Innovation & Design
Tim Hyer — 12 May 2008
Let's review some simple math:
0 + 0 = 0, correct.
0 + 1 = 1, correct.
1 + 1 = 2, wrong!
Well, at least when it comes to ideas.
We've all heard the phrase, two heads are better than one. When applied to idea generation, this phrase takes on a whole new meaning. The principle of collective intelligence suggests that multiple minds thinking about the same problem will yield an exponential output compared to that of a single mind. As Marty Neumeier suggests in his book, The Brand Gap, the equation 1 + 1 = 11 is most accurate for illustrating the generative power of teamwork.
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Tim Hyer — 2 February 2008
As a Business Development Manager, a huge part of my job here at Cheskin is secondary research. Aside from client calls and meetings, I find myself spending the majority of my time online, investigating company news, industry shifts, and latest business trends. It’s important for me to track down the most relevant and current information, so it may come as a surprise that my homepage is Wikipedia. Not Hoover’s. Not BusinessWeek. But Wikipedia.
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Darrel Rhea — 4 January 2008
I was corresponding with Reid Walker, VP of Communications at Lenovo this week. Reid is a certified global guy, emailing me from around the world including exotic places like Katmandu and Lhasa. (I’m jealous.) He is writing a manifesto for companies attempting to go global on Changethis.com. Lenovo is a unique company -- the first truly global company to emerge from an emerging market.
I was riffing off of his ideas, thinking about what my version of the 5 most important principles for driving success:
WorldBrand: Build a global brand promise (a value proposition that is truly scaleable – you know that most everyone starts with a local brand that gets extended. Start with what is truly meaningful to humans, base your positioning on that, then develop the plan for the global extensions at the outset.)
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Darrel Rhea — 20 December 2007
Today is an exciting day in the evolution of Cheskin. By joining with Added Value’s powerful network, we’re adding resources that will allow us to continue our quest for leadership in the consumer-led innovation consulting business. I’m thrilled to be gaining hundreds of colleagues from around the world to collaborate with, to challenge our thinking, and to and have fun with.
For years we have been telling ourselves and our clients that “change is good.” You just can’t innovate without change. This change will assure that we will be growing in ways that will provide greater value to our clients, while honoring our organization’s culture and values. If you want to know more about the exciting new improvements at Cheskin, call or email me!
Darrel Rhea — 13 December 2007
I attended an intimate event on innovation by I L O Institute (Innovation in Large Organizations) yesterday with several senior executives responsible for innovation in their organizations. Most of the day was dedicated to group discussion on the subject of innovation, but we also had Dr. Henry Chesbrough (the author of “Open Innovation”) speak at lunch.
Henry is a smart, articulate guy who has looked deeply at some specific aspects of innovation. He talked about the problem of getting "false negatives" from innovation processes (where commercially viable ideas wash out, only to be picked up by other organizations and made successful) and "false positives" (where bad ideas take on a life of their own and don’t get killed until too late). We have certainly seen a lot of examples of both instances happening to Cheskin’s clients, but what are the causes?...
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Denise Klarquist — 12 October 2007
These two phrases might seem the same, but from my point of view, it's the former that really matters. Here's an example of what I mean...
In a previous life, when I was at Ampex in the early 90's, the company talked a lot about the future of video technology - how could they make their technology relevant for the inevitable market desire for video on demand. While we can't deny that Ampex has been credited with a lot of invention, their approach to innovation was flawed. They tried to "make their technology relevant" by cramming more and more terabytes of capacity into a smaller footprint instead of understanding what would be relevant to the end-user experience.
A brand and product that was loved by consumers never leveraged the underlying and changing needs of their audience to "make relevant technology." And so what was a thriving giant in consumers' minds disappeared from our radar. A brand once associated with the wonder of music and entertainment now makes ugly boxes for data.
I contrast that to YouTube.
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Darrel Rhea — 10 October 2007
Innovation is still a sizzling topic, evidenced by the dozens of speeches requested of me by a wide range of industry groups this year around the world and which I delivered to keenly interested audiences. I have presented to many large groups of CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, Designers, Design Researchers, and others in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. After a hundred thousand air miles and scores of conferences and hundreds of personal dialogues with the individuals attending….What have I learned?
CEOs want the outcomes of innovation. They don’t want design, they don’t want process, they don’t really want a culture of innovation. They want growth. Topline, bottomline, organic growth. They want the financial markets to love them. If you are looking to get internal support for your innovation initiative, you had better be in that business.
CMOs want love too. They want innovation that is recognized and associated with their brands, and they want their brands loved. Your innovation initiative had better move and inspire customers.
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Kathleen Chattin — 6 August 2007
The rural poor in emerging markets may or may not ever be able to buy their own PC…or even want one. But there’s an alternative, already developed by Intel, to provide a shared “Community PC.” . It was designed for a shared usage model, at a village “kiosk”, somewhat similar to the Internet cafés that are already a widespread phenomenon in many emerging markets. So there are technical and financial alternatives to the one-per-person model.
Low-cost PCs are ‘sprouting up’ all over, whether the $199 PC from Lenovo, or Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, or Intel’s Classmate PC . There’s lots of goodness, people claim, in making PC’s accessible to everyone. But what’s good for short-term market penetration may bode ill for long-term innovation in the category.
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Lori Hobson — 27 July 2007
The first kids born into a world with the Internet got jobs this summer. Melissa, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, earns a paycheck and has a new Wells Fargo check card.
It must be a little disturbing to live in a household where your parents observe you not only out of parental love but also because they are interested in understanding how you use products and services as a mini-case study. In particular, I observe Melissa to understand how technology – especially the Internet and mobile devices – may shape future lifestyle and habits for her generation. Now that these kids are reaching adulthood, how will they be different?
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Lee Shupp — 17 July 2007
Oscar Pistorius is a South African runner who happens to be a double amputee. Known as "Blade Runner," he runs on carbon fiber legs, and he is very fast. So fast that the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) is considering banning him from track meets, claiming that he may have an unfair technological advantage over other runners. The problem for IAAF is that Pistorius is attracting much media and attention to the sport, while other runners are now threatened by the increasing possibility that they may be beaten by someone with no legs.
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Lori Hobson — 30 June 2007
When it comes to technology, I am generally more a bridge to crossing the chasm than a first adopter. But I do like being part of big events in Silicon Valley, where I live, like early viewings of Star Wars movies or the launch of much anticipated products. And we are more than Apple fans at our house -- consider that my disclosure. So here's a perspective for those who have chosen to wait...
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Lori Hobson — 11 June 2007
In 20 years, no one will remember Paris Hilton, but someone will write a book about Bob Brunner. Last week, Ms. Hilton went to prison, an event covered by every major news source, and Mr. Brunner and Jerry Manock spoke in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, to little fanfare. Mr. Manock was instrumental in the development of the first Macintosh, and Mr. Brunner, with the first Apple PowerBooks. Jerry and Bob were moderated by Bill Moggridge, an early notebook designer and modern-day father of interaction design. All three men’s work has broadly influenced computer design today down to the ThinkPad on which I am blogging. OTOH, Ms. Hilton has not done much more than, well, time.
