They were not only physically out of control, but mentally liberated from expectations and presumptions. For them there’s absolutely no reason why a frying pan shouldn’t talk about its cooking experiences or why you can’t hold your computer mouse the same way you hold your mobile phone. Their minds are not conditioned like ours and that’s what makes them a genuine source of innovation.

We as adults are generally limited to our past experiences. Any ‘new’ thinking or idea we initiate starts with a set of assumptions that will result in marginal revisions to what we’ve encountered before. Our minds are junkyards of historical observations. Those of us skilled or knowledgeable in a field will certainly be ahead of the game when it comes to decision making or when concepts need to evolve into feasible product. But if you’re a innovation strategist or a designer ideating the future of interaction design, you need to stop thinking about where apple is taking us and instead hang out with a 3 year old.

Seriously! Leave a bunch of 3 year olds with toys and a few colored markers. Do a simple experiment, like having a transparent sheet of plastic in the middle of the room where they can draw on and  play with each other from both sides of the invisible border.

You’ll be surprised!

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 in, innovation strategy sounds incredibly sexy (and it certainly looks good on a business card). But if you ask a typical applicant what exactly they think an innovation strategist does, what usually follows is blank stares, buzz words, or my favorite, “They strategize innovation”.

None of those are good answers.

There’s nothing worse than expecting one thing and getting another. In preparing to take on two new strategists in the next few weeks, I couldn’t help but reflect on what is becoming an industry title with no common definition. So I figured the least I could do is take a stab at some common tasks to help people know what they are getting in to, what they should consider learning to do, and where their responsibilities should lie.

So here are a few of the tasks, activities, and responsibilities of your typical innovation strategist.

Project Design
Innovation strategist as the planner

• Work with the client to articulate project outcomes
• Help design the structure of what innovation projects look like
• Set up the project’s research activities, and collaborate to select methods
• Build a multidisciplinary team based on available resources

Business Strategy

Innovation strategist as the box builder

• Interview clients to better understand what problems the team is trying to solve
• Help clients / the team state the project vision
• Help the project frame the problems based on client input
• Define what project success criteria looks like
• Draw from existing models or develop new frameworks to direct the solution

Design Research

Innovation strategist as design researcher

• Design and / or participate and / or facilitate research (depending on skills)
• Provide a business or user centered flaw to the other design researchers (depending on core competencies)
• Help researchers synthesize the findings into insights
• Frame the insights of user research insights through deliverables (personas, systems diagrams, customer journey maps, mental models, touchpoint analysis, or something else cool that I don’t even know exists yet.)

Workshop

Innovation strategist as a facilitator

Idea Development & Evaluation

Innovation strategist as an architect

• Help come up with killer ideas
• Help prototype, evaluate and test those ideas
• Make sure the final solution is in line with project briefings or has a damn good reason to break the brief
• Develop prioritization frameworks to evaluate which ideas are strongest
• Evaluate costs and benefits

Design Development

Innovation strategist as a sherpa

While innovation strategists are the center of my universe, being surrounded by a strong team is what makes a project work. An innovation strategist is nothing without the help of true and trained design researchers, skilled industrial and visual designers, project managers, futurists, human factors specialists, content strategists, and support.

But needless to say, when people ask, “What does an average day look like?”, there is no short answer. Being an innovation strategist is definitely a full time job, but even more, it’s a lifestyle decision. Innovation strategists are always working, because the world is where they learn, and their curiosity is not 9-5.

So what would you add? And are you interested in applying? We’re looking in Toronto and New York.

UPDATE: Add San Francisco to the mix. In short, if you think you meed the description, we want to meet you!

“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 spies’)  announced The Metaphor Program, with an open solicitation to researchers in academic institutions and the private sector. The program, operated under IARPA’s Incisive Analysis Office, aims to examine and extract insights as to what people mean from what they (don’t really) say. Metaphors characterize people’s subjective frames in imperceptible and obvious ways. Whether ‘life’s a playground’ or ‘life’s a bitch’ likely reflects some aggregation of thoughts, feelings and experiences.

IARPA’s investment strategy favors “high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”* No surprise then is IARPA’s venture on the road not taken. The Metaphor Program’s official mandate: “Exploit the use of metaphorical language to gain insights into underlying cultural beliefs by developing and applying a methodology that automates the analysis of metaphorical language.”

