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Designboom is announcing a new international design competition called Premio Vico Magistretti in collaboration with the Italian furniture producer DePadova.
On April 1st Designboom opens the call for entries for Premio Vico Magistretti to commemorate the Italian architect and designer and contribute to the spread of his design philosophy.
Thanks to Dezain.net.
Andra bloggar om: design, designtävling
In a UXMAtters article called “Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before“, George Olsen explains how user-centered design (UCD) is of interest to new-product projects but often failed when designing breakthrough products. Some excerpts about this topic I found relevant:
When it comes to matters of aesthetics and fashion, UCD techniques offer little assistance. They can’t tell you how people will respond to products they’ve never seen before, products people have difficulty imagining [examples quoted: the internet, many examples of Web sites] (…) These were cases where the power of the designers’ vision created the demand, showing vision-driven design is sometimes the right approach. In such cases, the role of UCD is to help better the odds that a particular idea will resonate with a product’s target market and screen out those ideas that won’t.
(…)
UCD techniques have focused more on how to approach projects for which the problem space is fairly well understood—both by UX designers and by users. UCD techniques are best at helping us determine how to solve such problems—which is not to downplay the challenges of those sorts of projects. However, the situation is different for breakthrough products, where potential users often have difficulty imagining a solution to a problem. UCD techniques have some role to play, but often these sorts of projects require UX designers to make decisions more on the basis of their conceptual modeling skills and design experience than on direct user feedback.
And the continues by giving some meaningful advices to use UCD:
Show users something that’s technologically cool, and they’re likely to say they’d use it, even if they really wouldn’t. So, rather than asking users whether they’d use a product, it’s far better to ask them how they’d use it in their everyday lives. (…) When users can’t provide what seem to be realistic answers when asked how they might use a product, that’s a serious red flag. (…) During usability tests, it’s useful to ask people to describe your product “as if they were telling a friend about it”—not only to see whether they understand the product concept, but also to learn about bridging concepts that you can use to get people interested in using the product, even if they don’t fully grasp its potential.
(…)
as you’re gathering user feedback about a digital product, be sensitive to ways in which people might misunderstand or “misuse” what you’re building (…) While user-centered design normally warns us
against designing for early adopters and power users, these are exactly the people whose needs you want to meet when developing a breakthrough product
Why do I blog this? because it gives some pertinent ideas that I could use in various projects regarding projects I have. Besides, the debate between UCD and vision-driven design is a recurrent discussion I have with colleagues, and I am trying to figure out where should I use UCD and when not…
In the last issue of Strategy Business, there is a long in-depth interview of Alvin Toffler about his the book he wrote with his wife “Revolutionary Wealth”. While the whole interview is a must-read for people interested in foresight, innovation, prosumer revolution and stuff like that, I was bemused by this excerpt:
S+B: When I looked at Future Shock recently, I was surprised at your stridence. You wrote of the acceleration of the pace of change as an illness, “a cancer in history.” With 35 years of hindsight, would you still describe our situation that way?
TOFFLER: Well, I might tone down some of the language. I was 35 years younger. But I think the basic argument of the book stands. We’re always asked what we got wrong, and we did get a few things wrong. That’s inevitable when you’re looking 30 or so years ahead. The hardest thing to forecast is timing — when certain events would happen. We said, back then in 1970, that humanity would clone animals, and that has happened; we said that we would also clone humans, and I still think that’s likely. But we were wrong in the timing. We said that these would happen by 1985. We didn’t make that date up. We got it from one of the world’s leading Nobel Prize–winning biologists, who happened to be rather more optimistic than he should have been.
There’s another passage in the book where we talk about throwaway products, that someday we may be wearing paper clothing. And we aren’t. Yet.
I always get a laugh from an audience when I say, of course, we futurists have a magic button; we follow every statement about a failed forecast with “yet.”
Why do I blog this? the power of words always strikes me.
