Traditionally a Design work within an OEM studio (original equipment manufacturer), will spend most of their time and energy on identifying target markets and selecting themes to develop further, and then translate a theme into physical properties such as clay models and digital models. Within this system of theme development, production programs can be started, postponed, shelved or eliminated all-together based on decisions from senior leadership.  The remaining amount of time is generally used to identify more closely with the potential consumers’ mental and aspirational mindsets.  Part of our design work is dedicated to selecting key words, phrases and  images that bolster the theme development for an existing brand.  Identifying future consumer’s unmet needs as market opportunities can be very challenging, because the process and tends to be disconnected from real-life consumer insights.  The reason for this is because most of the attention and still spent on the day-to-day business operations.   When we as designers try to create sketches for vehicles and conceive scenarios that are 10, 15 or even 20 years into the future for our companies, things can quickly go astray.  Sometimes this vision models can get weighed because of all the layers of bureaucracy and legacy costs that are associated within an organization, and other times it may be difficult or nearly impossible to move swiftly on opportunities when because you are working within a large and constrained system.  This is the primary reason that why consultancies can provide such valuable insight and fresh perspective, because they have more flexibility to showcase new ideas and explore unknown product/service/experience territories.  Some car companies have an ability to overlap this with their branding strategies, yet most do not.  The opportunities which may exist outside their specific product realm could be more about services or more about delivering an experience and  in this case, the innovation and branding strategies fall short in helping to identify a key innovation.  The territory of traditional automotive design thinking has always been about proportions, stance and quality of execution on a theme.  This is one of the reasons why I chose to join Idea Couture because I wanted to share this process on their projects and at the same time combine my experience and knowledge of foresight strategy to facilitate the innovation and business side.

It was my participation in the foresight strategies and futures workshops that helped guide me to Idea Couture.   My prior experience working with the Advanced Design studio provided me access to an experimental team comprised of designers, engineers and manufacturing innovation experts.  Through foresight study, we reached a new level of understanding in regards to identifying unmet market needs, values shifts, societal changes, technology advancements, environmental concerns, economic forces and political pressures.  Each of these topics have an affect on the business planning and product development strategy, and it was in this field of study that I was able to capture a sense of innovation and an opportunity mapping that gave me an ability to correlate my ideas abou the future with Idris regarding transportation, personal mobility and fashion synergy.

In December of 2009 I traveled to Shanghai for a round interviews with potential employers.  I visited with brand name car studios, international consultancies and I was also able to meet with Idris after an exchange of information on Linked In.  We discussed some potential synergiesbetween his company and myself, even though at that time  I did not have a clear picture or prior knowledge of the backgrounds of his experienced professionals who worked with his team.  My only thought was that there would be a positive benefit for both of us by working together and that by bringing in my capabilities and combining it with their business thinking we could better deliver innovation for clients.

Working for Idea Couture has offered me a chance to build a framework of challenging old ideas.  Based on deep insights and a multi-disciplinary approach, I am fortunate again to be able to work with a group of such diverse and qualified business people, and experts to rely upon as we face the challenges of innovating new products and services at Idea Couture.   I can think of no better opportunity for using my experience and skills than with this team.  We will make a positive difference by way of delivering innovation to companies that rely on us to more effectively relate to the people that we all depend on the most, the consumer.

It requires that we put ourselves on the same streets of the people we would like to offer new services or products to.  We cannot simply sit behind a desk and target potential consumers with ideas which are created in a vacuum.

Corporations are more comfortable when they are able to absorb information that is presented in un-ambiguous volumes of information such as with infographics, data plots, matrix charts and/or clear examples that illustrate the archetypical consumers mated to a given technology.  See Ford’s Antonella, a Computer Generated personas used in development.

However here is where the problem arises, because most companies are too focused on their day-to-day production to really see any greater potential for other adjacent services, similar markets or entirely new opportunities thus limiting their capability to even begin thinking about taking a ‘calculated risk’.  Identifying and developing an entirely new product, experience or service requires a Re-Think, Re-imagining and Reset of business as usual.