Poetic and linguistic metaphors are used to express what cannot be put in plain language. They’re used easily in ordinary speech to express complex or abstract ideas—so it makes sense that analyses of linguistic metaphors would be used to unpack what people can’t (or refuse to) articulate outright.  For IARPA, the metaphors you choose in speech and writing determine and are determined by stated and unstated beliefs. The choice to use different metaphors reflect contrastive stances. For example the Metaphor Program briefing references a study that presented participants with a report on crime in a city. “The report contained statistics, including crime and murder rates, as well as one of two metaphors, CRIME AS A WILD BEAST or CRIME AS A VIRUS. The participants were influenced by the embedded metaphor.” Those that read the beast metaphor were more likely to recommend more police and jails, while those in the virus group typically suggested investigating the root cause and establishing community programs. According to IARPA’s briefing, metaphors are associated with affect. And affect influences behavior.

Literally from Greek, metaphor means transference. We transfer the qualities of one thing to another—something normally not considered related to the first thing. IARPA’s program labels the two parts in terms of the source of the metaphor (the metaphorical expression) and its target (the subject or thing being interpreted). Poets call these the vehicle and tenor, respectively. As you like it:

“All the world’s a stage

All the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances”

The qualities of a stage are transferred to the world. The subject, ‘world’ is the tenor or target, the thing that undergoes the transference. The ‘stage’ is the vehicle or source, which carries the transferred qualities. Making and interpreting metaphors involves an analogical relation which can be mapped out and inferred upon. What do the system of concrete concepts—theatre, actors, stage, etc—say about the abstract concept, life?  Metaphors are a sensemaking tool—using unobvious comparisons to interpret the form, function, motion and feeling of anything and everything.

IARPA’s Metaphor Program intends to devise and deliver methodologies and software prototypes “to automate the handling of data, discovery and semantic definition of metaphors.” As poets have always known—metaphor usage and complex verbal patterns can tell us something profound about how people form images and conceptions of the world. If IARPA is successful in creating a mechanism that deduces biases and unstated beliefs from how people construct everyday language—what will be the implications on how we respond to social issues (like crime in the example above)?

How might poetics and cognitive linguistics studies advance or replace quantitative surveys and focus groups, which reflect conscious knowledge and sample bias?

How can weak signals be identified from conventional metaphors in strategic foresight—revealing hidden cultural tendencies and unmet needs?

What affect do metaphors have on customer and user experience? Would you rather surf or navigate a web or a net? Why do I have files, a desktop and a trash bin instead of interfaces, containers and deletion?

And how far are we from Poetics Thinking as the next big strategic business buzzword?

*Just as further corroboration for my last post, IARPA also mandates that: “Failure is completely acceptable—as long as it is not due to failure to maintain technical and programmatic integrity and results are fully documented.”

Applied Design Thinking practices help manage risks and avoid critical failures.  But it’s not just about mitigating mistakes; it’s about managing and making the most out of them.  Instead of ‘fail early and fail often,’ why not fail strategically?

Greatness embraces mistakes: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 
- Michael Jordan

Strategic failure can be designed into an organization’s innovation apparatus. The U.S. DoD’s technology-unit DARPA for example accepts a 90% failure rate against its innovation investments, but the 10% of successful projects have proved to be world-changing technologies, in line with the agency’s mandate of staying on the leading edge globally. Error, when calculated and effectively analyzed—accelerates progress. It’s the rationale for rapid prototyping. Increase your odds with every try, while you learn what doesn’t work, and arrive at surprising outcomes. Says James Dyson of the eponymous appliance manufacturer and bagless vacuum fame: “It’s accident. Serendipity—but the serendipity that occurs through never giving up and through just going on and on and on, testing, searching new avenues—and going up many, many blind avenues!” Error in this case, isn’t failing (an end result); it’s part of the process of design-doing.

Part of organizing for innovation involves giving space for researchers and creatives to break frame—to diverge from predetermined strategies and follow the trajectory of their serendipitous ideas. Google famously provides its employees with Innovation Time-Off (ITO), which allows one day a week to explore whatever projects inspire their attention. The employee-driven apparatus accords the space to create but also to fail without too much fear or consequence. In it self, letting-people-do-whatever-they-want is not sound innovation strategy. There’s no mechanism to mitigate risk and the efforts lack determination. In spite of that, ITO has generated popular applications including Gmail, AdSense and Google News. When ITO initiatives do go unfavorably, Google capitalizes in retrospect—analyzing and harvesting from failed pursuits. Remember Wave—it was supposed to replace email? Well, if you can’t make a mistake you can’t make anything. When Google Wave failed to accumulate users, its successful collaboration and communication features were applied to Gmail and Google Docs. What failed as a disruptive innovation succeeded by providing iterative improvements to existing products.

"Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success." - James Dyson

"If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything." - Marva Collins

Because error really is part of innovation, it’s essential that organizations design a system to harvest from the messy and serendipitous process. Fail hard, fail fast, fail cheap and—fail strategically, in such a way that salient knowledge can be taken away.  If your team really is inventive, there should be some value in what they make—even when it seems to fall flat. Harvesting from failure involves applying purpose to newness. Leveraging assets from error demands a system and culture where employees are unafraid to fail, but more importantly, comfortable reporting on failure.

Avoid making the same mistakes, accelerate progress, and follow the interesting surprises. As the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce put it: “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Make your mistakes with purpose.

"The mistakes make the music." - Miles Davis

"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

However, we are now experiencing another evolution in Industrial Design as it appears to be reaching the end of an evolutionary plateau, with emerging industrial economies such as China and India set to take over  the way things get made (for better or worse).  It is important to note that Industrial manufacturing will continue to exist, yet it must evolve to keep up with emerging needs of society and the new rules of global responsibility.  In a similar way that Industrial processes in Europe became focussed on premium quality rather than mass-quantity, North American manufacturing will need to re-examine and re-evaluate where their strengths are and what long term potential exists based on examining holistic risks and opportunities.

Since the 1950′s manufacturing expertise in North America has been systematically reduced to ever more efficient assembly lines with ever increasing regulations and manufacturing processes with more emphasis devoted to marketing and advertising.  As a result of this, manufacturers have become increasingly more clever at reducing the number, complexity and cost of manufacturing.  However as we look forward to the next phase of evolution in our emerging world economy, the core Industrial Design skills and manufacturing expertise appears to be set for going open and experiential.

It is this technical know-how that is gradually being re-distributed throughout the Internet and it is allowing new micro-assembly methods for independents, proving a way to bypass traditional investment heavy processes and procedures.  This is proving to be most beneficial for the emerging economies and independents start-ups.  Fisker Automotive and Tesla Automotive are both companies who are touting their independent green credentials, and yet they using the same supplier base from larger OEMs to create their more sharply defined and powerful Premium Electric or Plug-in Hybrids vehciles. Most important to note however, is that these are still early days for these type of innovators.

Already there are other new (smaller scale) business models which are begining to pop up.  As with many innovations, it is not always the originator of an idea who benefits from an idea or technology first.  Sometimes the groundwork that has been laid down by previous business experiments and prototype models leads innovators to other business models with separate and an un-intended technologies and they are able to realize a novel new approach for use in a new type of product.  An interesting example at this end of the spectrum is BPG Motors; an small start-up company born from a highschool science project in which the technology of Segway’s personal transporter was reformatted to fit into a motorcycle style package.  After only a few short years, the company is now experimenting with a fold-up scooter prototype, the UNO III, which can transform itself to save space to be taken indoors and up an elevator.  None of this would have been possible if not for the accessibility of open-source know-how and shared technologies (such as the out-sourced rapid prototyping of aluminum parts).

Are brand names, badges or marques of a manufacturer more important than what the physical product is?  These are questions that I often think about.  I think automotive manufacturers also need to address these kinds question before taking their brands into the realm of experience design.  If a manufacturer of a brand cannot impart a more compelling story beyond what the end customer picks up from their  dealership, then perhaps it is time for an investigation  around what kinds of experiences, journeys and alternative narratives can be provided to consumers.

Industrial Design has often been criticized as one of the most destructive professions due to the resulting industrial waste,  shortened mid-cycle enhancements and associated pollutants with the entire socio-economic, industrial and commercial program.  There are several leading minds in  transportation design and automotive design experts who acknowledge that the only way to improve current and emerging issues related to transportation and mobility is in collaboration with non-automotive sectors.  More importantly there is now an industry awareness and emphasis on designing experiential brands, that take consumers beyond the realm of “yes or no type offerings” or other stand alone products, and instead focuses on delivering a participative experience.  This is the next evolution for Industrial Design as it requires a breadth of knowledge of both product, process and positioning.

