Design & Innovation resources- March 2010

Hey Everybody
Here are some of the links I found both Interesting & Useful being posted in the month of March. I have divided them into the categories of Innovation & Design Thinking, Basics, Reframing/Rethinking, Competition & Resources.


Innovation & Design Thinking

1. Check out the Ten Innovations that will Transform Medicine in an article on HBR (Check Link)
2. Jocelyn Bailey posted 4 visions on the world tomorrow & how to shape your company around them (Check Link)
3. Here is the list of 15 design tips you can learn from Apple (Check Link) Nice read.
4. Learn about how mobile phones are transforming economy, society & lives of people in Africa (Check Link)
5. Jane Fulton Suri of Ideo authored an interesting paper titled - Informing Our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation. (Check Link)
6. Paula Thornton takes a critical look at the books by Tim Brown & Roger Martin. Check the review. (Check Link)
7. Now, What do U.S. President Jack Kennedy, snowboarder Shaun White, and Indian tycoon Ratan Tata have in common? Check out the article by Vijay Govindarajan on BusinessWeek (Check Link)
8. What does it takes to come out with a winning mobile phone. Check out as Izwan Ismail talks to Nokia designers & finds out. (Check Link)
9. Do Improv comedians make the best design thinkers. One professors beleives so. Check it out. (Check link)
10. How banks can do better. Here is a post by Ideo's Ryan Jacoby. (Check Link)
11. Learn how to get noticed in a crowded market in this FastCompany Article. (Check link)
12. Bhagwan Chowdhry's FAB Campaign Aims to Put $100 in Bank Account for Every Baby. Learn How. (Check Link)
13. How Web 2.0 might foster & enable an Innovation revolution. Check it out. (Check Link)
14. Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel wrote about the decline of Miramax films & what we can learn. (Check Link)
15. Materials driving product Innovation in 2010. (check link)

Basics
1. Paul Thurston & Nick Marsh posted a brief guide to Service Design. (Check Link)
2. I found a special report by MIT Sloan on Design Thinking which includes couple of articles. (Check Link)
3. Although it has been posted in Oct 08, still like this video of Roger Martin explaining what is Design Thinking & Integrative Thinking. (Check Link)
4. Thinking & doing Ethnography in Service Design. (Check Link)
5. Here's ten steps of becoming the designer you want to be. (Check Link)

Reframing/ Rethinking
1. Check out the article on Redesigning the Concept and Role of the Automobile. (Check Link)
2. Check out the article by Dr. Jay Parkinson on How to redesign healthcare. (Check Link)
3. Rethinking washing machine. (Check link)
4. Rethinking the C-Suite. (Check Link)


Competition
1. IIT- Kanpur is holding the NEXT50 Innovation Challenge. (Check Link)

Resources
1. Lots of papers from the DMI conference 2008 - Design thinking : New Challenges for Designers, managers & organisations. (Check Link)
2. Check out the 10 essential design tools for Social Media pros (Check Link)
3. A dedicated channel on service design on Guardian. (Check Link)
4. Free Design eBooks. (Check Link)
5. Love This talk by Gary Vaynerchuk. (Check Link)
6. Check out the cool Infographics. (Check Link)
7. Experientia Design is on Vimeo. check out their channel. (Check Link)


Thanks
Neeraj

Picture Source: Check Link

Cross Pollinators

Hi everybody

One of the key skills of design thinkers is to Cross Pollinate/ draw insights from various disciplines & comeup with Innovative ideas. Ideo calls its people to be T shaped people, who enjoy a breadth of knowledge in many fields but also have depth in atleast one area of expertise. One of the benefits what I have felt working with these kind of people is that they seem to look at a problem from various perpectives at the same time draw insights from various unrelated fields. They think in metaphors & see relationships across disciplines.

Janine Benyus recently gave a talk at TED Global about Biomimicry in action by highlighting various examples about what we can learn from nature in solving design problems.

Have a look at this amazing talk.

Thanks

Neeraj

Source: http://www.trentgillaspie.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/t-300x199.jpg

http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html

Ethnography

ideas-innovation.blogspot.com/

Theodre Levitt said “ The purpose of business is to create & keep a customer”

So how can a company Create & Keep a customer. One way to do is to understand the people its is catering to, inorder to draw insights which can be converted into Business ideas leading to growth & creation of markets.

Now Understanding & capturing insight is done using Quantitative Studies like Focus Group Interviews. Although these methods are fruitful to some extent, some of the limitations of these methods are that they provide limited insights from the user, their inadequacy to provide any information about user’s behavior, emotions, feelings, pain points etc. The tools acted as evaluation tools rather than insight capture tools.