Most companies already know who they want to target and what they are willing to spend, but what they don’t know and don’t have, are all the cultural points of reference, the interviews, the video-diaries,  the deep insights that come from knowing and understanding their ‘target market’ intimately.  Companies can literally get stuck when it comes to identifying new social classes that are yet to exist 10 years (even 15 years +) from now into the future.  Experimenting with branding techniques and products that aren’t really connected or based with anything that is current quickly loses relevance, authenticity and meaning.   Internal Design studies and Innovation work really start to break-down because no one actually knows who these future consumers really are.  Again, this is not an Engineering issue, it is an Anthropology study, also a Futurist’ scenario and a Qualitative research issue.

This is why a consultancy such as Idea Couture make sense for companies who wish to understand, utilize and implement foresight strategy that take responsibility for identifying, examining and creating innovative solutions for future target markets.

This issue is often referred to as a ‘wicked problem’, which is to say that the solutions are not obvious, nor are they transparent or easily recognizable upon initial inspection. The real answers are not known only until after someone has solved it.

Furthermore, if any attempt is made to solve a particular issue as an individual part of a wicked-problem, then it could potentially do more harm than good.  To ignore the over-lapping of adjoining issues for products and services is like to going into a field of land mines blind-folded.  You need innovation that that allow you to navigate the most effective  way through using the right tools and taking the right steps.

The opportunities to solve these issues cohesively, requires groups of different and complimentary minds (that do not have a conflict of interest in developing solutions) to work together as a team to create points of cultural reference, identify weak signals, map out scenarios and if need be engage even more raw ideas from un-biased participants.  This synergy-approach eludes most corporations primarily because each node of expertise comes from completely different and diverse set of backgrounds, which is normally not associated with human resources that are  available within an established organization.  What ultimately facilitates desired outcomes for Idea Couture clients is essentially our diversity and key competencies within our respective areas of expertise.

However, striking this balance in the modern world, and more importantly the emerging world must take on a different meaning.  As the old notions of luxury are challenged, they must make way for a new set of user dynamics and offer solutions to the people who live in the growing Megacities (cities with populations over 10 million).

In 2000, there were 18 megacities – conurbations such as Mumbai, Tokyo, New York City, and Mexico City had populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants. Greater Tokyo already has 35 million, which is greater than the entire population of Canada.  (source: Wikipedia)  2015 and beyond will also  see cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, added to this list to name a few.

Transportation on the whole is beginning to splinter into many different value streams such as delivery-on-demand, hub-to-hub services and deliveries, international condo cruisers, executive coaches, virtual garages, post-materialistic neighborhood eco-cars, shared-public vehicles, super-budget-sub $3000, and also new derivatives of personal mobility leading to even more avenues.

As Mega-cities become the norm, consumer attitudes will shift further away from the traditional aspiration of commuter vehicle ownership.  The costs associated with owning, insuring, driving, navigating, re-fueling, re-charging and parking will begin to unravel the notion of investing in one single mode of transport.  In its place, we will see more services based types of transportation.  All it will take are a few entrepreneurs who can splice together on-demand services with real-time users who consumers who are looking for more than just a taxi.

We must search out new ways of mobility, in terms of prestige, convenience, adaptability, affordability, dependability, the “raison d’etre” …… and we must find them quickly.  For consumers, they must be offered some form of tangible incentive, be it joy from the sheer act of being mobile, entertainment, price or convenience.

In terms of Engineering and Design, there are studies currently taking place around the use of robotics in the transportation industry; GM EN-V is one example of a technology demonstrator, and is now on display now at the Shanghai World Expo. The EN-V operates on technology borrowed from Segway, and the entire vehicle is half the size of a Smart car, fully electronic, has a top speed of 25 mph, and is capable of making turns 360 degrees in-place.Another example is the T.25 concept from Gordon Murray (Designer of the famous supercar; McLaren F1), which demonstrates foresight for government regulations, and fuel economy mandates, which are expected by the year 2020.

