Entries in frog design (11)

Interview on Innovation, Org 2.0, and User Experience

Jess McMullin has posted an interview he did with me a few weeks back, on his bplusd blog (a very good read all around). We touched on a lot of different topics in our 45 minute conversation, which he summarizes as:

  • Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
  • Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
  • Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
  • Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
  • Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

 It was a lot of fun to do, thanks to Jess for suggesting it and putting the effort into doing it. You can download the full mp3 from his site.

Posted on Thursday, June 12 by Registered CommenterAdam in , , , , , , | Comments1 Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint

Happy 15th Birthday, World Wide Web!

Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

internet_cake2.jpg

(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo) 

Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”

 

Posted on Thursday, May 1 by Registered CommenterAdam in , , , , | CommentsPost a Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint

Design Green Now Presentation

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a presentation I did a few weeks ago Design Green Now in Washington. This is the slide deck I used to introduce myself and frog for ten minutes or so before the panel discussion itself. It misses quite a bit without the talk over, but you’ll get the general idea!

If you view it on Slideshare, you can see a full screen version.

Posted on Monday, April 21 by Registered CommenterAdam in , , , , | Comments1 Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint

In Barcelona

I’m heading off to Barcelona today for a week, which I’m looking forward to as I’ve never been there. Myself and another frog colleague will be helping run a workshop with IESE, the well-known European business school, for one of their clients. Should be a lot of fun. I’m hoping I’ll have a bit of time to enjoy the city too, and if any of my readers live there, drop me a line through the email box at left, would be great to try and connect. I’m going to hit the Gaudi cathedral, Las Ramblas and the market, and will probably wander in general around the central part of town and the water. Any can’t-miss things I should try to check out?

Posted on Saturday, April 12 by Registered CommenterAdam in , , | Comments1 Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint

Design Green Now

I was part of a panel discussion at Western Washington University yesterday for Design Green Now, a series of talks about sustainable design taking place on the West Coast. Together with my fellow panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Marc Stoiber and Arunas Oslapas I think we covered a pretty good range of topics with our short presentations, but the real heart of it was Q&A with the 70 or so students attending and some questions submitted via a website. It was also good to see a presentation about the various sustainability efforts going on at the WWU campus.

As often seems to happen in these discussions the daunting complexity of the challenge became an over-arching theme. The moderator, Sean Schmidt (who did a great job) asked a question submitted on the website about what should a company’s priorities be — recycling, looking at materials usage, energy reduction, take-back schemes, etc. The answer? “All of the above” and “It depends.” These are not the neat and tidy answers one would like to move things forward quickly, but unfortunately that’s the way things are right now. As I seemed to keep saying at the talk, “it’s complicated.”

It was an enjoyable evening that brought out a lot of good discussion, many thanks to the crew at Ecosystems for inviting me and putting it on. If you are in San Francisco, Portland or San Diego, check out the upcoming ones (my fellow frog and leader of frog’s green initiative Sara Todd will be speaking in San Diego).

Another write up at Searching for Green

Posted on Wednesday, April 2 by Registered CommenterAdam in , , | CommentsPost a Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint
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