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Darrel Rhea — 10 June 2007
The world of design is maturing at a very fast clip. I’ve keynoted several conferences outside the US this year (Copenhagen, Montreal, Auckland, Toronto, Sydney, etc.) and the growing importance of design around the globe is clear. Europe is ahead of the US in many ways, with Scandinavian countries leading in the theoretical understanding of customer-led innovation (but weaker on the systemized implementation of that understanding within organizations). Meanwhile, countries like New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and China are aggressively adopting design practices to boost their competitiveness. It has been exciting to see the eagerness of all types of organizations to use design as a basis for innovation. This surge of interest will be pushing the field of customer-led innovation to innovate itself. After meeting literally thousands of business leaders and designers from around the world this year, I am excited not just with the enthusiasm for the field I love, but by the incredible work being done by practitioners around the world.
Lee Shupp — 30 May 2007
Microsoft announced Surface yesterday, and the announcement has spurned lots of media attention today, with articles in the NY Times and USA Today. Glad to see it making such a splash, because it's a really cool product, and Surface provides a more more interesting and intuitive computing experience than the traditional desktop PC.
You have to see it in action to really get what it does. For a video demo, see the CNET site
We've had the privilege of working with the MSFT team the past 4 years on Surface, and it's been a really fun journey. I feel like a proud papa seeing it go public. It's wonderful to be able to contribute to our client's success. Congratulations to the MSFT team for their hard work on a really innovative product!
Leigh Marriner — 30 May 2007
Congratulations to Microsoft for launching this cool new product. It’s an acrylic tabletop with an embedded 30 inch screen. You interact with it through hand gestures. It can recognize small objects such as a digital camera with WiFi and download photos to the table surface, where you can sort them by pushing them around the table with your hands.
It’s been fun to be involved with Microsoft on this innovation effort – brainstorming, understanding the consumer experience, and helping identify market opportunities.
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Darrel Rhea — 13 May 2007
The “Better by Design” conference held in Auckland, New Zealand last week was an impressive event. This was a conference aimed at CEOs to enroll them in adopting design thinking and tools to improve their bottom line. I keynoted this event, and was joined by a strong roster of international and local speakers. The New Zealand government is a primary sponsor (along with industry players) and is taking an enlightened approach to developing their economy’s competitiveness. They understand the importance of design in the export business and are actively supporting the country’s emerging design infrastructure. As evidence of that support, the Minister of the Economy and the Prime Minister each spoke passionately about design at the event.
What impressed me was that the conference organizers didn’t just talk about the importance of design thinking and user-based design tools – they applied these ideas effectively...
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Lee Shupp — 28 April 2007
I spent last weekend in Vancouver, at the annual gathering of the Association of Professional Futurists. The APF has consistently put on great conferences in cities where the locale fits the conference theme. (For example, a past gathering on "The Future of Reality" was held in Las Vegas; what better place to explore what reality is, and what it may mean?) This year the theme was "The Future of Identity," and one of the unique identities that we explored was the identity of Vancouver as a city. Vancouver has developed a successful model for cities of the future, and the city has done that on the premise that traffic congestion is a good thing, rather than a problem to be addressed.
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Tommy Stinson — 12 April 2007
Last weekend, the Washington Post published an interesting piece about an experiment in culture. Joshua Bell, a highly-acclaimed concert violinist, put on a baseball cap and casual clothes and posed as a busker in the L'Enfant Plaza station of the Washington, D.C. Metrorail. His goal (or rather, the goal of the journalist who wrote the piece) was to see if morning commuters would stop and listen to his music.
Now this is an accomplished, highly-decorated artist playing extremely difficult musical pieces on his 18th century Stradivarius. And the end result of his 45 minute incognito concert? $32.17. And only a small handful of the thousands of morning commuters even seemed to give him a glance as they walked past.
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Lori Hobson — 8 April 2007
Inspirations pass. What stirred us bolt upright in bed yesterday doesn’t even get us out of the hammock today. So it’s not a surprise that we are witnessing the end of a theme that has been a social cause, design mantra, and political crutch for over a decade. “Simplicity” is on the decline. It started making its way to the door a while ago, and like a busy host at our own intellectual party, we hadn’t noticed that our stylish guest had decided to slip out. From here on, “making things simple” as a mission will be pursued primarily by the people who are driving the idea into decline or those who take a while to catch on. (Hint: usually those are the same group.)
Which leaves the Masters of Innovation, or at least me and my coffee klatch, compelled to consider what is next.
By now you may be shaking your head in disbelief, but if I told you that the future – the next muse that will tickle our minds and stir our souls – has made a cameo appearance at my house, would you try to sneak a peek through the window?
I have seen the Apple iPhone. They are not released, but one of them lives where I live.
What I saw is a hint of what is to come. The antidote for dumbing things down. The means for organizing the disparate and embracing the wild wooly reality of the connected world. A metaphor for communications that don’t gloss over the facts. Not to give Apple too much credit – there are other examples I could highlight – but this product embodies a new approach to the complicated that doesn’t balk at detail.
To sum it up: it’s made the complex engaging, even beautiful.
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Terri Ducay — 3 April 2007
Like most people, I never seem to have enough time to read. But when I received renewal subscriptions to the New York Times and The Economist, I didn’t hesitate to sign up. While the integrity of the information and the quality of the writing and reporting is at the core of what interests me, what is valuable is the manner in which the information is designed and visualized, enabling me to easily absorb and understand it.
I especially find that design and visualization does not just make things easier to access - it actually heightens my level of understanding. News, information and ideas become visceral and thus more powerful. So what I am buying is not only the information but the experience of that information as well.
Here is what I love:
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Leigh Marriner — 26 March 2007
The AMA's Marketing News has a cover story on innovation in the February 1, 2007 issue. This point of view is upheld by what we have discovered in our client work. Line extensions do not lead to real innovation. True innovation means designing a product that delivers significant new value to the customer. And success is first and foremost a function of senior management, not just R&D and Marketing. The culture has to embrace innovation and what comes with it – risk, uncertainty and failure. A few of our observations about successful innovation:
1) Being afraid to fail and not embracing risk stifles innovation. You need to be willing to go in the wrong direction in order to be open to true innovation as opposed to product extensions
2) Stage-gate processes need to be modified to allow true innovation to flourish. You can’t come up with reliable numbers that will pass the stage-gate process early in a true innovation process. Stage-gate processes push products into an existing mold. While it’s important to have some method to make rational go/no go decisions before too much is invested, a company needs to be willing to pursue questionable ideas for some time in order to be able to show potential if it exists. Truly new ideas often look wacky at first.
3) Often truly new ideas come from outside a company, not just from the R&D facility. Companies that manage to avoid an NIH mentality have an advantage.
4) True innovation need not be based just on core product innovation. Starbucks has shown that consumers’ emotional experience can create innovation. Orange Glo showed that a customer’s experience with a cleaning product can create a truly innovative experience, even though the underlying cleaning technology isn’t new. Although the Prius represents new technology, the reason it is so successful is due to emotional considerations – a substantial consumer segment care enough about being (and being seen as) environmentally conscious to make that a primary purchase criterion for their car.
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Darrel Rhea — 15 March 2007
This week’s Design Management Institute’s European Conference is focusing on the Metrics of Design. By any measure, the conference is well attended with over 150 designers, design managers, researchers, senior executives and others… gathering to be inspired and informed. It’s a tall order, though, to mix a conference cocktail of “design” and “metrics,” despite how critically thirsty our business public is to be reassured they are on the right path with developing products and services that will serve their customers well.