Transportation technologies have the ability to facilitate change, but ultimately adoption of this will rely completely on the behavior of how humans move about.  Metropolitan cities are more fashion conscious, and urban dwellers are more interested spending money on others things rather than to automobiles.  These people have other desires for items; shoes, purses, headphones, jackets etc…  But human behavior is not an engineering subject and neither is fashion. Therefore, the future scenarios of personal mobility will be less about pure Engineering, more about Ethnography and Designing towards consumer tastes and their unique interests.

Soon, consumers will not care so much about who manufactured their product, but instead they will be more interested in what Designer, Stylist, Co-creator or Theme Artist customized their mobility.  As this scenario evolves it will begin to see an over-lapping of transport services that combines with fashion design, product design, and experience design.

Organizations are increasingly turning to open innovation platforms as their source of innovation.

Open innovation platforms (or crowdsourcing platforms) are a way to involve consumers in the process of innovation. Here at IC, we have built examples pretty amazing open innovation platforms – the Aviva Community fund and the MIT Ideas Challenge that are helping prove the case. You can also check out Open Innovators for dozens of other examples of programs that work. As our fearless leader Idris Mootee recently wrote in his article What you don’t know about Crowdsourcing and why they often fail, it’s not a silver bullet for innovation. But when used in a defined way as part of the research and development process, they can be quite successful.

Solving the worlds problems one 2×2 at a time

A lot of organizations struggle to wrap their heads around open innovation platforms because they toil with their purpose in the innovation cycle – what is the role of the platform within the innovation pipeline. With that in mind, I’ve spent a bit of time sketching an organizational principal for open innovation platforms. Obviously an organization can choose to involve external parties at any point in the innovation process – but the emphasis of this thinking is focused on what would be classically viewed as research through development (as opposed to the commercialization).

Do you have a problem? X AXIS
The first decision criteria is “Is there a defined problem”.

On one side of the equation, many organizations are submitting or asking explicit questions to the audience for solving – they have a defined problem to be solved. For example, Innovation Exchange solicits “Challenges” (specific problems to solve) from major corporations. I call this “innovation inspired by the business” – the key driver of creativity is based off of a fundamental business-side need or problem.

On the other side, some organizations just want good ideas that align with their brands – they have undefined problems and look to the crowd to both explicitly state challenges and opportunities. In short, they hope the crowd both provides both self identifies the problem and articulates a solution to the problem. An example of this would be the over-mentioned “my Starbucks ideas”. I call this “inspired by invention”, as it often manifests itself through the creative ingenuity of the crowd. It could just as easily be called “Innovation inspired by needs”.

When can the crowd play? Y AXIS
The second decision criteria is “When do you involve the crowd”?

On one side of the equation, organizations involve external participants early in the innovation process. Involving customers early results in raw, often messy ideas that may or not reflect any possible reality. I think of this as a platform for actively soliciting feedback for “opportunity collection” because there tend to be a lot of undefined directions that can be pursued or that can inspire lateral thinking.

On the other side, organizations can involve participants late in the innovation process. At this point, organizations are often looking for full concepts, designs, or solutions that represent a full solution to a problem. Examples of this would be Google’s Lunar Prize, where the criteria for winning is to “successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.”. This is an example of “solution collection” – getting many external participants to come up with multiple, well articulated solutions.

The quadrants of organization-led open innovation platforms

Based on this model for understanding open innovation platforms, there are four primary opportunities for organizations to use open innovation platforms to drive the innovation process internally.

