned.

Please follow – and maybe contribute? – to our common sense-making at http://www.cph127.com/cph127/design_thinking/index.html

I’ve hoped we had got the opportunity to meet during INDEX: in Copenhagen in September, I hope we do sometime…..

All the best
Hans Henrik
CPH127

Hi Bruce,

Interesting panel! And enjoy cross-country at the foot of sunny Jackobshorn ;-) I would ask the panel why, as global business leaders, they still still mainly base their business design & innovation work on basic tools such as MS Word, Excel and maybe Visio and then decide on the basis of that. Sophisticated conceptualization ist still meager at the board level. I wonder how much global business leaders could learn from designers (e.g. engineeers, architects, product desigers, etc.) who use their right brains, pencils and drawings for design & innovation, but they also use computer aided design CAD to test their freshly designed buildings, bridges, mobile phones. That's what brought design to another level of innovativeness. In business all we get to is simulating business processes...

I would be really curious to hear how these global business leaders think of the "conceptual age" and how they actually make their business design choices. Crafting a strategy is pure design - but are Word, Excel and Visio sufficient for these multi-billion dollar task?

design and organizational change

design is not six sigma. strategy is not control. managers are not entrepreneurs. - we ve been there - but: life needs both poles. and it calls for a balance of the dynamic and the static principle.
it is not about to create the *creative* organization - it is about to create the *creating* organization.
and: a lot of left-brain is involved in that.

how much left-brain work is needed in a strike of a creative genius? and what exactly? is it only about intuition, destruction, empathy... where and how does the *will to give form* set in? and what is that? at some point you just have to stop exploring. you have to make a decision! you have to take millions and millions of dollars and you just have to jump...!

if you want to say so - realistically - we have to move from control-control organizations to control-release organizations.

...
in the hot and popular design discussion of 2005 i am surprised how fast everybody agreed on the fact that design is much more than what meets the eye.
but: design is also much more than customer-centered product development.
if we zoom out of our current discussion and put it into a historical context you can also see the 2005 design hype as a follow up to the worn out brand strategies on the level of customers' decission making processes...

there is also something very symbolic in the design hype of our young millenium - and this is not about satisfying our needs better! it is much more about demanding directions, entrepreneurship, risk taking, attitude, responsibility, rock and roll.

it is a new model of market communication and market interaction: a creating individual interacts with an equally creating corporation.
and what you demand is substance.
this substance does not stop with lifestyle promises an ad agency has written for you and is very much the opposite of customer retention strategies...

Bruce-
The opportunity to 'stump-the-experts' is indeed unique and not to be taken lightly. But the question that begs is to re-frame the concept of innovation from within the MBA mind-set and define it from the metrics which have so far eluded most I-D's in their profession.

The MBA is driven from a set of comfort-inducing metrics that enable management to control ALL Aspects of the process of wealth creation, and the people involved.

Innovation, on the other hand, involves distributing control to the eyes, minds and ultimately hands of those willing to risk all in search of the higher qualities of design. Delivering "significance" through a chaotic process of research, insight, discovery and expression is difficult to control at best, and downright anarchistic at its worst.

The challenge is to express the spectrum of design values from within a business or engineering frame of reference. Easier said than done.

If your panel can explore a few of those issues, I'd be most grateful.
Thanks-
-D

Dear Bruce:

For your topic: "1) How can companies measure the effectiveness of creativity and design strategies?",

I have developed a method to Verify and Manage
creativity both at talent (Knowledge)level and
Product (Know-how or Technology) level.

The file is in MS-Word format and contains a lot
of tables.

It took me 10 years to evolve this watching & observing Bangalore evolve; I don't mind sharing it.

How can I send this across to you?

-Vish

hello alex rotenberg.

that is an interesting comment.
possibly you would like to get in contact with me through the email address on my blog.

thanks

Bruce,

There are a number of things below that have been driving me to think about the effectiveness of Innovation around the globe and how companies are (or are not) able to embody them. Rumbling around my mind are how different countries are addressing competitiveness through Innovation. Also on my mind is the corporate structure that ‘conventional-structured’ companies hold that is preventing their ability to embrace Innovation in today’s world (not to be underestimated, since these represent the majority). And thirdly is the switch from old product paradigms (a hardware stand-alone product) to new system paradigms (hardware, software and service revenue-stream).

See what you think about these-

1.
Is there a role that governments should embrace to foster creativity or innovation in business?

Background- Asian governments have been highly supportive of fostering business successes, especially to help export and international competitiveness for their businesses. Some western countries like the US, have worked to stay clear of business activities in the areas of creativity and innovation. Countries in Asia, like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have funded workshops, foundations and grants to spur design and promote innovation for global competitiveness.

With the tight connection between Asian governments and their business community, and the low cost of their labor, are there any collective efforts that other countries (like those in the West) should undertake that would be of any value to businesses that compete globally?

2.
Should corporations in the future consider having a board member who serves as the ‘Consumer Ombudsman’ bringing design and innovation to the lead of the corporate structure?

Background- Design has often been cited as a critical need for representation at the top of the corporate ladder, but often has fallen under the helm of engineering or marketing. This internal structure has caused it to lose its ability to contribute compared to those organizations who bring design/innovation to the very top (think Apple/Steve Jobs). The role of Consumer Ombudsman (or other Consumer moniker) could be the Design Experience representative who brings the perspective of the end user to the top of all corporate processes.

3.
Will there be a time when Software and Hardware no longer draw lines between their mutual definitions?

Background- As companies are increasingly developing more products that incorporate software into their devices, there seems to be a clear problem arising of having two distinct ‘products’ or ‘experiences’ living inside as one; the hardware and the software. Some companies are making beautiful hardware only to lose the battle for consumer acceptance by stuffing inside them a software interface that people don’t respond well to. Those who are making great software inside great hardware see run-away sales (think Apple iPod).

What will successful companies of the future do to bring these parallel experiences (software and hardware) in symphony with each other, and are their innovative experiences able to be mutually created as a common Brand experience?

4.
Are there changes that can be incorporated in business models and corporate structures that bring the process of Innovation and Design to the level of acceptance and recognition needed to bring the resources of time and manpower to the practice?

With all the talk about how important Innovation is to competitiveness, many corporations still under-fund Design and Innovation practices and don’t use Innovation as a structural member to their organization.

Regards,
Gregg Davis,
Design Central

what is the implication of davos2006 on international marketing?