As keynote speaker on the first day, I felt responsible for communicating that there is a viable balance between intuitive and rational approaches. In fact, my position is that any company needs both to succeed in creating and communicating products and services that are meaningful to its customers.
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Craig Millman — 13 March 2007
This is a poignant story with a twist.
A few weeks ago my adorable niece Nicole turned four. I attended her birthday party at the local children’s gym, took snapshots and video and ate too much pizza. There was, of course, a mountain of presents, to which I contributed.
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Lori Hobson — 2 March 2007
Do you care if you buy the real thing? Do you mind if a company dupes you into using its product if in the end you are glad you did? If you found out most of the parts of your PC, auto, handbag or mobile phone were repackaged in China and sold for less than 1/10 the cost, would you lament it? Would you buy the Chinese versions if you had access?
In design these days, “authenticity” is mentioned as a key global trend more often than JetBlue strands customers on the tarmac. And yet there seems to be an endless market in knock-offs, me-too products and services, and campaigns that are at their roots deceptive.
Is authenticity really a trend or are consumers actually ogling its evil twin at the local Wal-Mart?
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Lori Hobson — 9 February 2007
Has Steve Jobs demonstrated that high impact innovation is best done sans exploration with consumers? In case you don’t know, Apple is a company that largely arrives at innovative product and business concepts based on the gut feel and apparent genius of a handful of people – Messieurs Jobs, Ive, and a small cadre of designers and engineers. With the phenomenal success of the iPod and its larger ecosystem, it might be hard to say that all winning innovation starts with a Cheskin-style deep dive into consumers’ meaningful experiences.
Yet, most organizations do not have the vision, design savvy, drive, dictatorship, infrastructure, secrecy, or funding-processes that Apple has.
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Lori Hobson — 25 November 2006
As I slid my key in the door, the ring of the phone inside the house made my head jerk upright and eyes snap forward. Instinctively I knew that I had been found out. I had just cheated fate, and I was sneaking back into the house with the spoils of my win. A momentary pang of anxiety shot through me as if being discovered could somehow jinx the situation.
It was October 2002, and where I live, in Silicon Valley, things were pretty bleak.
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Keren Solomon — 7 November 2006
Every Election Day, there are numerous articles and news segments talking about democracy, and how we are fortunate to live in a country where government and law comes from the consent of the governed. And just about every year, we hear about voting “glitches” and how nice it would be to “improve the process.” Design for Democracy is an organization that has some thoughts about how.
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Lori Hobson — 15 October 2006
Where I live, the neighbors just bought a winning tech lottery ticket. YouTube sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion, turning co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen into hundreds-of-millionaires. (YouTube: another valley garage-to-riches story) Apparently, the whole thing started in Hurley’s Menlo Park garage, and – assuming he still lives here – the sale makes him the latest in a legacy of rich residents in our little bedroom community.
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Lori Hobson — 12 October 2006
Where I live, “technology” has a meaning beyond its functional purpose, its inherent marvel of invention, or its potential as a status symbol. We are a community for which technology has a deeply valued significance that transcends even fundamental emotional satisfaction. The meaning of “technology” in Silicon Valley nestles somewhere among our hope for prosperity and the American dream, our unity with our neighbors and friends, and our belief that intellectual prowess applied over time can resolve any challenges humans face.
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Darrel Rhea — 23 September 2006
To say that “Innovation” has become a buzz word in media is just the least of it. Major business publications – magazines, books, and online publications -- are full of why businesses should pay attention to innovation, what it is, how to make it happen, and who is responsible. But I wish that authors, journalists and pundits would make a sharper distinction between “innovation” and “invention.”
Invention is about solving problems in novel ways. However, that doesn’t mean that the solution is necessarily beneficial, either to the consumer or to the company that worked hard (or not so hard) to create it. There are hundreds of thousands of inventions that never even make it to the market, and many thousands that do get there but don’t last, for good cause. Despite their seductive novelty, inventions often don’t achieve business goals for two reasons: they don’t solve a meaningful or relevant problem, or they solve a problem and don’t do it in a meaningful way.
Innovation is about generating improved utility that really matters to people, and this in turn creates value for them. Consumers will gravitate to these products and services, and the subsequent consumer preference, price flexibility and loyalty, results in significant competitive advantage & economic rewards for the seller. Both the customer and the manufacturer get tangible benefits.
Why is this distinction between invention and innovation important?
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Lee Shupp — 28 August 2006
I've just finished reading "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology. The book applies research from psychology to analyze how we think about the future, and why our visions of the future are so often wrong. He starts by examining happiness, and what it really means. He then focuses upon three illusions of foresight:
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Jan Yeager — 26 July 2006
I have a small collection of children’s books that I’ve acquired over the years. A favorite is Where’s Waldo, one in a series of books based on an iconic character dressed in a red and white striped shirt, matching stocking cap, and black rimmed glasses. Readers are challenged to find Waldo in visually dense scenes filled with crowds of people and elaborate environments. There is so much information to look at that it’s easy to become distracted from the search for Waldo and get caught up in the myriad of detail.
This book came to mind recently as I was helping a client craft a presentation to be delivered to a group of business partners. The objective was to show evidence of a market opportunity in order to prioritize product development efforts.
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Miguel Gomez Winebrenner — 27 June 2006
Many sports consumers, especially Americans, have been commenting on how much more exciting this year’s World Cup has been. In great part this has been due to the fact that the U.S. team has improved a lot over the past ten years, and because there has been a sustainable US soccer league (MLS) for some time now. What few people know is that FIFA (soccer’s governing body) has made two substantial innovations to the game in order to create the level of excitement that is being felt this year.
The first was an innovating change to the design of the ball. This new design introduced in 2006 (called the Teamgeist) has fewer stitches and as a result is much quicker and more difficult to catch when struck. As opposed to older balls like the Buckminster design from 1970, which was purposefully slower and heavier, this new ball creates less friction with the surrounding air and easily swerves past goal keepers when struck from a distance. Now, it seems, many strikers can “bend it like Beckham.” The result of this innovation in soccer ball design has led to more scores, especially from long-range, and has made the World Cup much more exciting to those who favor lots of goal-scoring, like sports consumers in the United States.
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Craig Millman — 9 May 2006
Me? No, that’s the tagline for Threadless.com. I’m a big fan.
A few weekends back, I was roaming around downtown San Francisco with some friends. One of them led me into the Virgin Megastore on Stockton to check out some T-shirts he liked. They were ok – mildly humorous, with war-inspired, apocalyptic graphics and headlines. Unfortunately the uninspired visuals couldn’t match the content.
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Darrel Rhea — 30 April 2006
Making innovation happen in the best environment is tough. Making innovation happen when the lines of authority are foggy is exponentially harder.
In the ideal world, someone owns each of your company’s brands. That is, he or she is accountable for the brand’s performance, and has the authority to control brand touch points and mandate changes. Without this structure of authority, there will be “brand by committee,” or “brand by politics,” or “brand by pecking order.” Usually it’s all three, and usually it’s ugly. If this occurs in a franchise business, which is where many consumer products and services are distributed, it’s worse than ugly.