Defined Problem + Early Involvement = Crowdstorming. Articulating a specific problem to consumers and asking for many raw responses. This is pretty much like a massive brainstorm, and works as a way to stock the innovation pipeline early. Output: Lots of raw solutions to a specific problem with varying quality. Example: Fiat Mio

Undefined Problem + Early Involvement = Researching. Ask consumers to come up with solutions to undefined problems. The real value here is the articulation of previously unknown or unmet needs, collected through the initial articulation of customer problems used as a rationale for the solution. Output: Explanation or justification of previously unarticulated consumer challenges or needs with a small number of solutions of varying quality. Example: Dell Idea Storm

Defined Problem + Late Involvement = Prototyping. When you involve the consumer at this point, you’re really asking for a specific designed solution to a problem. Depending on how late in the innovation process they are involved, the output can be anything from concept sketches to fully-functioning prototypes. Output: Depending on how late the challenge is put to the crowd, and how defined the solution must be, expect a small number of solutions. Example: Supdaroo or one of my favorite sites, threadless.

Undefined Problem + Late Involvement = Adopting. Some organizations choose to build idea orphanages, allowing external participants to submit fully thought-out and conceptualized product concepts that may or may not align with their interests. Would-be inventors can submit their concepts with the hope of the organization moving on their idea. Output: Well thought out ideas that may or may not be relevant to the organization. Example: Lego Design By Me

Yes, no maybe so?

Obviously open innovation platforms differ in terms of where they play in an organization’s innovation cycle. In practice, each of the quadrants of the open innovation platform classification isn’t mutually exclusive. But in terms of understanding where their value lies, I think it’s a good starting point.

So what do you think? Agree with the classification? Have any recommendations on how to make it better? Have any great examples of crowdsourcing applications that I’ve missed? Join the comment thread and let me know. Also, if you’re interested in Open Innovation and the Virtuous Cycle, be sure to read Henry Chesbrough’s epic book Open Innovation.

As designers/industrial designers/architects/visionary futurists we must be able to employ many tools, and with the passing of the hand-drawn ship curves we are now permanently entering the realm of an almost fully digital process.   With so many new softwares becoming available, the creative process itself has become fully encompassed with digital tools for every aspect of product design right down to sketch gestures that utilize soft A.I. that maps out your ‘intended’ brush strokes (iPhone apps).  Perhaps it is not an absolute necessity to know all digital modeling software programs but it goes without saying designers need to know softwares and know them intimately well.  However, as the next generation of designer/cad jockeys inherit an entirely new set of softwares the idea of what it means to be a ‘designer’ is being challenged.

At one point in the early 2000’s digital skills were a double edge sword, because once you excelled at a certain program you could be easily pigeonholed into being labeled a ‘digital wizard’.  Not to diminish the merits of CAD modelers and the technical people who support the design process, but creating math models in virtual space (at that time) did not constitute being a Designer.  I speak from first-hand experience on this, as my automotive career began using Alias AutoStudio.   My first appointment within at an OEM Design Studios in North America quickly made me realize that there was a negative aspect to be associated with a CAD programs.   The dreaded label of ‘surface-modeler’ or ‘CAD-jockey’ proved to be an obstacle but it no less to diminished the  aspiration of becoming an automotive designer.  As part of the creative design team, the words ‘cad-jockey’ or ‘cad-monkey’ were  a scarlet letters to carry around, while typically viewed as only a supporting role to other designers, the skills learned there proved to be invaluable.

Now a decade on, in 2010 there is a fast growing movement happening in the realm of CAD and nowhere is the phenomenon more visible than in Architecture.  ‘Algorithm architecture’ as it has been referred to, is challenging the old paradigms of designer to CAD person workflows.  In this instance, a clever group of CAD/code scripting folks have figured out a way to introduce code-bred designs that were generated from algorithms. Most of the aesthetically pleasing examples, still have a human mind over-seeing the entire process in order to weed out the unattractive compositions.  Final designs are selected based on both their aesthetic and functional merits, which is a result of continually re-running the programs.  This process will certainly evolve to another level once social networking has been factored into this process (such as Threadless, X-Prize and Local Motors Competitions).  CAD worker and Architect are becoming synonymous in the field of architecture and eventually this wil become the case for product development as well.