Is it just me, or is marketing getting a bit too personal these days? As the New York Times points out, marketers are now delivering custom messages to consumers via digital billboards that are controlled by RFID technology:
"Each day, it seems, marketers go further in their quest to deliver messages so engaging and personalized that one cannot help feeling special. The latest step will be seen today in four cities when Mini USA begins delivering custom messages to Mini Cooper owners on digital signs the company calls “talking” billboards.
The boards, which usually carry typical advertising, are programmed to identify approaching Mini drivers through a coded signal from a radio chip embedded in their key fob. The messages are personal, based on questionnaires that owners filled out: “Mary, moving at the speed of justice,” if Mary is a lawyer, or “Mike, the special of the day is speed,” if Mike is a chef."
Apparently, Mini users are looking forward to these billboard messages, viewing them as fun, playful and whimsical. Likewise, marketers love the idea, since it will reinforce the "tribal feeling" that the brand creates. As the head of North American operations for Mini Cooper suggests, "People buy Minis because they really want to have more fun in their days. We want everything about our marketing to fit that."
[image: Mini-Cooper Billboard]
NASSCOM, the Indian trade association for its rapidly growing IT enabled services industry, recently concluded its annual Leadership Forum, bringing together the leaders of this industry. Although there was no official overarching theme defining the conference, it was clear that the big issue shaping most of the discussions involved the intersection of innovation and a growing scarcity of talent. In the process, though, I fear that the industry leaders are under-emphasizing some important opportunities.
I was privileged to be able to attend this conference and participate in a number of the panels and discussions. It was truly an energizing and inspiring experience, impressive in terms of the scope of the program, with over 100 speakers addressing a broad range of topics.
The Indian IT outsourcing industry has achieved substantial scale and very impressive growth. NASSCOM estimates that, for the financial year ending in March, the industry will grow to $31 billion in revenue, 32% over last year’s revenue. The industry now employs 1.6 million people, driving much broader prosperity within India. According to Julio Quinteros, an analyst from Goldman Sachs, Indian IT services companies have rapidly grown shareholder value in sharp contrast to the more disappointing performance of established American IT services companies.
The most impressive thing about the conference was that, in spite of this enormous success, there was little if any complacency. Instead, the leaders of the Indian IT services industry continued to show the same sense of urgency that has driven their success so far.
The competition for talent
Many of the discussions focused on the intensifying competition for talent within the IT services industry. Continued growth of the industry hinges on the ability to access and develop talent. Turnover rates are generally rising, especially in the business process outsourcing industry, further increasing the challenge of sustaining profitable growth. Wage rates are also rising as companies compete more aggressively to attract and retain the available talent. In the meantime, other countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, China and the Eastern European countries are competing more effectively for IT outsourcing work.
Indian IT services firms are responding to these challenges on a number of fronts. They continue to invest heavily in scaling their recruiting and training efforts, increasingly branching out and establishing facilities in second and third tier cities in India to reach a broader pool of talent. In many cases, they are establishing development and operations centers in other low labor cost countries.
Indian firms are also investing in developing more value added services to generate more revenue per employee. One of the hottest growth sectors for the Indian outsourcing industry is so-called “knowledge process outsourcing”, focusing on providing such high value services as financial research, clinical research and engineering services for product development programs.
More generally, these Indian firms are also focusing on tightening their operational performance to enhance profitability per employee and to become more responsive to increasing customer expectations. McKinsey & Co. discussed a major report on “Operational Excellence: The Next Frontier in Offshoring” (executive summary available here) at the conference. The report offered a framework for benchmarking operational performance and found a high dispersion of performance across Indian offshoring service companies. Offshoring service companies could do a much better job of absorbing increasing wage rates if they focus more aggressively on enhancing the productivity of their operations. One of the interesting sidelights in the report was the finding that third-party service providers generally outperform captive offshore facilities.
Innovation blowback opportunities
Another key theme emerging from the discussions at the conference involved the increasing need for innovation in the offshoring business. Unfortunately, there did not appear to be any consistent definition of innovation so, at times, it was unclear what the exact nature of the opportunity is. NASSCOM has announced a joint research effort with BCG on “Developing an Innovation Ecosystem for the Indian IT Industry”. This effort in particular seems to be focused on identifying opportunities for the Indian IT industry to collaborate with other stakeholders in the Indian economy to address challenges in providing more cost-effective products and services to the Indian population.