So what does all this mean to brand-name manufacturers?    Manufactures can do much more for consumers, and  there are real needs that can be addressed right now beyond simply offering more products.  The short answers could be in developing alternatives to car ownership, and alleviating time wasted for commuters stuck in traffic.  There are many forms this could this take, most obviously transit buses and ride/share programs.  But how could an automotive brand use experiential marketing to provide a premium service?  Would there be anything from a brand to add to the experience beyond simply being an “outstanding, compelling or gotta-have-product”?   Imagine an autonomous limo that picks you and and delivers you your destination, that is piloted by Google, co-branded by Apple and offers passengers an engaging experiences designed by Universal Studios.  Or how about stopping off at Starbucks to recharge your electric hybrid while you enjoy your favorite cup of coffee?

The path forward is not yet clear, and there is still much deliberation about what vehicle architectures, electric infrastructure and vehicle servicing that will be needed in the future.  However, industry already knows about the more immediate and frustrating issues of traffic, pollution and insurance premiums.  If foresight indications are correct, then the R&D groups of large OEM’s need to begin re-evaluating what mobility means, and what role their brands will play in a service oriented economy.   Creative technology environments are generally reserved for work in manufacturing R&D silos, however I know from experience that they can be quite flexible in accommodating new types of design and engineering (see my earlier post here).  In order for OEM brands to gain access to the next evolution economy, the Researching-of and Designing-exercises for consumer experience based offerings, must be opened up beyond the silo of transportation designers.  What is needed now, is a new platform to engage policy makers, urban planners and non-automotive businesses with those in the Automotive Corporate world.

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 designing extended social programs for people with chronic illness. A productive few days in DC with the World Bank had us working on distributed innovation experiences for offices around the world.

I’ll be honest. I’m exhausted. But when you’re talking about innovation change, it’s hard not to focus on the greater good.

These days, there’s a lot of interest in Idea Couture’s social innovation practice. Much like design thinking, any new and fuzzily-defined term that enters the business world is at least partly cause for buzz. But on the plus side, I know that the majority of the interest is based on the opportunity that Social Innovation presents.

This isn’t CSR. This is business. It’s making money by doing good. And it works.

From pharmaceutical companies who know that their social impact will lead to financial impact, to technologists who are looking for new learning opportunities that extend their definition of value through solving problems of social change, these last few weeks have shown me that the social innovation world is alive. The great Peter Drucker said that, “Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise”. It seems as though the business world is starting to catch on.

Three years ago, I sat down with a good friend from MaRS to talk about his experience working with not for profits. At the time, I had been hitting a wall doing some business model design work for a now-defunct not for profit. To this day, I’ll remember that conversation as a turning point in my career. “The problem with so many of these (not-for-profits) is that they’re completely afraid of money,” he said. Over the next few years, I’ve grown to understand what he meant.

It’s not necessarily a fear of income – very few organizations have the ability to raise funds like a well run not-for-profit. But for some reason, the dialogue of multiple winners from a giving scenario seems to make many not-for-profit’s uneasy. But whenever a problem is solved, new value is created, and in many cases, that value is being left on the table.

Thankfully, with the number of social-entrepreneurs that I’ve met since that fateful conversation, both through our incubation experience and through talks at a number of universities, a shift is on its way. It seems as though many people realize that one possible future of giving is to also get, be it through new organizational experience, new revenue streams, or reduced operational costs. With benefits like that, it’s no wonder there’s buzz.

The shame of making money through solving real social problems is on its way out the door.

Read any CSR book, and it will tell you that companies will eventually change – not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because their customers are demanding it. While this is certainly true (our design research constantly confirms that customers are asking for social-embedded products and services), I’m now seeing a lot of companies that are shifting based primarily on operational benefits. That puts a smile on my face because the social innovation mandate is coming from both the top down and the bottom up.

I’ll make this very clear – 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 with ties to their core business model. The expectations are high, both in terms of financial impact, but also delivering results on social impact.

Social innovation is the future of business. It’s hard not to read that and feel a little more optimistic about what’s to come.

I get it. Deadlines, budgets, internal pressure and uncertainty don’t exactly create an encouraging environment in which to trust your crazy innovation partners. But, after taking clients through the process countless times, and coming out alive and better-armed with powerful insights on the other side, here are five things I’ve picked up from boardroom banter that might help.

