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Ethnography, Experience Design, Featured Articles, Strategic Innovation

Think like a three year old

Posted by: Maryam Nabavi, at 12:39 pm on October 17, 2011

We recently had a learning zone workshop with a group of kids in our office. They were in two separate groups of 3-5 and 6-8yrs, each group with unique exercises to complete. Not to mention how exhausting it was running after the younger ones, I also realized how much more imaginative they are comparing...

Articles, Ethnography, Experience Design, Strategic Innovation

What does an innovation strategist do?

Posted by: Patrick Glinski, at 7:31 am on August 15, 2011

Ask a person what an Innovation Strategist does and they usually give you blank stares or buzz words. So who are you and what would you say you do here? Here’s a quick list of responsibilities from the inside of an innovation firm.

The opportunity to become an “Innovation Strategist” catches people’s attention. Since our initial posting for the role in Toronto, we’ve received over 120 resumes from dynamic, brilliant young individuals all interested in joining the Idea Couture team. From the outside looking...

Art and Culture, Featured Articles, Strategic Innovation, Uncategorized

The Spy Poets: IARPA’s new Metaphor Program

Posted by: rbolton, at 1:16 pm on May 27, 2011

“The Greatest thing by far,” Aristotle declared, “is to be a master of metaphor…. It is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” IARPA, the US governmental arm for intelligence research (sometimes described as ‘DARPA for...

Art and Culture, Business Models, Explorations, Featured Articles, Organizational Design, Strategic Innovation, Uncategorized

EPIC FAIL: Error as the Site of Innovation

Posted by: rbolton, at 2:13 pm on May 16, 2011

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed every unsuccessful act to be successful as discourse. Mistakes are reference points. They re-calibrate our assumptions and reorient our course of action.  The culture that doesn’t identify and contemplate its mistakes is condemned to repeat them. Applied...

Art and Culture, Business Models, Consumer Electronics, Economics, Experience Design, Explorations, Industrial Design, Organizational Design, Retail Design, Service Design, Social Change, Strategic Foresight, Strategic Innovation, sustainability, Technology, Transportation Design, Uncategorized

An evolution in the making; from designing things to designing experiences.

Posted by: Jesse Diephuis, at 1:42 pm on April 19, 2011

Conditions are ripe for collaborative design to take place in creating solutions beyond Industrial Design programs and outside of traditional R&D centers of Automotive OEMs.

The phenomenon of cheaper, faster, better (better in terms of having more options) is more a result of global economics than it is a corporate mandate.  If you think about Bauhaus (the origins of Industrial Design) and how it was intended to provide a social service of making houses and household product...

Articles, Social Change, Strategic Innovation

Optimism from Social Innovation

Posted by: Patrick Glinski, at 7:24 am on April 11, 2011

For Idea Couture, Social Innovation means using social impact as a business strategy. It’s about creating real, tangible value for organizations through tackling social problems. It’s hard to read that and not feel a little more optimistic about the future of business.

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of workshops and social innovation. A speaking engagement at the 3P conference in Kitchener had me talking to technologists, business leaders and academics about how to use Design Thinking to make social change. A week of planning sessions in Montreal was about...

Articles, Strategic Innovation

5 things that might help you trust your crazy innovation partners

Posted by: Riwa Harfoush, at 12:05 pm on April 1, 2011
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You might think that the biggest challenge in any new project is doing the work itself, but that’s actually not the case. The biggest hurdle we face when we kick-off a project is usually trust. Our fuzzy front-end innovation process means that right from the get-go, we need to win our clients’ trust...

Articles, Experience Design, Industrial Design, Service Design, Social Media, Strategic Innovation, Technology

Digital people are the world’s best innovators

Posted by: Patrick Glinski, at 7:17 am on March 18, 2011

I’m not trying to discount the capabilities of industrial designers, researchers, or architects who’ve found their way into the innovation space, but the qualities of digital innovators put them in a unique position to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

Idea Couture has its roots in digital innovation. Frog, Adaptive Path, my good friends at Normative Design, and many other leading innovation firms also have amazingly strong foundations in the digital world. Three years ago, I left the interactive industry to pursue innovation consulting, and while...

Articles, Business Models, Organizational Design, Strategic Innovation

Stop lying. You hate innovation.

Posted by: Patrick Glinski, at 7:30 am on March 15, 2011

Please, stop calling your company “innovative”. Innovation is about your organizations culture, not what you say in commercials or your annual report.

When you work at an innovation consultancy, you take the word innovation seriously. For three years, I’ve worked at Idea Couture helping dozens of organizations  design disruptive future scenarios based on real consumer insights, social and societal needs, economic imperatives, and technological...

Articles, Ethnography, Experience Design, Service Design, Strategic Innovation

The relationship between Design Thinking & Innovation

Posted by: Patrick Glinski, at 9:06 am on March 3, 2011

Innovation and Design Thinking are inherently linked. A night on Quora led me to try and make a tangible connection between the two.

As you might expect, the terms Innovation and Design Thinking come up pretty often at Idea Couture. It’s not very often I have to intellectualize the terms, but earlier this week, I ran an internal workshop outlining the foundations of design thinking as it relates to facilitation [side note -...