Currently a fashion statement for automotive, as emulated fractal architecture (Pandion Showcar from Bertone), there are  subtle signs that logaritm architecture will find its way (and purpose) into product development.  In the future this means that when we are given primary structure (which is initially designed around strength analysis software), the result of the skeletal load paths could then be paired with another program to accommodate aesthetic designs along the same lines and volumes.  Perhaps the entire process could even provide a feed-back loop which allows the object itself to change the overall design and engineering to suit preferences. Case and point; Emergent Architecture based out of Los Angeles, CA.

The net result of all these scripted-code-based designs on Product Development will be a steady and fundamental shift in the way the final output (the finished design) is conceived, created, and employed.  In some cases this process is completely blurring the lines between the Designer, Modeler, Script-coder, Art Director and Architect.  It is amazing to think that a 100 years ago, most buildings were constructed using carved wood logs, bricks and stone.  Now however, we are entering a permanent phase where mass-customized designs, and re-mixed designs are created using some form of Algorithms or Logarithms.  Visual Art meets C0-engineered/ Software Adaptive/Computer Aided Design.

If you consider that most digital files can be either downloaded (or re-produced by novice digital creator), the designs of the future  will be available across a variety of shared resources any where in the world.  You may begin to realize the impact that this may have when you start to think about the emerging markets.  In developing countries (who do not have legacy costs with conventional know-how) begin make their investments in newer technologies instead of the old ones, an accelerating shift will occur.  The capability of technically savvy entrepreneurs will be able to easily manipulate and re-produce high-end  designs or even be able to single out any desirable trait or elements which they deem desirable.  All it will take for a company to exceed in these markets is an initial investment in creative process with CAD software and access to rapid prototyping machines.

I’m sure you’ve been put in the situation before. An RFP or a project arrives on your desk that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it doesn’t take into account fundamental human behaviours. Maybe it ignores market realities. Or maybe it’s just trying to solve a tactical problem rather than dealing with what really needs to be solved. Either way, it creates an uncomfortable situation – are you a going to tell the client they’re wrong, or are you going to do what’s asked.

The NAA Interactive Briefing

In the interactive division of the National Advertising Awards, entrants were asked to submit an innovative creative solution to the the following business problem for Sympatico.ca:

“Drive adoption of Sympatico.ca’s various assets by convincing our target audience to make Sympatico.ca or one of its sister sites, like Best Health or Auto, their homepage. The site is currently competing with U.S. and international sites like MSN and Yahoo.” (for more details, download the full briefing here)

Of the teams that responded to the challenge, half developed creative advertising campaigns consisting of a mix of traditional and social media forms. Some came up with clever campaign concepts that successfully focused on strong calls to action that supported the stated business objectives.

And the other half of the entrants told us the portal model is dead.

Dear Client, You are Wrong.

Now I don’t want this to turn into a debate around whether portal models like Sympatico.ca are dead. What I do want to ask is, if you’re put into a situation where you don’t believe that a brief is responding to the right thing for a client’s business, do you follow it?

In the past, I’ve been on both sides of the coin before. Perhaps it comes down to the difference between taking client work to get paid and taking client work to make a difference. Here’s a quick summary of your likely outcomes:

Partners Vs. Working for Approvals

A lot of agencies don’t break the brief. The hope is that once the ability to execute is proven, there will be the opportunity to show strategic worth on something else. In my opinion, this is the wrong approach to design. This is working for approvals instead of working to achieve a result.

The benefits of not working at an agency is you’re not boxed into agency scenarios. As a strategic innovation and experience design firm, clients come to us with a recognition (and expectation) that in order to strategically differentiate, you may need to go outside your comfort zone. Questioning long-standing assumptions is part of our value proposition, and as such, every brief gets broken to some extent. If your job is to solve problems, then articulating the right problem is step number one. It’s the difference between a partnership and a paycheck.

Now obviously not everybody has the opportunity to work like we do. So what do you do when the brief is wrong?

So, Facebook is evolving.