If you are the brand manager and you own a brand, your responsibility is to define the brand experience. If it is clearly articulated (functional benefits, emotional benefits, economic benefits, and an explicit way the brand creates meaning in our culture), you can define criteria to evaluate how the brand is delivering today. And you can provide a tight creative brief for efforts to improve it. This focus provides a critical context for innovation research.
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Lee Shupp — 15 April 2006
I recently spent a weekend in Santa Fe learning about chaos, complexity, and social network theory at the annual conference of the Association of Professional Futurists. It was a fabulous weekend with stellar speakers, including Mark Klein of MIT and Cristopher Moore of the University of New Mexico and Santa Fe Institute. Cris gave a fabulous talk entitled Diversity: A Weapon of Mass Construction, that contained some very interesting insights about complex systems that has some application to business organizations.
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Craig Millman — 3 April 2006
In my last post I described my frustration with my cell phone’s interface. Here’s an example in which confusing design proved not only frustrating, but costly as well.
Example 2: Lost in the forest of signs
Challenge: Figuring out when it’s ok to park
Cost: $300
I had occupied my apartment for about four months when this incident occurred. I let a friend park in my gated spot and tried my luck in the street. I’m generally responsible and circumspect about avoiding tickets. I found a choice location in front of my building and spent a few moments studying the street signs.
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Darrel Rhea — 2 April 2006
It’s been a few years since I was last in Sydney, so my experience here is as if through new eyes. What I am seeing this week is that Australians are a very straight-forward lot – sort of a combination of Brit and Pioneer. It’s refreshing.
The Pioneer aspect makes itself apparent in many unexpected ways, not the least of which is innovative programs developed by the government, as unexpected as that sounds. Rarely do we think of government as a source of enlightened design thinking.
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Jennifer Gray — 15 March 2006
Sitting in today's new employee orientation, I explained what people need to know when it comes to the Cheskin Employee Experience. At the end, the org chart slipped out and I realized I'd forgotten to cover it. Because, after all, it means little to me.
There is an expectation of hierarchy, particularly when employees join a company. A navigation tool, a reminder of who's who, a guide for who to lobby -- whatever it might be, it feels irrelevant. As head of HR, I probably shouldn't be disdainful of tiles and roles. Yet, I'm in good company (and in a good company) when it comes to this perspective. Cheskin has never been a hierarchical place that relies on the strength of a strong baton.
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Darrel Rhea — 2 March 2006
Often when clients begin to work with us, one of the first questions they ask is “How do we get our customers to accept and buy our products?” Given that is what their work is almost always measured by – numbers that represent units sold, profit per unit, and overall profitability – it’s understandable. But it's the wrong question to be asking.
Traditional “common sense” has taught manufacturers to develop products first then work hard to get the market to accept it. When innovating in this mode, designers get reduced to “putting lipstick on the pig” and design researchers are called on to optimize the best possible color and shade of lipstick. You get the idea. It all creates an egregious waste of energy and resources because the basic product concept might really oink.
The best way to get customer-acceptance of products is to design products (and services) that are a direct expression of consumer or customer needs, wants and desires. This practice is Customer-Led Innovation, and it is the most effective way to produce value for customers – which is the primary job of innovation in the first place.
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Craig Millman — 6 February 2006
At some time or another we all become victims of confusing user interfaces and poorly executed information design. Ordinarily the effects are inconsequential. We tolerate the shortcoming, adapt and move on.
In some cases it’s more difficult to ignore. Poorly designed products and systems can cost us more than headaches; they can cost us time and money. In the most extreme cases, the results can be fatal. S. M. Casey documented some deadly design mishaps in his “Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error.”
Lately, I’ve had a string of bad luck with convoluted design. While none has been life threatening, some of the experiences have put a dent in my wallet…
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Joanne Mendel — 29 January 2006
I really enjoy it when I’m diving deep into something and find a wealth of applicable knowledge in an unexpected place. In this case it took someone outside my field of expertise (namely Christopher) to point me to it. Knowledge communication, an emerging field of study, is currently being incubated in the University of Lugano and the University of St. Gallen, by Dr. Martin Eppler among others. Central to Epplers’ inquiry is how communications occur between experts and decision makers in a business context or, how effective business decisions happen.
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Joanne Mendel — 29 January 2006
Organizational decision making is becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. Experts (with specialized knowledge) and decision makers (having awareness of the business context in which knowledge is applied) need to work in an integrated way to improve decision making.
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Denise Klarquist — 23 January 2006
This weekend I attended the compostmodern conference in San Francisco, a collaboration between the AIGA and IDSA to promote sustainability. I was inspired by the likes of Kalle Lasn from Adbusters and Chris Hacker, Senior Vice President of Global Design and Design Strategy at Johnson & Johnson, that latter underscoring the business case for environmental sustainability - a nice change from the typical "do it because it's good for you" message.
Paul Saffo wrapped up the conference on a more threatening note, essentially saying "do it or perish." He too noted that we need to create a stonger motivation in order to shift from a throw away culture to one that values conservation, environmentalism and sustainability. Like all the speakers who proceeded him, he made a strong case for the power of design.
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Terri Ducay — 22 January 2006
In preparation for a trip to Beijing, I bought a travel guide book by DK Publishing – Eyewitness Travel Guides.
I am a huge fan of DK publishing. They were the first publisher to design a format that is highly visually and informative, a ratio of images to words that is roughly 80% to 20%. The images, both photos and illustrations, give a huge amount of information in an elegant and easy-to-use design.
DK’s design objective is to “provide information in an attractive and easy to reach form.” It aims to inform, excite and inspire. Oh, and did I mention their books are fun to use? They accomplish all this by employing a few tricks of knowledge visualization.
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Darrel Rhea — 2 January 2006
New Year’s resolutions are almost always well intended…but unfortunately, they’re usually short-lived. A couple of days ago I discovered an interesting website, 43 Things, that provides online community support for its users to achieve their aspirations throughout the year. It’s an engaging concept, for a community-oriented website. What’s even more interesting are the goals that are cited the most by the thousands of people who make their declarations public. They tell us a lot about what is meaningful to Americans today.
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Terri Ducay — 18 December 2005
While scanning a Slashdot New Technology online news listing, I found a story entitled Journey Towards the Center of the Earth. Visions of Jules Verne popped into my head. It turns out that there is a Japanese-led deep-sea drilling project to begin in 2007 called Chikyu, which means ‘Earth’ in Japanese.
Chikyu the project is an attempt to collect the first samples of the Earth’s mantle. It seeks clues on primitive organisms and will use information gathered to help detect earthquakes.
If the story was not interesting enough, what surprised me for a scientific/academic article was the simple yet informative way the article explained the mechanics of the drilling vessel. A PDF containing the story used visualization to communicate complex information in a user-friendly way.
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Denise Klarquist — 18 December 2005
I just read Niti Bhan's provocation on the benefit of design councils on CPH127. While some success is apparent in other countries, I think that the ability of the US to establish a successful national design council could be challenging at best.
While we Americans may be becoming more sophisticated in our appreciation of attractively executed products, I'm not sure that we generally agree on what constitutes good design, or design in general.
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Darrel Rhea — 20 November 2005
Writing Making Meaning has been an interesting process. Not only was our topic and material born from hundreds of thousands of interviews over many years of professional work, but as we get closer to the publication date, the book has also resulted in an increased intensity at Cheskin of internal discussions about our own treasured objects and the respective personal meanings behind them for us.