1. Exploration isn’t validation

We have a series of approaches to tease out consumer attitudes, preferences, socio-cultural ties and opinions. Often, our clients want to use these opportunities to validate what they’re already doing, instead of looking at what else might be possible. If we jump to validation, we miss out on the purposely broad and open-ended nature of the exploration phase, and that means missing out on the things that have been overlooked or undefined.

2. Competitors aren’t good benchmarks

When we conduct global scanning to observe weak signals in comparative and competitive industries, we often get some pushback from our clients to stay in the industries they can most relate to, or worse yet, to focus on competitors. If your competitors are already doing it, it’s probably not enough to make you relevant. Instead, a push towards lateral thinking usually ends in our clients looking for insights in unlikely places – where their competitors never thought to.

3. Consumer insights first, tactics later

In a rush to get to the finish line, we often have to justify why it’s better to hold off on solving burning tactical and executional challenges until later in the process. It’s tough, but we force ourselves to trust the process and hold off on solving/designing until we finish the exploration phase. Getting the consumer insights right, without the loaded and leading questions, means that we’re eventually designing for the right outcomes.

4. If there is rigour, you won’t end up with meaningless data

Too often, we hear the tale of months of research that result in a pile of action-less data and deliverables. Rest assured that when there is a rigorous process that transforms insights into ingredients for a solid strategy, the fuzzy front-end can result in tangibles on route to your end goal.

5. We can translate

A lot of the initial discomfort comes from clients needing to sell the project and its findings internally. “This isn’t how we usually do things” is valid, but shouldn’t drive process decisions. It’s our job to help you tell the story. By identifying important points in the project where translation is needed, it is possible to take the work and translate it into a story  that is relevant and compelling within your organization.

As a parting note, I’ll leave you with something that I didn’t learn from work – this one comes from my old man. He’s always told me that the horrible discomfort you feel when you encounter something new usually precedes great learning – it’s simply the beginning of an ascent along the learning curve. So relax! A little trust can go a long way.

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 I expected a painful transition, what I found was that infusing big problems with the sensibilities of the interactive space, no problem is insurmountable. Now, all of these firms call upon that experience to tackle problems much larger than designing websites.

I believe that interactive people are the world’s best innovators.

While today, the process of innovation is often labeled “design thinking”, people from the interactive space don’t really need to call it anything other than their job. The process of innovation has been intuitively embedded in user experience since people first started thinking about how websites work. What’s even more incredible is that the interactive space has only reached one billionth of its potential. While we draw on foundations of industrial design and architecture, we’re blazing trails in other unexplored territory.

Digital people are inventors

In a typical design process, defining constraints of a project is one of the very earliest steps. In the interactive realm, a constraint is treated like an opportunity to push the boundaries of a medium. As a result, people are more than willing to hack the rules or create new rules to make the optimal solution work. Their analytical yet lateral ability to solve problems is second to none. Interactive people are inventors.

Interactive people understand systems

Anyone who grew up in a web firm lived the life of the ugly stepchild. If you were building websites in the early 2000′s, you knew that your entire existence hinged on an appreciation of multiple service and experience paths. You were building within a larger organizational system and context – you were one piece of a puzzle. Interactive people are systems designers.

Empathy is at the core of innovation

A web design process is inherently user centred. It requires an in depth understanding of a person’s goals, and your job is to help them achieve those goals. That being said, interactive people understand that an end user’s experience is a reflection of both what you design and their own environment on the other side of the screen. We deal with issues of accessibility, issues of screen size, mobile considerations, situated experience, and more. Interactive people understand user centred design.

Digital people communicate

Since the beginning of my web career, I’ve understood design thinking tools. Prototyping, wireframing and storyboarding are all essential processes in the digital space. Apply those same skills to a service design problem, or to a product design problem, and suddenly abstract concepts make complete sense to your clients. Interactive people apply the design thinking toolkit every day.

Digital people understand performance

One of the largest barriers to innovation is the burden of proof. Since the very beginning of the digital era, people have been measuring websites to communicate the success of innovation, and drawing relevant parallels where no previous parallels existed. Digital people balance business and user objectives.

Interactive designs are always iterative

The day after you build something, you switch to optimization mode. There’s an inherent appreciation in digital that solutions can be elegant, but can always be improved. The idea of constant improvements and iterative design are fundamental to digital processes. They’re also core to the beliefs of innovators.