With emphasis on at least 3 core web services – search, chat and the upcoming email – Facebook is getting more serious about functions that Google, among others, are doing well at providing. It makes sense. So here are some quick thoughts on what 400 million users are experiencing on Facebook these days:

A bigger search bar, center stage.

Why it’s good for Facebook:

Keeps users in the site; search is clearly important, if it’s done well people may use it. Facebook controls not all but a lot of social capital on the web. Social search has obvious value for them (and us), but will it be enough? Not quite. Then… wait for it…. Bing! At least it’s trying now. With a lot of help from Microsoft meaningful search results can surface from within the Facebook wall.

Why it’s lame:

Integrated search is not executed well at all. Maybe I just don’t know about the secret and strategic plan to roll out reasonable usability at a snail’s pace? The search results don’t integrate with the Bing-driven web results that remain a click away from the sidebar. Google is always atop my browser, one click or keystroke away (F6 for those who don’t know). Why would I switch? Un. Bloody. Likely. Here’s a free tip for you, Facebook: if you can’t solve the true integration challenge, simply try placing Bing results right next to social results. Make that more visible right off the bat and some of us might actually intend on typing something into your search box rather than doing so accidentally. (But as of course that’s unlikely to happen, because we’ve got F6.)

Slightly more accessible chat.

Why it’s good:

Keeps users in the site; chatter is constant. Lots of people sign into this feature already. Maybe now the rest of us who don’t use it a lot will think of turning it on now and again. You know, because your chat box isn’t only available from the bottom-right anymore (a location also known as “the last place a person in the western world naturally directs their eyes towards”)

What’s missing:

3rd party email service integration, Facebook content integration, voice and video chat. Lots of work to do here, but doable, and potentially very useful. What else is missing? My objectivity. At some point in this post I began addressing Facebook as “you”. Ha.

Upcoming email service.

Why it’s good:

While they won’t likely get my business in this area, if rolled out properly they could get a lot of newcomers rockin’ the …@fbmail.com or ….@fb.com – if they could somehow pry that domain from the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Why you’ll wait for version 2:

Facebook will probably push social context down our throats, ignoring that email experience that do not need to evolve into a frenzy of likes and threaded rambling. After all, Google provides Wave for that. If my email procedures get just 5% less efficient, a huge time-suck will ensue. I can’t risk that. This’ll be a tough one for Facebook to generate conversion from, but new adoption is another story.

Ready? Set? Now race to the middle!

In a way, as Google gets more serious about the social game and Facebook moves towards the domains of the Mountain View Machine, we’re looking at a race to the middle that will have some very interesting outcomes, and perhaps some friendly ones as well. Clever mashups are already around; check out Threadsy. Some cool integration there. Now if only it was executed by the data sources themselves, in collaboration with each other. Imagine if Google and Facebook innovated together? Unlikely, I know. But the economies of scale could be there for their servers appetites. Lotta pictures on that site. And growing. Okay okay, enough economic rationale. It’s complex and they are fighting for glory. One is focused on implicit results and the other, explicit. And yes, the fight is too good for now. Like most of us, I enjoy watching it. I also find value in multiple services. I enjoy many benefits from several cloud services, and as for the drawbacks, I try to minimize my encounters with them. I like that the industry is busy and competitive because it’ll make result in better products, ones of better value. Mistakes along then way, for sure. But reasonable competition for the masses. I like that they’re trying.

Trying… and killing it out there… here are some recent stats… go to Facebook the source.

More than 400 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

More than 35 million users update their status each day

More than 60 million status updates posted each day

More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week

More than 3.5 million events created each month

More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook

More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook

More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day

Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

For the last several weeks, much has been written about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to de-index from Google and put up pay walls for News Corp’s digital media properties.

Variety.com (the Hollywood trade publication) has also announced that it will revert back to erecting a pay wall for its content.  Variety.com had this model in place as recently as 2007 when it decided a pay wall didn’t work.  Well, I guess that was then…

And now, we have three major publishing houses announcing that they will hold back e-book versions of some titles, making them available several weeks to several months after the initial launch of the hardcover.  Hey, movie studios have been doing that for years, right?