This round of discovery was kicked off when I asked all my Cheskin coworkers to do a short exercise and send me the results. My requested was that each person choose an article that he/she had purchased and which had provided a meaningful experience, to write a short essay about it and to send me the results. I also requested a photo of the object with the author.
To make clear what I was requesting, I wrote one myself and attached it to the request. Here’s mine:
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Darrel Rhea — 12 November 2005
The Effective Executive has long been one of the first books I turned to when I’ve needed a refresher on management skills. It was, in fact, a book I picked up immediately when I first became CEO of Cheskin. I knew it would help to ground my thinking once again, at a time when I needed to be reminded of ways to touch move and inspire a team. What I have always appreciated about the thinking behind that book is that it isn’t about managing one’s team; it is about managing oneself…and clearly that is the best place to start. To lead well is to be a leader.
The thinking behind this, of course, is from Peter Drucker, author, teacher, consultant, self-proclaimed social ecologist. I was sad to read that Mr. Drucker died yesterday at the age of 95. He was the consummate leader himself, teaching many of us to be more effective through improved time management, better decision-making, setting priorities, listening, communicating. I really liked that he viewed employees as resources and not as a cost, which is a point of view not embraced often enough by corporate executives. I was always moved by his increasing focus in the nonprofit world, and he inspired me to start spending more time with colleagues to figure out how we can leverage our resources to serve humanity in ways that the for-profit sector can’t.
I like especially his thinking about innovation, and how important it is to “turn on the tap” so that the corporate imagination will flow. “The tap,” he wrote in The Effective Executive, “is…disciplined disagreement.” How cool is that? Almost any executive can be a visionary, but it takes an enlightened executive to collaborate with his team to open up the ideation to all players and then to build the systems (discipline) required to succeed in implementation.
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Darrel Rhea — 4 November 2005
My wife bakes a cookie that my boys and I think is the best in the world. “A keeper!” we declared after she first tried a recipe she got last year from Cook’s Illustrated. She whipped up a batch just this evening, in honor of our son visiting from New Zealand. Ummm. The fragrance of the cookies baking brought to mind the recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about a long-time Cheskin colleague, Steve Gundrum. Steve heads Mattson & Co., a food R&D firm that innovates products that you probably have on your shelf, if not on your table, right now.
But this isn’t about cookies, much as I like to ponder them, or the interesting story Gladwell weaves about Steve’s Delta Project and the Great Bake Off. It’s about…yes, you guessed it: Innovation. And it’s about how to fashion a recipe for success for innovation that’s a keeper.
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Steve Diller — 26 October 2005
One advantage in writing a book about meaningful experiences was the opportunities it provided to plumb the depths of Cheskin's history. It's a pretty illustrious history, with engagements that often had impacts far beyond what Louis Cheskin, our founder, might have anticipated. It also has implications for all of us who work to enhance customer experiences.
A particularly interesting example was his work with McDonald's. The historical documentation indicates that, back when that company was seeking to expand more quickly, its management hit on the idea of altering the legal definition of their establishments, from "hamburger stands" to "restaurants."
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Gary Feldman — 26 October 2005
I'm really excited about a new service that recently debuted in New York that demonstrates how a company can create a meaningful, innovative experience by bundling together existing products and services (which are innovative in their own right).
The company: OZOCar, "New York's 1st Eco-Luxury Car Service".
At first glance, OZO Car is a car service that uses a fleet of Toyota Priuses, one of the most fuel-efficient hybrid cars out there. So no more guilt about single passenger trips to and from the airport in gas guzzling Town Cars.
But it gets even better than that.
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Davis Masten — 25 October 2005
The New Yorker has influenced me all my life. My Mom used to read it. So I was particularly proud to see my friend and colleague, Steve Gundrum, profiled in it last month in a story by Malcolm Gladwell. The article, “The Great Bake-Off,” describes a real project that Steve conceived and led: the development of a new cookie using different approaches taken from technology, primarily open source versus specialized teams.
Steve first came up with the idea to experiment with open source development after hearing it described at the TED conference in 2003. Like a true entrepreneur, he grabbed the idea from one area (after talking with Mitch Kapor) and ran with it in another, getting several notable companies to join him in the experiment. Which approach worked better? The results are too interesting to give away. Read the article or hear Malcolm talk about it in a podcast at foodcom.com.
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Darrel Rhea — 25 October 2005
Despite devoting my meaningful work life to helping companies create meaningful innovations in products and services, I must admit that once in a while I am surprised when a financial institution comes up with a new service that is truly different and not just another marketing trick. This one is Bank of America’s new Keep The Change™ program.
Only recently launched, this is indeed meaningful to its potential users, meeting the criteria we delineated in our book Making Meaning (which is soon to be launched itself). And, in this case, it’s meaningful not just for each individual consumer, but ultimately – if it kicks off and becomes broadly successful – can be meaningful to our savings-starved economy.
What is Keep The Change and how does it work? It’s an electronic rendition of what some of my buddies did for years – every time they had a handful of change, they tossed it into a jar and when the jar was full, they rolled the coins and banked them. This is a little less visible, but equally painless way to save for consumers who buy with a debit card: the electronic debit card system rounds up on the cost of the purchase to the nearest dollar and stuffs the difference into the holder’s savings account.
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Davis Masten — 9 September 2005
It's odd what makes an innovation suddenly move from niche to mass. So often it is unplanned and unexpected events.
Cheskin has been actively involved for years in helping consumers use digital tools to tell their side of an experience. Even before they hit the market, we believed tools like camera phones, PDAs, blogs, and podcasts had immense power to convey a new, more intimate and individualized point of view. But our efforts paled in comparison to the stimulus provided by recent events, in particular the London bombing and Hurricane Katrina.
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Denise Klarquist — 6 September 2005
While collaboration is defined as people working together, I like to think of it more as the sharing of ideas, techniques, tools and even objects that result in something greater than the sum of parts. Two recent examples come to mind:
I ran across this website today as I was scanning the Cool Hunting newsletter. Alyce Santoro's Sonic Fabric designs are beautiful, no doubt, but what I was more impressed by was the inspiration that lead to the innovation and how the concept of collaboration is woven throughout (pun intended).
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Dimitry Shkolnikov — 6 September 2005
I love high-powered cars. The fact that these amazing automobiles, like the Chevrolet ZO6 Corvette or the BMW M5 sedan, are also gas-guzzlers didn't bother me in the past. I watched the price of gas climb, but it didn't moderate my desire to drive the latest and greatest sports cars on the market; that is, until now. For some reason--maybe because the price of gas has simply gotten too high or maybe it’s because the Katrina disaster sobers us all--these cars that used to bring me uncompromised pleasure have started to become embarrassing.
This is very similar to what happened in the 1970s, when American's replaced their muscle cars with compact, fuel efficient Japanese imports. The shift was dramatic and changed the face of transportation for decades. Will this happen again? Will these dream machines disappear, or will their makers retool and find a way to improve fuel efficiency without compromising the experience? I'm not yet ready to give up my love of fast, fun cars, but I've started to take a hard look at their impact on me and others. I can't be the only sports car driver who cares about this.