Qualitative Studies like Ethnography are being increasing used to capture Insights from Customers/Users/Staff inorder to understand their satisfactions, limitations, pain points, etc which can be used to determine the next big Idea.

In the last post I had mentioned about the book Ethnography for Marketers. I have been reading on this subject .Through this post, I would like to demystify the Ethnography – what is it, why & where it is Used, How it is used, when it is used

So what is Ethnography

Ethnography is observing customers/ Users in their natural environment to find their frustrations, limitations, satisfactions, pain points etc with the objective to acquire insights into the users needs & wants. The field is drawn from anthropology & sociology.

Why & Where it is Used

Ethnography is used to complement Focus Groups Interviews inorder to gain insights. The main objective of Ethnographic studies is to understand customers in their natural context (home/office/retail store, etc). It is mainly used when little is known about the target market or when fresh insights are desired from a segment. In the present scenario when customer’s taste & preferences are constantly changing, it help companies to maintain an understanding of their customers & keep a track of their constant changing needs, issues & wants. Ethnographic studies can be used to understand the interaction of customer with product /service (for eg: ATM, website, retail). It can be used to assess the corporate cultures. It can also be used to understand how the user interacts with the processes of a product/ service (using a remote/operating a machine). The tools are used for discovering latent needs of customer for new product discovery, new service discovery, etc.

How It is Used

There are various Ethnographic tools which are available. They are used in the natural context of a user/customer/employee. Some of the tools are:

a. Observing the Product/Service Usage

b. Day In life

c. Mystery Shopping

d. Guerrilla Ethnography: Researcher not disclosing that he is researching

How is it Different from Market Research

Ethnography seeks to understand the behavior of people in their natural environment & their interaction with the product/service. The study seek to draw out emotions, perceptions, pain points, aspirations & beliefs that users may have with respect to products/services. It complements Market Research.

Guidelines for Ethnographers

a. Being in the Users Context: The main Objective is to be in the user’s context inorder to view & understand how the product is being used. What are the pain points, limitations of products, what workaround the customer has created, what is the role of product in the life of customer, etc.

b. Being Subject Oriented: The ethnographer has to be subject/user oriented suspending his own assumptions. The focus should be on learning & observing rather than evaluation of concepts.

c. Flexible: The other objective is to be flexible & not restrict to a pre planned questionnaire.

Here is a Video I found on Vimeo explaining what is Ethnography.

What is Ethnography? from Steve Inskeep on Vimeo.

Now ,Jan Chip Chase is a Principal researcher from Nokia who travels around the world and inside our pockets in search of behavioral patterns that will inform the design of products we don't even know. Here is a presentation he made at TED. Following the video is the Slideshow featuring some of the techniques being used.

Insight & Innovation

View more documents from whatidiscover.

But the question remains How we can organise observations to draw insights patterns.

Lets see...will be exploring this week.

Thanks

Neeraj

Sources: Article Inspiration: Ehtnography For Marketers, Hy Mariampolski

Video & Slide Source: TED.com , Slideshare.com

Reframing - A key skill of a Design Thinker

http://ideas-innovation.blogspot.com/

Reframing.....Reframing is one of the key skills of a Design thinker. Reframing involves a break from the traditional way of seeing things & framing in new context to generate new ideas. Reframing helps in generating new ways to create value which others may have missed. Eg: At the time when digital music download was considered as piracy and many were against it, Apple reframed the problem as to how to provide digital music, be legal & at the same time generated business value from it. An Indian Example is how J.K Tripathy of Trichy Police reframed the issue of police deriving power from the constitution to deriving power from people & developing a community policing system leading to drop in crime rates. Another example could be the Carpooling System(Mega Car Pool) in Delhi reframing a question of people driving alone leading to more cars & pollution with how can people help each other in reaching a place at the same time earning incentives.

Patrick Witney (Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology) talked about Reframing & its Importance at the inauguration of the recently conducted Innovation Summit. Here’s the video of the same.

Give it a Thought how can you reframe the problems around you & convert it into Opportunities. James Moed of Ideo has written an article on Reframing Recession.

Check It out at http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/thinking/publications/pdfs/Reframing_Recession.pdf.

