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.

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.

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?

Handy links: Brands in Public, Zeo Sleep Coach

Brands in Public is a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands – from Zappos to Virgin America to In-n-Out Burger. Each dashboard organizes a hot list of what’s being said about the brand around the web, via Twitter and blogs and YouTube and Google Trends and more. As well as polls and debates and commenting for people who want to do more than just watch. – Bands in Public

Developed with leading sleep scientists, Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest. -Zeo

Note: These podcast were recorded last week, so you might hear some less-than-timely mentions. Now that the Noodleplayer is up and running, this won’t happen again. Thanks.

Like 75% of the world, I’m a visual thinker, and I need sketching as part of my tool kit to describe the problems I face and iterate on the solutions I ideate. The sad part is, as a business graduate, no one ever told me that this was a skill I needed. For some, sketching comes naturally. For others, a little inspiration is needed.

As a strategist and experience architect, sketching solutions is one of the most important tools I have available to me. While we’ve been trained over the years to believe that sketching is an artist-only skill, the reality is that any problem solving process, no matter what field it falls under, can be improved through the infusion of pen, paper and design thinking.

A wife, a thesis and a drawing

My wife is currently finishing her PHD in child psychology from McGill University and spends most of her free time analyzing the data associated with her dissertation. Over the weekend, I passed by her desk and saw the following sketch:

What you’re looking at is Meredith’s use of sketching to describe, understand and test the relationship between the variables in her survey data set.  The visualization of this information allowed her to better understand the systems of her data and progress her understanding of the problem at hand. My mind was blown.

A Sketching Definition
From the words of the always wise Wikipedia:

A sketch is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work. A sketch is a quick way to record an idea for later use. Artist’s sketches primarily serve as a way to try out different ideas and establish a composition before undertaking a more finished work, especially when the finished work is expensive and time consuming. Sketching sharpens an artist’s ability to focus on the most important elements of a subject and is a prescribed part of artistic development for students.

While this definition clearly leans towards the realm of artistic sketching, there are a number of important takeaways:

• Sketching is freehand. If you can put pen to paper, you can sketch. You do not need an artdegree, an expensive set of tools, or the ability to draw the perfect straight line. There is no barrier to using sketching as part of your tool set other than your own lack of self-confidence.
• Sketching is not intended as finished work. For some reason, non-designers feel the need to be perfect the first time. Sketching is not the same as a final marketing strategy, information architecture, project proposal or whitepaper. Your sketch will go through dozens of iterations before it’s done, so it should be treated as disposable.
• Sketching is a tool to try out different ideas. The old saying the first answer is usually the right one is an unfortunate one. Imagine how unsuccessful brainstorming sessions would be if you stopped after the first idea was delivered. When you sketch, there is a low investment required to try other avenues. Sketching is an opportunity to explore dozens of different directions with no consequences.
• Sketching lets you focus on the most important elements. It’s amazing how communicating through sketching can cause you to completely reframe the nature of your problem. By forcing yourself to communicate ideas visually, sketching can enlighten your problem solving process.

Sketching in the wild
When brought outside the domain of designers, sketching is a communications tool to help organize and socialize ideas. Literally, it’s using our innate drawing abilities to organize information in a way that goes beyond pure verbal communication. In this context, sketching is less a piece of design than it is an aid to thought. Sketching provides us with insight into our own definition of a problem, and the better we can define the problem we’re trying to solve, the better the solution.

While rougher sketches require more imagination as a tool to facilitate discussion, the bigger point is that using sketching as a descriptive tool rather than relying on verbal communication enhances our understanding of a problem.

Any problem.

Sure, sketching is a tool to visualize the solution,but it’s also useful in defining a system, organizing ideas and prototyping thought-based solutions. When we (business people) solve a problem based only on verbal queues, very seldom do we take the time to define the scope of a problem. The greatest benefit of sketching is that it forces us engage with an idea in new ways.

The reality is we blessed with the innate problem solving skills of my wife. I learned that sketching was necessary to describing the context of a problem after many painful client meetings facing tough questions that never even crossed my mind. For business people, sketching can enhance your understanding of a problem and allow you to try variations rather than settle on the first answer we think of.