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Christopher Ireland — 22 August 2005
I have the first 12 or so issues of Wired magazine. It used to be my Bible back in the pre-dotcom days, but it seemed to lose its way after awhile and I stopped reading it. That is, until my recent vacation.
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Christopher Ireland — 2 August 2005
Building a company is not for wimps. At its best, it is extraordinarily difficult work that depends a great deal on circumstances beyond the control of any one person, or even small team. It's probably not quite as risky as a slot machine, but it's close.
I was reminded of this today while listening to HistoryPodcast. The author, Jason Watts, delivers interesting and obscure (at least to me) historical stories about people or events, but he also adds in small comments about the development of his company (which he prefers to think of as a hobby). Today, he mentioned that the whirring sound heard in the background of his podcast came from a $10.99 fan that he would like to replace if donations help out. He's also reported on how his fan base is growing--he has 150 subscribers so far--and his thoughts on revenue generation (he doesn't believe in paid subscriptions).
In adding these personal comments, Jason gives listeners a inside view of what it's like to build a small company. It adds an interesting dimension to his podcasts--one that is surprisingly engaging. I was even tempted to respond to his request that listeners send him their ideas for a logo, but my lack of drawing skills thankfully interceded.
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Darrel Rhea — 2 August 2005
Because our work was profiled in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Blink,” it generates a lot of questions for me on a weekly basis. It makes sense to comment on how “thin slicing” connects to the reality of shoppers making buy decisions on packaged goods. (For tips on how to deal with the retail experience overload, see my previous blog, “Mastering the Grocery Shopping Experience.”) People base their buying decisions on a strong feeling they get which isn’t necessarily rational but usually justified on some levels. The feeling that drives their decision is intuition, and what Gladwell calls “thin slicing” – but it’s not always right, just as any subjective opinion isn’t always right.
Why do we thin slice in the store? People do it out of self defense, simply because there’s so much stimuli in any retail environment that it virtually impedes shoppers from operating rationally. After all, most stores carry between 25,000 and 40,000 separate products, each with multiple packages. If you attempted to consciously “see” even a fraction of those, you would experience mental overload! --your brain would slow to a crawl and you would vulnerable to predators (like those old ladies with shopping carts that might run you over). It’s an evolutionary coping mechanism.
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Lisa Leckie — 25 July 2005
It must be something in the air. Like Terri Ducay, I've been looking for change in my life. Unlike Terri, I decided to get it from fashion rather than four wheels. Also unlike Terri's experience, I can't find the exact thing I want waiting for me in a showroom. I have to create it myself.
Today, the most fashionable consumers are those capable of experimenting. They can't just adopt a luxury brand or a new designers' unique look. The top "fashionistas" are capable of creatively assembling clothes from many sources, both old and new, cheap and expensive and seeing how it works for them. Their fashion reputation is based on their personal decisions about color, texture, design and brand pairing. Those who are good at this have an amazing skill for putting things together in innovative ways; for example, combining a feminine vintage top with a emerging brand of fashion jeans, or their Dad’s 70’s leather coat (made in Siberia) with a pair of striped tube socks and knit scarf from H&M.
At its essence, this is about creating personal meaning through selection and combination of clothing and accessories. It's fun for me, but what does this have to do with innovation in the marketplace and why would my clients care to read about this?
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Davis Masten — 22 July 2005
I was riding in a car today in Battle Creek Michigan. One of my hosts told the story of how he left his keys in his car. He had his cell phone though. So he called his wife, who hit it open the car door button on her set of keys for the same car. The door unlocked.
I’ll remember this the next time I lock my keys in my car. Hope this helps you too.
Christopher Ireland — 14 July 2005
I blogged recently about adding podcasts to my life. The Daily Podcast offers a good overview of what's happening in this space for those interested in more details.
Unlike most of the technology products or services I try, this one is actually changing my behavior. I don't know how long it will last, but I actually look forward to my morning workout now because I get to listen to new podcasts downloaded overnight. When I was in college, one of my favorite activities (along with cheap beer night) was to wander the library aisles and randomly read passages from books. For me, this type of spontaneous information adventure was blissful, and listening to podcasts comes as close to recreating it as anything else I've done.
Although I've chosen the categories to match my pre-set desires, the podcasts themselves are wide ranging. This morning I was treated to a discussion of the physiology of orgasm, an interview with a woman struggling with Alzheimer's disease and a talk by film maker David Lynch on the power of mediation. With that start, it's going to be hard to have a boring day.
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Denise Klarquist — 7 July 2005
I was recently introduced to a new blog on Design and Innovation - CPH127. As we at Cheskin address design and innovation challenges for our clients regularly, it's clear that these fields, if we can even use that term, are increasingly fluid and evolving.
Ask just about anyone now to define "design" and you'll get as many answers as people you ask. Innovation is not far from that as well. The guys at CPH127 underscore this just by their very nature... "Our team consists designers, MBAs, dot-com entreprenours and all the other folks you would never expect to be on this kind of blog."
I was especially fond of a recent post by Ian McArthur on new skillsets for designers.
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Christopher Ireland — 30 June 2005
iTunes caught me by surprise this morning. Instead of my normal email announcing some new music they thought I'd like, I got a note headlined "This just in: Podcasting on iTunes." Hmm, that's fast, I thought. Podcasting has been around awhile on the geek circuit, but most normal people don't have a clue what it is yet.
I decided to follow iTunes advice and check it out. The result is what makes Apple so amazing...
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Claudia Knight — 27 June 2005
We often hear about brands refreshing or reinventing themselves to stay current, but exactly how is that done? Is it like a make-over where a person lets experts change his or her look, style and manners, ala Professor Henry Higgin's re-do of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady or the more recent incarnation "Extreme Makeover"? Is it a more subtle process, like going to a therapist and analyzing past behavior and future options? Or is it just a straight forward business process that some how combines the predictive validation of number-crunching with a creative inspiration of what's possible?
In our experience, it's a little of each and there are pros and cons to each approach. Here's a challenge to any of our readers--I'm going to describe an organization (it's real, but I can't reveal its identity) in desparate need of a make-over. Let me know what you would do.
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Darrel Rhea — 25 June 2005
Recently Ed Batista and I traded emails on Malcolm Gladwell's Blink – specifically Gladwell’s positioning of focus groups as a "a tax on revolutionary ideas.” Batista asked my take on Gladwell’s comment on focus groups as being detrimental to innovation. My reply was that market research has already evolved beyond where Malcolm is talking about it. Focus groups are an easy target because they are misused and over used. There will be 950,000 focus groups conducted in the world this year, and yes, some real atrocities will result from some misapplications of a perfectly good methodology. But that is only one method used in research, and there are plenty of others that do a great job of informing designers and the design process. Cheskin’s been making speeches about this since the early 80’s.
Contrary to Ed’s POV, Malcolm doesn’t pose a stiff challenge to traditional techniques. What he posed instead is a challenge to the mindless application of one specific technique by clients who demand focus groups – and an industry of researchers who don’t know better. The reality is we evolved a highly sophisticated design research practice decades ago, using ethnography and a host of other tools proven to be effective and fully endorsed by design innovators.
You don’t use focus groups to evaluate revolutionary ideas. They can provide context for them. They can facilitate the generation of them. This is old news now getting broad exposure, but better late than never. That’s Gladwell’s welcomed contribution.