This is a huge opportunity and has generally been under-emphasized by the IT services industry which historically has focused on overseas markets rather than the domestic market. There are some notable exceptions to this. Infosys, for example, has developed a strong partnership with ICICI Bank, one of the most innovative and successful banks in India. ICICI Bank used the Finacle application software suite from Infosys to develop an extremely cost-effective and scalable operational platform. This collaboration has helped ICICI Bank to grow rapidly, increasing its transaction volume by five-fold over a five year period.
This opportunity is particularly intriguing because it extends far beyond the domestic market, even though that is certainly attractive in its own right. As JSB and I have written, there is an opportunity to pursue “innovation blowback” strategies, using the Indian market as a catalyst for breakthrough innovation in products and services that can then be used to support global attacker strategies designed to challenge incumbents in the more developed Western economies. In recent years, ICICI Bank has started to expand internationally, leveraging its innovative operational platforms to deliver more cost-effective services to customers in countries like the UK, Canada, Singapore and China. The Indian IT services industry could fuel enormous growth for the Indian economy by more aggressively supporting these innovation blowback strategies.
Fostering talent networks
But the biggest opportunity of all requires a different form of innovation. It also requires a very different mindset for the leadership of the Indian IT service companies.
Rather than continuing to focus on attracting and retaining talent within their own companies, these firms could create enormous value by developing the management techniques required to mobilize and leverage specialized talent wherever it resides. This would require building scalable talent networks encompassing a broad range of smaller, more specialized companies.
The Indian IT services companies have been very effective in building relationships with technology product companies on a global scale. But when it comes to expanding their own IT services, they immediately focus inward. If they don’t have the capability already in place, they may go out and acquire a smaller, more specialized company, but their instinct is to bring the capability in house.
As an alternative, these companies could take their emerging skills in partnering with technology product companies and apply them to building talent networks to mobilize and leverage large numbers of more specialized service providers. The real power would be to master the techniques required to accelerate the development of talent across such a distributed network of partners, thus creating stronger incentives for partners to join the network. Focusing on this challenge would create an opportunity to innovate in “Learning 2.0” capabilities, moving from traditional training programs to more distributed learning platforms and ecologies.
Ultimately, the opportunity would be to become leaders in the formation and orchestration of creation networks. This would require mastering open innovation management techniques to attract and mobilize talent, focus the innovation initiatives across multiple participants and accelerate commercialization and learning from these initiatives.
Even broader innovation opportunities
These efforts in turn would expose the Indian IT service companies to the challenges of coordinating activities across large networks of partners given existing IT architectures. By gaining firsthand experience in the limitations of these architectures, Indian IT service companies would be well-positioned to drive another wave of innovation in IT architectures. In my talk on Web 2.0 at NASSCOM, I suggested that Indian IT service companies are natural candidates to define and deploy fundamentally new IT architectures that work from the “outside-in”.
In contrast to traditional IT architectures that emerged in the center of the firm and imperfectly extend their reach beyond the boundaries of individual enterprises, we are in desperate need of IT architectures that start with the assumption that the task is to coordinate activities across hundreds, if not thousands of firms. By starting with this perspective, we would need to re-think the nature of transactions and define roles and governance processes accordingly. In fact, we would likely move from today’s transactional architectures to much more helpful relational architectures designed to support enduring and deepening relationships across individuals and institutions.
There’s no shortage of opportunities at both the product and process level to drive the growth of Indian IT services companies. The sense of urgency that continues to pervade the leadership of these companies will serve them well in identifying and aggressively pursuing these opportunities.
In the current issue of The New Republic, art critic Jed Perl complains that too much money washing into the art world has swept away traditional benchmarks of aesthetic value. Instead, the art world is consumed with "laissez-faire aesthetics," defined by a belief that the value of a painting or other artwork is "simply what everybody or anybody says it is." (This isn't good, if that "everybody or anybody" is some recently-minted Russian petrodollar billionaire, or someone else who lacks a sufficient amount of art-world snobbery to appreciate a truly great work of art).