Thanks

Neeraj

Photo Source: http://www.getentrepreneurial.com/images/reframing.jpg

Video Source: http://vimeo.com/5112642

Achieving Innovation

Innovation....the more I hear about it, the more interested I am in knowing what it is & how to achieve it.
Innovative strategies are being thought of inorder to deal with rising oil prices, to breakaway from clutter in Fmcg category inorder to stand out & be noticed, to have a business model to be profitable as early as possible in aviation business, to develop green products at the same time keeping their cost of production low, to develop highly cost effective water filter inorder to provide safe drinking water to people living in slums. Some of the companies which have focused on Innovation Include Whirlpool which allocated $45 million inorder to embed innovation into its culture & find ideas to develop new products. The revenue from innovative products for Whirlpool increased from $10 million during first year to $760 million at the end of 5 years. Southwest airline focused on business model Innovation and is still the preferred airline of many.
CEO’s of companies, Ministers, educational institutes & even U.S Presidential Candidates wants innovation to be prime focus inorder to provide new & unique solutions to present economic, social & business issues. Innovation is also being looked as the only way to create high value by Creating new products & services.
But how can we define Innovation or lets say what is Innovation. Well let me start by defining what to me is Innovation. To be simple, Innovation for me stands for Identifying Oppurtunity & designing products/services accordingly. Oppurtunity may be a scope to cut cost which means inviting kaizen/lean expert to implement lean tools to cut cost (Eg: GE six sigma drive), Opportunity may be a scope to enter new markets due to change in laws & thus expanding business, Opportunity may be able to notice customer's unmet needs and come up with new products & services (eg: Sony walkman). So again putting it simply, Innovation is simply looking for opportunity & seizing it. But as they say simple things are the most difficult to be achieved, so innovation which is of utmost importance to companies across the globe is difficult and is more sort of a mystery having dozens of methodologies to achieve it.

But after close examination, I have noticed that the following points should be followed inorder to Innovate:

1. Always be on the lookout for problems: One of the things I learnt from Kaizen is that, one should always be on the lookout for problems. A correct problem noticed provides a chance to innovate much faster. I think Innovative companies or Individuals focus a lot more on Identifying Problems of both customers and non customers with current services & products. A problem can be as simple as leaking pipes which gave Pidilite idea of making M-seal thus catering to new customers. Makers of OXO kitchen equipment noticed problems with current kitchenware and developed a beautifully designed OXO kitchen tools & housewares. Owners of Cirque du Soleil noticed problem with existing circuses & theaters & converted circus experience into amazing dramatical experience. Makers of yellow tail noticed the problems with existing wines as being complex & boresome to drink & made yellow tail, a simple & fun product. Tata’s noticed the problem faced by many Indian middle class families to travel using two wheelers in all seasons because of affordability factor & thus undertook the challenge of developing world’s cheapest car ‘NANO’. Forsche’s (Mumbai cab service only for ladies driven by ladies)owner Revathi Roy noticed the growing female workforce in the city was not being looked after well so she decided to start up with Forsche.
The underline point is Managers of the 21st century need to shift their role from that of just providing solutions to being excellent at noticing problems. A simple problem being noticed like huge waiting time at checkout counters of retail store can provide immense opportunity to retail manager to innovate & come up ideas to make business out there (eg: retail companies can sell space near checkout counters, etc)

2. Re-form/phrase your response regarding what you do: I have noticed that once you reform/rephrase the answer to the problem, new answers keep coming which can unlock immense opportunity.
For Eg: Let us take the example of future group. If 5 years ago someone asked what they are into, the response would have been that they are into fashion retail brand development & operation. But the moment guys at Pantloon re formed/re phrased their response that they are not just a fashion retail brand developer & operator but are into a business of building buisnesses at every touchpoint of customers, I think thats when they unlocked their true potential of opening many lines of business be it restautants, logistic company, mall development company, having ice cream parlors, future capital business, Telecom & IT, etc. Thats how pantloon shifted away from red ocean to blue ocean and are now into plethora of businesses existing under umbrella brand of FUTURE GROUP.

3. Know latest trends: I think one should know the latest trends(not just of one’s industry) which can serve to be useful in developing products/ service & finding that opportunity within your own industry. One of the latest trend recently was networking. Networking with customers & creating products became another big trend which involved customers directly into product/ service development process. Can this trend be used by fashion retailers to develop next season clothes, by networking with customers service providers can include customers to develop new services, restaurant owners netwoking with clients to develop new receipes thereby adding customers personal touch to whole process and making them have fun too........
Innovation will act as the only source for survival in 21st century. The above mentioned points will help companies to continuously innovate and be ahead of competition. But as one’s company says

STOP TALKING & START DOING.

So start the process of Innovation within your organisation.

NEERAJ JAIN PUNE