The medium is in its infancy

Ask an industrial designer to talk about the web, and they’ll base most of their thinking in what’s current. Talk to an interactive designer about the web, and they talk about visions for the future. Every day, some new considerations enters our design lexicon. And every day, some new startup is experimenting with these tools to push the boundaries of what is possible. Digital people are adaptable and flexible.

Innovation in product is innovation in digital

To solve product and service design problems, we need to migrate towards platform thinking. A product is no longer just an object – it’s a hub of connected information and interactions. Yes, strong industrial design can create an object of desire, but without inherently and intuitively applying digital sensibilities to that product, it will arguably be less competitive. Industries like music and publishing are transforming before our very eyes, and who are the best people to lead us into this unexplored territory?

Any of these qualities on their own are factors we look for when hiring innovation consultants. But what’s incredible about interactive people is that, more often than not, they have all of these qualities. And I know this is just a starting point in a long list of skills. I’m not trying to discount the capabilities of industrial designers, researchers, or architects who have found their way into the innovation space, but I do truly believe that the inherent understanding of all the qualities outlined above put former interactive practitioners in a unique position to solve big, important problems.

So did I miss any?

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 signals. For many of these clients, I’ve seen real innovation happen.

What’s interesting is that none of these clients talk about how “innovative” they are. But they live it. In the grand scheme of things, these are the companies pushing the boundaries of their industries and changing their own internal values systems. That’s real innovation to me.

For your average everyday consumers, innovation means disruptive innovation. Does a car that reads your Facebook news feed really deserve to be called innovative, or is it just novel? Is a CPG company that releases Organic shampoo in 2011 really innovative, or are they just opportunistic? Is a communications campaign that crosses multiple channels really innovative, or could it just be clever? I’d argue that very few of the “innovations” that companies advertise are really innovations, and even fewer of them are truly representative of a general organizational culture.

As a result, in the corporate and consumer world, the word is at risk of completely losing its meaning.

These days, it seems impossible to turn on the TV, open a magazine, read a blog post or listen to a CEO without hearing a company’s “commitment to innovation”. What’s I find truly unfortunate is that the disciplines of PR and marketing are bastardizing a term with immense power and meaning. Having spent plenty of time studying the internal models of innovation at some of the world’s most “innovative” firms, I can tell you that their internal processes are innovation blockers, not innovation enablers.

The dirty truth is that while most of these firms love the idea of innovation (and may even be filled with innovative people), they hate innovation in practice. Innovation “introduces risk” instead of mitigates it. Innovation casts doubt on how things have traditionally been done. Innovation results in disagreements. Innovation unearths cultural gaps within organizations. Real innovation is culturally hard.

Most companies are happy make incremental improvements or to explore novel changes. The refusal is to reset their understanding of their competitive landscape and to accept that their industries are fundamentally at risk. They’re fine with turning money into ideas (R&D), but not turning ideas into money (innovation).

So please, stop calling your company “innovative”. Yes, you make incremental improvements to your products. Yes, you invest in R&D. But at the end of the day, if you’re unwilling to shift adapt your core organizational values based on societal, social, and technological changes, you’re just fooling yourself. Until your organization is willing to rethink its relationship with its customers, reimagine what the future will look like, and reset its view of the industry it competes in, it’s not really innovative.

If you’re really committed to innovation, don’t just tell us about it. Live it.

Needless to say, the process of preparing and presenting to the internal IC team had me pretty primed to talk about what Design Thinking is and what it means in the context of Idea Couture, business, and innovation. So I was pretty happy when I went on Quora last night and came across this great question:

Part of the challenge in answering that question is that there is no single definition of Design Thinking. From what I’ve seen and what I practice, there are four points of view on what Design Thinking really is. Each have a different connection to innovation.

1. Design thinking is a person is a person who is capable of forming ideas through abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning implies knowing throughout intuition (no formal proof), which is effectively a new thought. Innovation through new ways of thinking.
2. Design thinking is a human centered way of viewing the world. By trying to solve problems through gaining insights around people’s needs, you’re creating new perspectives which lead to new opportunities for innovation. Innovation through new perspectives.
3. Design thinking is a series of methods allow designers better communicate ideas. Completely new concepts are difficult for most people to grasp, so using a designer’s lens on communications improves understanding. The communication of innovation.
4. Design thinking is a series of steps to guide the innovation process. It’s the meta name given to the activities involved in creating a new idea. Design thinking is innovation.

So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Just tired of hearing the term “Design Thinking”? Let me know.

Also, here’s a copy of the internal presentation if you’re interested.