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal highlighted the article in its "Informed Reader" column of January 29, hinting that throwing money at art isn't really a good thing, since it tends to erase the distinction between high art and pop culture (think Harley Davidson exhibits at the Guggenheim, or Star Wars exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). Art is at risk of being turned into something along the lines of TV, as galleries and auction houses cater to the lowest common denominator. Instead of being an object of private contemplation and appreciation, art is at even greater risk of being turned into an object of personal conspicuous consumption. No longer able to make the distinction between "pop art" and "high art," we will be forced to use price as our only guide.
Anyway, I wonder if an analogous case can be made for the world of innovation. Is "laissez-faire innovation" sweeping away all notions of what separates "great" innovation from "good" innovation or "average" innovation. All innovation is good, as long as companies are willing to pay for it?
[image: The Art of the Motorcycle at the Guggenheim]
Human beings are genetically predisposed to find patterns and to assume that events are linked in time by cause and effect, and it’s quite easy to see why. If you assume that a rustling in the bushes means that a tiger is about to pounce, then being wrong nine times out of ten is probably better than failing to make that connection once. This contributes to a natural human inclination to simplify memory by constructing a single linear narrative.In businesses, rising sales are typically attributed to the brilliance of management strategies. Falling sales are blamed on external competition, lack of effort by staff, or changes in fashion. No one ever says “I don’t know why.” The pundits who comment on the stockmarkets of the world are perhaps the worst of all at attributing events to clear, simple causes when the reality is almost certainly so complex that it defies any kind of explanation.
History is taught to schoolchildren as if events were the consequence of a series of decisions and actions by leaders and heroes. “Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.” When this cannot be done causes may be located in physical or emotional pressures. “The Pilgrims set sail for the New World to escape religious persecution in their homeland.”
If you assume a reason, then look for it, you will almost certainly find it.When people force events into some pattern that seems to make sense, that sense always matches their assumptions, beliefs and prejudices. If you assume a reason, then look for it, you will almost certainly find it. This is made infinitely worse by the well-documented tendency in people to link things causally simply because the happen closely together in time. You give someone a pay increase and notice that person produces a series of sales. Bingo! Salary incentives increase results from sales people. But maybe the sales would have happened anyway—simply by chance.
The speed that Hamburger Management offers is an illusion—and a dangerous one at that.Of course, this will slow things down. But not as much as making a series of mistakes and ill-considered actions that you will have to put right later. The speed that Hamburger Management offers is an illusion—and a dangerous one at that.
The recent "Elevator Pitch" post has prompted great discussion over the past several weeks.
An elevator pitch is that 30-second blurb you should have in your back pocket... at the ready for networking or expressing yourself clearly to your company's senior leadership.
To continue the discussion, I've made this the topic of the February Sand for Your Inbox eNewsletter.
Read more for tips to create your own pitch.
If you would like to subscribe to "Sand for Your Inbox" (creativity and problem solving tips delivered to your inbox each month), 
click to subscribe!
Others riding the Elevator include...
Finally, I also found out there are a lot of closet A-Team fans out there...
A must-read about Toyota: From 0 to 60 to World Domination
How does Toyota win? By coming an evidence-based culture with an eye to the long view. By investing in incremental innovations to build long-term brand equity, and investing the payback in revolutionary innovations like the Prius. By paying attention to technical details and to the humans who design and build the cars and those who service and drive them.
It seems simple, right? Realization and implementation are so tough.
RE:VISION is an organisation founded by Urban Revision that concentrates on competitions for visionary thinkers. Re:Vision was born out of the belief that each of us has a unique perspective along with a wealth of ideas, energy and resources. Within us lies boundless potential. These competitions are about inspiring innovation, tapping into existing ideas, and using them in new and amazing ways. It’s about seeing yourself differently…full of big ideas and new possibilities. RE:VOLT is the first of a series of competitions The challenge is: how would you intelligently and sustainably power a city block? Think big ideas. Think small environmental impact. Think about ways to make a difference in how we fuel the future.
