Our Design Led Innovation client consulting or facilitation sessions often involves a business diagnostic activity, that is split into something I fondly call: hard and soft diagnostics.
A hard diagnostic, aptly called as it covers hard financial numbers,
I so love this term.
Apparently it was created by Peter Gorb and Angela Dumas for a London Business School paper:
“A great deal of design activity goes on in organizations which is not called design. It is carried
In September last year, do you remember I mentioned that I was going to Berlin to co-facilitate a workshop with our partners The Design Thinkers group?
People loved Sparrow, a clean and simple Gmail client for the Mac and iOS. But nobody knew by how much until they sold-out. The internet was just a buzz with unhappy people, myself included.
It's funny. As a kid I loved riding bikes. What I loved even more was tinkering with them. I had this classic Chopper (you know, with that smaller front wheel?) that I hacked
Derek Sivers, whom I have had the pleasure to meet recently, shares in a short TED snippet advice on
When I talk to clients about budgets required to bring good design to the table, I get a lot of interesting looks and comments from them that imply one thing: they feel that design is a risky part of their business. You see, what business people
Bradley Derry (at Fuel Your Product Design) ran a really nice interview with Chris Bangle on what makes a good design leader. It is really good to hear from Chris, a friend of Design Sojourn, who has been somewhat quiet of late. <iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24080982?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="520"
One of the problems of Design Thinking is that it has inherited some of the bad habits of the Business mindset. In particular the need for repeatability and for research data to help justify any design decision the organization makes. Frog Design's Ben McAllister
The ever-witty Mike Monteiro, famous for his potty mouth, shared at a recent San Francisco Creative Mornings talk, the ups and downs of running a design business. For example, dealing with problems such as getting clients to pay up, getting comfortable with
Sometime in 2006, I decided that if I were going to be designing commercially successful products and strategies, I would need to know what it is really like to run a business, a business that would
I recently spoke to a person who has successfully started to integrated design thinking into his organization. He re-emphasized the word “started” because he feels his organization is still making the journey. Even so, his organization is already starting to see the benefits
I'm sure most of you have heard the news about the Nokia and Microsoft alliance. Nokia announced that it has decided to use the Windows Phone 7 as their primary Smartphone platform. Their
The Design Currency Logo by Jeff Harrison.
Over the recent Chinese New Year holidays, I met a very well traveled designer. We were discussing the pitfalls of running a design consultancy, and that conversation eventually led to consulting business models.
He basically said,
At the end of October 2008, I briefly suggested for designers to work with the business to make fewer products and focus their strategies during the recession. Here is a quote from HBR that sums-up this strategy:
Recent evidence suggests that the paradigm of
Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you’re fine.
Bryce Bell, a Mechanical Engineer from Oklahoma, is another Engineer that has a soul of a Designer. I love these guys! He shares, on his website Cardnetics, his 2 crazy transformable business card
IDEO's Tim Brown has written a great article on Design Thinking for The Harvard Business Review. This one sure did the rounds in the studio! Recently, I discovered that there is a pdf
Designers are in the business of doing business; their clients rely on them to make smart, market-savvy decisions and yet there is no resource to provide the necessary knowledge to make these decisions wisely. DBR is simple, pragmatic advice on the business of creativity. Our