Stephen Palacios — 20 June 2005
Last week I began this blog series about the vast opportunity the Hispanic population represents to US business. Today I'll continue to develop the context of why any sane business, and most notably the health care industry, should invest in this market.
Although Hispanics on the whole still have only a small share of America’s wealth, their participation in the economy is growing. Let’s look at some market projections.
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Davis Masten — 10 June 2005
Leah's blog make a good case for why Black & Decker's decision to extend into kitchen mixers was probably a mistep. But if HP decided to spend some time in the kitchen, they may find a more hearty welcome. According to 12,000+ consumers in over a dozen different countries, the HP brand can stretch into home appliances. Why?
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Darrel Rhea — 9 June 2005
As Terri Ducay's blog notes, we just returned from the DMI Brand Design Conference more convinced than ever that business demand for design innovation is getting hotter every day and is likely to explode. This isn't the first time we've heard this. What is different from past predictions is who is doing the predicting and what its implications are.
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Terri Ducay — 8 June 2005
It is professionally gratifying to know that this is the "Decade of Design." I just returned from the Design Management Institute (DMI) Brand Design Conference, where speakers like Bruce Nussbaum, Editorial Page Editor of Business Week, describes designers as being the new consulting gurus of the 21st century. When companies like Procter & Gamble and General Electric, call on designers to take the lead in transforming their companies, this signifies a big shift in how corporate America is beginning to think. Good bye Six Sigma, hello Designer.
Why the shift? Why are design conversations taking place in CEO offices? Well, there are several reasons given by Nussbaum:
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Leigh Marriner — 8 June 2005
Collaboration is an important part of any consulting assignment, but to work effectively at Cheskin, I've had to take this skill to a whole new level. I've had to learn to collaborate remotely with team members scattered in different countries, operating in different time zones, and using different communication tools. I've had to adjust to working with people who are at home, in their car, in a client's lobby or at the zoo with their 3 year old. Usually they have road warrior laptops or web-connected PDAs, but sometimes all they have is a phone.
Collaboration is important here for a number of reasons: Whether we're thousands of miles apart or sitting face-to-face, we know the only way we'll succeed is through the sum of our efforts. Our competition is just too tough for a one man act to beat. Because we know how to collaborate across time and space, we are truly flexible about where people work. This allows us to hire from a much broader and deeper talent pool. The type of creative, intelligent thinkers we desire find us far more attractive when they learn they can work from their home in Las Vegas or Redmond or Mexico. And because we invest in the latest collaboration tools (like Sharepoint TeamServices, MS Live Meeting and Smartphones or Treos, we are exposed to new visions of sharing and communicating, which end up regularly influencing and improving our work processes.
But no matter how strong a company's philosophy and tools are, there's one aspect of collaboration that matters above all else...
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Gary Feldman — 7 June 2005
In a recent column in AdAge, Scott Donaton comments on a plan to simultaneously release films in theaters, on DVD and pay TV, leaving the decision on how, when and where to watch the movies to filmgoers. This seems progressive to me and very much on track with putting the consumer in control, but apparently entertainment execs fear it will doom their business model. They explained to Scott, “we just need to remind people how much they like going to the theatre."
"Remind?" If people enjoy going to the movie theatre so much, why do they increasingly prefer watching movies elsewhere? What part of the theatre going experience would you remind them of--the fixed times? the over-priced, low quality food? the lack of parking? the dirty floors? the noisy kids behind them? the scratched screen? Rather than remind them of something that they most likely do only because, up until now, they haven't had an alternative, I'd suggest the entertainment industry rethink the entire theatre going experience. This experience is so badly broken, it almost screams for innovation. And once the choice is real--once people can choose when and where they watch a new release--the theatres won't have much time left to convince crowds that they are even worth consideration.
Other businesses have survived this type of competition by innovating their core offerings. Here's a few examples:
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Darrel Rhea — 7 June 2005
Ed Bastista’s blog today talked about Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and how important design is for influencing people’s perceptions of products and services. Bastista’s focus is on web design, and his assessment is spot on.
As Malcolm and I discussed in the book, most viewers can not and do not distinguish between the content of the product or service, and the appearance or “packaging” of the site (made up of its graphics, navigational, and branding elements). We have done hundreds of studies that have confirmed this. Design absolutely alters our perceptions in significant ways.
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Christopher Ireland — 6 June 2005
Fifteen years ago, we got a call from a small company in Redmond called Microsoft. They needed some help with their packaging for a new version of Windows. We were happy to help, even though we were all happily using Apple PCs at the time.
The next decade and a half whizzed past as we worked with one project team after another: Encarta, Word, Excel, Schedule+, Access, PowerPoint, Cinemania, Office, FrontPage, SQL, MSN, Passport, Outlook, Project, Optical mouse, ergonomic keyboard, SharePoint, Exchange, SmartPhone, OneNote, XBox, and more. We helped with software development, hardware development, positioning, messaging, branding, support manuals, even internal communications (and as needed, career counseling).
Keeping up with the breadth and depth of expertise this relationship demanded has been no easy trick. But we've done it, and as a result, we can celebrate this 15th anniversary with the relationship in very good shape, supported by at least a dozen very talented Cheskin folks and backed up by a history of over 500 projects, many of them global. Of course, we wish we would have traded our services for stock back in 1990--but, we're just as happy and confident to own it now.
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Darrel Rhea — 21 May 2005
We all know that Bill Gates is the media’s favorite nerd, and Microsoft is the media’s favorite evil empire. So this week’s media coverage about the new X-Box 360 introduction represents a seismic shift of these entrenched negative stereotypes. Suddenly, Bill is being characterized as “unleashed,” “hip,” “lose and happy,” and “cracking jokes and making fun of himself.” Time magazine said “somehow humanity’s most famous nerd has become kind of cool.” (Yes, we’re talking about the same Bill Gates that has been demonized decades.)
What force drove this epic transformation? Design. The new X-Box is a multi-billion dollar bet that a stodgy engineering culture within a monolithic global corporation can produce a cultural hip thing of beauty and relevance. So far, the media is declaring them successful, calling
it “cool,” “sleek,” “feminine,” “sophisticated.” And this coolness is creating a positive halo that is coloring perceptions of Bill and his whole enterprise. Time Magazine crows “from geek to chic.”
The hard part wasn’t creating the design. They simply hired some of the best industrial designers in the world, like our friends at Astro. The hard part was listening to them and accepting their work. That’s where design research comes in. Cheskin did research with all types of gamers in Asia, Europe and the US on the new X-Box designs.
What gamers told us was that the elegant console “had to be made either by Sony or Apple.” Bingo! That provided the confidence do an “unnatural act.” That is, it gave a nerdy corporate culture the confidence to accept the authentically cool and hip innovation of their development team.
There are a lot of other reasons why this product is likely to be a success, but if it was as ugly as the first X-Box, it would be a sure failure. Congratulations to the development team for listening to their consumers – and achieving a breakthrough in innovation!
Leah Hunter — 18 May 2005
I scored tickets to a Star Wars opening! It’s a regional sneak-preview, not the whole Hollywood red carpet shebang. But still. I get to see the movie before 98% of the population, and that makes me giddier than a juiced up Jawa.
Like everyone else in the world, I am drawn to the idea of exclusivity, though I have rarely had the chance to rub up against it in the popcorn line.