The coming competition will be all about the following themes:
RE:ROUTE, new thinking on global transportation
RE:STORE, green innovation for a healthy urban economy
RE:CONNECT, urban planning for people and space
RE:VISION, architecture for sustainable urban community
I think that the big question from RE:VISION is really interesting: WHAT IF?
WHAT IF one person really holds the power to change the world? WHAT IF that person is you?
Thanks to Inhabitant.
Andra bloggar om: miljö, hållbar utveckling, hållbart samhälle, framtiden, tävling
Commerce Department Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez announced that one of America's leading thinkers on entrepreneurship, Carl J. Schramm Ph.D., has been named chairman of the advisory committee of business and academic leaders that will seek ways to measure the effects of innovation on the economy.
"Innovation has propelled America forward, raising our standard of living and improving people's lives with better products and services. We need to better understand innovation's role in the U.S. economy. This is why the Commerce Department has formed an advisory committee to see if we can develop ways to measure innovation," said Gutierrez. "Today, I'm pleased to announce that Carl Schramm will work with the Commerce Department to develop innovation metrics and capture its contribution to our rapidly changing economy."
The Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee is comprised of 10 CEOs and five academics. Schramm will assume chairmanship of the Advisory Committee at its first meeting on February 22 at 2:00 p.m. at the Wyndham Washington Hotel, 1400 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. The meeting will be open to the public and registration is available online at www.innovationmetrics.gov.
Schramm is president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation in the world to focus on advancing entrepreneurship. Regarded as one of the country's preeminent thinkers on America 's entrepreneurial economy, he is an economist, entrepreneur, lawyer and expert in health care finance, regulation and insurance. Schramm is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, October 2006) and coauthor of Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism (Yale Press, May 2007).
If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly first. In the real world, doing something new almost always means doing it poorly the first few times. Improvising never produces a polished result, but it's nearly always the first step towards creating something new and worthwhile. To do something new, you have to make a conscious decision to let yourself try things that you know you can't do. That's practicing "Conscious Incompetence."
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.The way to get out from the herd and let adversity itself turn you into the next big success is to practice “Conscious Incompetence.”
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.Merely by trying things others ignore or turn down without question, you’ll build an enviable reputation as an outstanding creative thinker.
Ideas arrive like kids to a disco. When adult outfits and fake IDs
fail them, they just rush the door, dislodge the bouncer, and come
piling in. The notion seems to be that if they all arrive at once no
one can be held accountable or got rid of. Party!
So those of us who make our living in the idea biz are required to be quick about it. Many of us resort to those 3x4 foot pads of "easel" paper for capture. These are reverently arrayed around the room as if to say, [assume silky voice] "look, we treasure everyone's contribution." And then of course we stick yellow post-its on the paper, sometimes then voting with those little colored dots. Very soon, walls disappear. The windows are covered. The sun is blotted out, extinguishing any hope of, er, illumination.
Brain storms work because we almost never consult these sheets of paper, yellow tabs, or colored dots. The good ideas are few enough that they can keep them in mind and loosely there. Paper fixes what should be kept fluid. Paper gets in the way of the pattern recognition that leaps back and forth between the unconscious and the conscious mins of the individual and then round and round within the group, as each and all of us press on with selecting, editing, combining, and generating ideas...until illumination does arrive. A new idea always seems to shine or at least vibrate, or at least carry on like Soul Train dancer. It is never papery. It does not come with dots on. Stick em! There's no stick em on em!
If you are sick of the paper-based brain storm, too, I recommend bright sticks. Mine arrived yesterday, and Pam came home to discover the windows glowing with florescence. This is a better way of idea capture. It is faster, more beautiful, and bigger picture. The thing is you do have to have windows. But most people have windows. I mean, unless you've been living in a bomb shelter since 1957, and if that's the case, idea generation is probably not your most pressing need.