Finally, the major music labels have announced that they will cease the production of all recordings, digital or otherwise, and force people to attend live concerts if they want to hear their favorite music.

OK, I made that last one up.

Where’s the innovation?  It’s undeniable that traditional media companies are under a lot of pressure to hold on to their revenues.  Some are fighting for survival.  But shouldn’t such circumstances spark innovation?

Let’s look at publishers’ plans for holding back e-book versions of some of their titles.  Is it really a good idea to force consumers to buy hardcover versions when so many of them have already demonstrated that they want e-books?  Is it really a good idea to artificially prop up the value of a hardcover, at the expense of making an e-book a less attractive product, when the trend seems to clearly favor e-books going forward?

Insights into customer needs (e.g. people want to buy, carry around, and read books conveniently) and foresight into the evolving market (e.g. e-book market is growing very quickly; and every electronics manufacturer and their cousin are readying better, faster, do-more e-readers) should be driving innovations at these media companies.

Instead, they seem to be gripped by the fear that consumers who grow accustomed to paying $9.99 for an e-book won’t want to pay $25 for a hardcover.  That may be true.  But what exactly are they hoping will happen?  That consumers who have already invested in an e-reader, and who have already been enjoying e-books, will be willing to pay a premium for a product they don’t really want?   Or that, by making e-books less attractive for consumers, they will simply forget about them and return to buying big, heavy hardcover books?

The ground around media companies is definitely shifting.  The environment is ripe for innovation.  Some will survive.  Some will not.  But I think the ones that will thrive will be the ones that innovate.  I just haven’t seen any shining examples of innovation from the incumbents lately.

What do you think?  Am I glossing over any innovations from the big media companies?

Rubber boots and metal sheers in tow, I was ready to heave and hoe (and all the other farm-appropriate gestures) my way along the learning curve – my green thumb had previously been limited to some potted basil and a few house plants. I expected organic farming on a large scale would be complicated. I didn’t realize it would be so inspiring.

This farm used permaculture, a design method that mimics the architecture and relationships in natural ecologies to develop sustainable agricultural practices. In other words, the organic ‘food forest’ (which requires zero fossil fuels) was bursting with diverse produce, wild flowers and life, thanks to the network of ecosystems nurtured within it. With a bit of nature-inspired design, a sustainable and rich ecosystem was created and did an unbelievable job at contributing to its own maintenance.

I was fascinated and unbelievably curious – farming is an obvious place to mimic nature’s design, but what about business? What about manufacturing, packaging and services? After all, 3.8 billion years of R&D later and we can’t deny that nature is the authority on the design of sustainable systems.

The interwebs led me to Bio-Mimicry, a design discipline committed to developing sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.

What can inter-species cooperation and competition teach us about building communities? What can the butterfly’s wings teach us about self-cleaning material? What can wind-turbines learn from flying birds? How would nature heat and cool a home? These are the kinds of questions BioMimicry seeks to answer – and with cool open-source projects like The Biomimicry Institutes’ AskNature,, the answers are right at our fingertips.

At a time when the often-daunting task of designing for sustainability is a top priority for many businesses, this is especially intriguing. Biomimicry can be a powerful tool for innovation on the road to more sustainable designs and processes. Nature can demonstrate the underlying simplicity of seemingly complicated processes – so take another look, what can you learn from your own backyard?

Ps. Intrigued? Check out this great TED talk video for examples of how nature is already inspiring design.

When was the last time we saw an innovation in the “fan” product category? This guy gives a quick demo.

I love love this product. http://www.dyson.com/fans/

The Dyson Air Multiplier™ fan works very differently to conventional fans. It uses Air Multiplier™ technology to draw in air and amplify it 15 times, producing an uninterrupted stream of smooth air. With no blades or grill, it’s safe, easy to clean and doesn’t cause unpleasant buffeting.