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Leah Hunter — 17 May 2005
I am in furious mural mode.
At home, I’m sketching line-drawings of birds in my bathroom. At work, I’m lobbying to create 30-foot painting to disguise the concrete wall outside our office. At first I thought the mania was just mine, but recent spreads in Elle Decoration and Surface confirm: walls are where it’s at right now. They’re the latest focus in fashion retailing.
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Darrel Rhea — 20 March 2005
Recently one of my colleagues wrote a fairly scathing review of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s newest tome after The Tipping Point. While I agree with some of her concerns about the conclusions people may take away from it in terms of unfounded or unfair snap judgments, I find that much of my work (many thousands of research studies) confirms his premise that people process visual information rapidly and on an unconscious level. In fact, his work echoes Cheskin's pioneering work a half a century ago. Blink will likely become Gladwell’s newest contribution to Twenty-first Century cultural idiomatics. But that doesn’t mean that rapid conclusions are always correct, or even that it is a good way to make decisions. Hence, the broad and deep customer studies proffered by Cheskin -- which do, in fact, support well-founded decisions that drive many millions of dollars into wise investment or away from product and brand concepts that would otherwise clearly fail.
Unfortunately, while many businesses do invest in the type of sophisticated research it takes to predict success, not all do—and not all take the advice that they pay for either. And sometimes, they fall prey to their own blinking, such as the failure of New Coke, which Gladwell discusses in Blink based on his interview of Davis Masten and me (most of which is paraphrased in the book).
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Denise Klarquist — 14 March 2005
Amazing how easy it is to forget that there are opportunities that exist outside of what we think we know. I work for a company that bases its value on this simple idea - you'd think I wouldn't need a reminder.
My neighbor and I need to replace the fence that separates our yards. I called our contractor, got a bid and passed it along to her. Her first response was, "That's great! Now we just need to know what kind of fence we want."
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Christopher Ireland — 8 March 2005
I've been attending the TED conference since 1992. That means I've watched it grow from an unruly toddler, barely able to function, to what it is today: a mature, sophisticated "adult" with fully developed values, personality and lifestyle. This has given me an unusual vantage point to study how a successful conference evolves.
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Gary Feldman — 7 March 2005
The competition is pretty fierce in the cellular category, right now, with lots of advertising by carriers and handset makers, and new features like multi-megapixel cameras and video recording.
Yet despite all these new bells and whistles, I think all the companies are missing something:
Where is the cool, must-have, "it" phone whose design evokes gadget envy not only among the technocrati, but among the style movers and shakers.?
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— 18 February 2005
Although I was only able to walk the exhibit hall of MacWorld for a brief period of time, I was overwhelmed by the amount of third party vendors riding the iPod wave.
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Christopher Ireland — 4 February 2005
Ed's fabulous post on the innovation failures of AT&T reminded me of how difficult it is for any company to truly innovate in pace iwth the market's demand. While I agree with him that AT&T had some particularly troublesome blindspots (in the early 90's, we suggested to them that "beepers" would hit big with teens and we were nearly laughed out of the room...), no company is immune to the stresses and strains of change--and change, plain and simple, is exactly what innovation requires.
Much has been written about people's resistance to change. Who Moved my Cheese is my personal favorite. But the challenge really comes home when you experience this first hand, as Cheskin does each time it adapts to its customers' needs.
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— 2 February 2005
I read about SBC’s decision to purchase AT&T with some interest, as I spent several years as an SMTS with AT&T Labs. It is a sad story best summed up in the Wall Street Journal Editorial, “Not to Big to Fail” (subscription required).
Here is the key paragraph:
Like so many once-great firms before it, the telephone company that was once a monopoly fell victim to competition, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the gales of "creative destruction." Following its antitrust breakup by the feds in 1982, the company once known as American Telephone & Telegraph never did find a successful business model beyond the cost-plus regulation and pricing it had known for decades. We sympathize with its executives who had to cope with ham-handed federal rule-makers, but in the end the company will be acquired at a discount price by a competitor that faced the same political forces.
But I can tell you with certainty that AT&T’s not finding a “successful business model beyond … cost-plus regulation and pricing” was despite a heavy investment in research and development. So what went wrong?
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Adrian Burstein — 30 January 2005
I have seen lately many alarming articles about the falling dollar, its causes, and consequences around the globe. These articles often had a political agenda and focused on macro-economic perspectives, blaming the astronomic national deficit. As important as all this is, I inevitably abstracted myself from the economic speech, and fell in a delicious thinking cycle around the notion of reality dictating our behaviors vs. our behaviors dictating reality. I mean, aren’t we who with our consumption behaviors created that deficit to begin with?
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Christopher Ireland — 26 January 2005
How do you take several decks of data, totaling over 100 pages, and reduce it down into 5 slides that accurately communicates all the essential knowledge you've gained from research conducted across 3 countries?
We do it here by switching to a visual language. Our inhouse design team uses a wide palette or "vocabulary" of colors, shapes, sizes, shadings, drawings, photos, spatial relationships and icons to capture and convey marketplace opportunities, concept opportunities and positioning or identity direction.
We've learned that we can communicate much more information visually than thru text or data. We can also reach a more diverse group of people since not everyone spent their formative years in stats class....
Steve Diller — 25 January 2005
As I've mentioned in an earlier entry (I think), I've been writing a book on the design of meaningful experiences with Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea. We're at the point now where the book's largely written, and we're in discussions with a few select publishers.
One of them has noted that business book publishing is "in the toilet." Apparently, the bursting of the bubble in 2001 burst much of the enthusiasm for innovative (or supposedly-innovative) ways of thinking about business practice. A "back to basics" movement, whose symptoms include such trivialities as having people wear ties again, supposedly rejects "newness" in general.
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Christopher Ireland — 20 January 2005
I currently have two pens in my purse. One is a beautiful silver heavy-weight pen sent by Jaguar in an attempt to win back my business. The other is a simple plastic ballpoint courtesy of The Bellevue Club from a recent stay.
I'm reasonably sure both were the result of a marketer trying to extend his or her company's brand experience as far as possible. One pen does this very effectively; the other has actually driven me further away.
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Ingrid Ryan — 12 January 2005
Having spent the first few years of my career in advertising, where the Apple computer is king, I considered myself part of “the Apple tribe.” I prescribed to the idea that the world of Apple is a fun one, where icons are happy and colors are bright and the programs are easy to use. Working on a Mac made me feel...
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Alyson Madrigan — 12 January 2005
Today many rely on the emergence of future technologies to solve problems that are being created now. Our world is not a credit card. We need to take the time to understand the risks of our reliance on future promises and quick fixes to look beyond our culture of immediate gratification. The ability to deliver sustainable meaning and value begins by making intelligent decisions that consider the long-term implications of our current collective actions. Let’s raise the bar and start to think about how to address structural causes so that the solutions we create can maintain their purpose and intent as well as strive to realize the full extent of their value.
One field that has excelled in this sense is Sustainable Design. It has emerged as a highly collaborative discipline that is being contributed to by a diverse group of innovative leaders. By understanding the interrelatedness of business, ecology and culture, these leaders have developed an extremely effective approach...
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Christopher Ireland — 28 December 2004
The recent issue of Wallpaper introduces their first annual design awards. When I first saw the cove