My inspiration was an episode of House, and I think an episode of CSI: New York where glass panels, and not windows, serve as the medium. Certainly, it would be great to have "glassboards" but it looks as if this kind of thing would be expensive and space consuming (see Arount's white board below). Mind you, if you were building an office space, glass would, in places, be as easy to install as dry wall. It is possible to build or buy light boxes, and we have all seen restaurants use these to announce the specials of the day. The writing glows. I got my bright sticks from Amazon. They get them from Office Depot.
References
Arount's white board here.
The Lifehack whiteboard here.
Commercial light boxes here and here.
The Arstechnica openforum discussion (some overlap with Arount, very slow to load!) here.
Acknowledgments
J Wynia here for an exchange of email on the question.
POPsci features a very long and insightful interview of Will Wright (game designer of The Sims and working on his next project called Spore). IMO, the article is important because it describes the current trends in the gaming industry. Let’s see some of them below with quotes:
The first trend is certainly the interest towards user-generated content. Wright wants to turn players in “Pokemon designers, Neopet designers, or Pixar designers“:
I think Second Life is interesting because they have given the players such huge control over the environment (…) In Spore, the tools are more and more powerful than they were in The Sims, so the next step is, now, how do we take those things and use them to build a narrative
(…)
Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. So there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play.
(…)
We’re going to have different feedback mechanisms. One of the things we’re going to be doing continually is rating the most popular content, so when you make a creature you’re going to be able to go to what we call the metaverse report and get a sense of what is your creature’s popularity ranking relative to other people’s creatures.
And he recognizes that an economy that emerges out of it is inevitable: as in Second Life, it will develop, go on eBay or other platforms and might lead to “some sort reward”.
Second, gaming foster an “augmented sociality” that is based on the content and is achieved not in the game itself but with other channels:
the asynchronous socializing through content, which we’re already seeing in The Sims web community. huge communities form with very well-known people based on the content they’ve made, other people taking that content and telling cool stories with it.
Third, the educational model of using games is now less about directly teaching content/facts but rather making people know processes. This has been a long discussion in psychology and educational sciences but there are still some people trying to design games to make kids learn irregular verbs or Napoleon’s battles. Actually, the thing is that video games are less good at declarative learning (content) and better for procedural learning and problem solving. And it’s good to see a game design such as Will Wright agreeing with that:
I think in a deep way yeah [answering the question “Do you see Spore, or the rest of your games for that matter, as being educational?”] – that’s kind of why I do them. But not in a curriculum-based, ‘I’I'm going to teach you facts’ kind of way. I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity – creativity is a fundamental of education that’s not reallytaught so much. But giving people tools.
And finally, concerning the future of gaming, Wright addresses the articulation between interactions in the physical environment and digital interactions. In a sense, the question can be rephrased as how to turn data generated from real-world interactions and put them back in the game to enrich the playful experience:
One thing that really excites me, that we’re doing just a little bit of in Spore… I described how the computer is kind of looking at what you do and what you buy, and developing this model of the player. I think that’s going to be a fundamental differentiating factor between games and all other forms of media. The games can inherently observe you and build a more and more accurate model of the player on each individual machine, and then do a huge amount of things with that – actually customize the game, its difficulty, the content that it’s pulling down, the goal structures, the stories that are being played out relative to every player.
Why do I blog this? this is a quite good overview of the current game trends (and I left aside some other issues). Besides, it’s pretty refreshing to hear them from a game designer and not from observers/researchers who try to shake the game industry.
Frederic Lucas-Conwell conducted a study of Silicon Valley technical evangelists called “Technology Evangelists: A Leadership Survey.” Here is the abstract:
The purpose of this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the relatively new phenomenon known as the “technology evangelist.” By our exploration, we aim to help readers improve their management functions, and to understand how best to integrate “evangelists” within their organizations.
In order to do so, we analyzed the roles of those who hold this position and leadership styles. Our research included surveying and interviewing twenty-nine technical evangelists worldwide from a variety of cultures and organizations. Some general tendencies regarding the role did, indeed, emerge. However, we also discovered variable character, or personality, patterns among the participants. Therefore, we proceeded to examine the gap, between the role of the technology evangelist and the subject’s personal character.
We contrasted individual competencies with these character patterns, and created a grid to analyze their qualities of leadership. This paper includes our recommendations for recruiting, integrating, developing and managing the technology evangelists.
It provides good insights into what motivates evangelists and what makes them tick. If you want to learn about evangelists, check it out.
Yesterday in the NYT, a pertinent article about PARC strategy. It basically describes PARC’s path to move from being a in-house research lab to a subsidiary form. The article shows on-going projects but more interestingly critiques the fact that PARC is a “lab of missed opportunities”:
Early in the decade, a struggling Xerox Corporation was trying to sell off a stake in its Palo Alto Research Center, which it could no longer afford to support. But with the technology bubble bursting, the price that investors were willing to pay for a piece of PARC, as the center is known, kept going down.
So in 2002, Xerox switched to Plan B: it spun off the center into an independent subsidiary and sought to prove that it could sustain itself by licensing technology and forming partnerships with outside companies. On Friday, PARC is announcing a deal that underscores that strategy. It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology
“There’s no way anyone can top what they did in the past in terms of dramatic research developments,” said the futurist Paul Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. But Mr. Saffo praised PARC for finding a business model that has allowed it to survive at a time when many research groups at American corporations are being cut.
“This is an organization that has done well at keeping researchers, and spinning out a steady stream of little products,” Mr. Saffo said. “PARC has been a very quiet success.”
The National Academy of Engineering is asking the public for help in determining the grand engineering challenges of the 21st century:
"America's big names in engineering, as well as millions of Internet users around the world, are being asked to weigh in with their picks for the greatest technological challenges of the next century — a nine-month process that could give birth to new research initiatives. The project, called the "Grand Challenges for Engineering" program, is aimed at gathering up all those ideas and distilling them into a list of 20 puzzles for engineers to solve — in fields ranging from energy to communications to aerospace to advanced materials. The National Academy of Engineering, an arm of the Washington-based National Academies, is supervising the project, armed with a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation."
Over the next few months, comments and suggestions will be sorted and ranked, then reviewed by an 18-member blue-ribbon committee headed by former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry. Other members on the selection panel include Google co-founder Larry Page, genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter and millionaire inventors Dean Kamen and Ray Kurzweil. The academy will unveil the 20 top challenges in September.
[image: Grand Challenges of Engineering]
In the news is a rumour that Toyota is about to build a new car factory in the US. It is a remarkable journey the Japanese car producer has made (on the US market) over the last decades. Today nobody is underestimating them any longer. Everything from the launch of the premium brand Lexus to the smart hybrid vehicle Prius has been made out from a smart tactics. At the same time the three major US car producers have made a lot of critical mistakes. Toyota went for smaller cars with low fuel consumption while the US companies like General Motors, Ford and Chevrolet developed even more and bigger pickups and SUVs.
By using a smart product strategy Toyota had a 12% growth in turnover last year and is today number three on the market soon to be number two. According to me it is just a matter of time until they will be number one, a reality that was unlikely just some ten years ago.
Good, attractive and diversified products (and services) are the heart of every strong brand. Then the marketing is like the blood circulation telling the world about your products. Attractive products tell a looser from a winner. And if you in a smart way will communicate directly from your products you have every chance (if you have attractive products that is…) to be an important part of the mind of the consumers. I have developed this theory and even developed an idea for a communication strategy in the latest issue of the David Report bulletin called Communication Through Products.
Some of you may have noticed that I have been writing quite a lot about the recent launch of the iPhone by Apple. That’s because I think it is really clever to develop a product that makes consumers (all over the world) yearn already six months before it will hit the stores. I will repeat the question from Tim Powers post here at the David Report blog the other day - why aren’t there more Apples?
Andra bloggar om: produktutveckling, designstrategi, design, varumärke, varumärken, varumärkesstategi