There is no risk in sketching, other than uncovering some input you should have thought of long ago. So go ahead, be sketchy, and take your problem solving skills to the next level.

The number 140 is doing magic.  How did they get this magic number?  There’s so much hype about Twitter and you can’t imagine how many times Twitter is mentioned when I’m watching CNN news. The news anchors are actively promoting their tweets. Is TV not enough? I’ve had probably more than a hundred requests for Tweeters but I still have not jumped onto the bandwagon. Sorry, I must have disappointed many.  I just struggle to write in less than 140 characters. I need at least 486 characters in order to say something meaningful. So, I have a problem. Think about it this way, most people who tweet are men (no formal statistic, just my guess) because most men are comfortable in communicating in 140 characters or less. We have fewer words in our vocabulary and usually say things short and sweet. On the other hand, a woman’s verbal capacity is far bigger. Women are better communicators in general and don’t usually get to the point so fast. So, the next big idea may be 300 characters Twitter for women?

Can we milk this 140 idea? I just wonder what will happen if we limit our everyday conversations to 140 characters per message? What about a social network that only allows 140 connections and your friends need to compete or stay active to remain in your network?  What about your wireless carrier sending you your month statement in 140 characters? I hate reading these monthly statements, as they can’t even design one that people can understand. How about Twitter TV? 140 seconds show? What about Twitter music? Here’s the big one…. Twitter Dating! 140 people you can meet in 140 days?

Twitter TV is real, they have teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site, which invites 140 character postings from members around the world. The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format. The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen. I think I like the idea of Twitter Dating better.

Twitter exploded with tinyurls and retweets, as every geek with a pulse forwarded and OMG’ed the 80 minute preview (embedded below). The excitement was profound and immediate. I made some time to watch the video so I could meaningfully participate in the discussion, and lo and behold, I was excited too.

You see, a little while ago, Google set out to answer a few tough questions, as it explained on its blog:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

These are great questions. The summary answer is Wave.

There are 5 core themes that specifically interest me at this stage:

1. Redesigning the nature of our digital interactions
2. Open source solutions
3. Opportunities with the API
4. Opportunities with pattern recognition
5. Integrative features

1. Redesigning the nature of our digital interactions

When Gmail first came on the scene with its threaded conversation system, everyone who tried it immediately knew that it just felt right. It was a vast improvement on the original Outlook-style stack of messages that most of us were forced to adopt. Over the years, Gmail has lured millions of users from other email services due to its speed, generosity, intuitive interface and supporting features. It was a step in the right direction; still email, just an vastly improved experience.

Gmail gave us greater context and control in our digital conversations. Facebook helped us orientate and network smoothly within our evolving social spheres. And, Twitter nurtured our desires to broadcast while helping us tap into the hive mind of the techno savvy et al. It appears that Google Wave is taking several steps further down the path, disrupting our current conceptions of what our digital interactions ought to be.

Wave is emphasizing several critical virtues: personalization, real-time interactions, open access to data, and integration of multiple forms of media from multiple sources. These virtues are central to the new emerging standard of meaningful online interactivity. Due to its robust and flexible style of communication, I can easily see Wave attracting many early adopters in academia, creative industries and other collaboration-intensive environments. It will likely spread naturally from there.

2. Open source solutions

The virtues of open source ought to be well understood – if you’re unclear, do your homework and come back.

I’m glad to see that Google continues to develop strong experience  in the realm of open source . Currently, there are over 260 open source projects (including the Chrome browser and Android operating system) listed in Google Code (the company’s haven for code-hungry developers). Its blog on open source activities may only be read by techies, but the fruits of the philosophy are enjoyed by all. As an open project, Google is hoping that Wave will become a reflection of our best ideas and aspirations.

I am not going to write more on this topic at the moment – postponing further discussion for a dedicated post sometime in the future. If you have anything to add regarding open source and Wave, please comment below.

3. Opportunities with API

Excerpt from the Wave site:

What is the Google Wave API?

The Google Wave API allows developers to use and enhance Google Wave through two primary types of development:

• Extensions: Build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact
• Embed: Make your site more collaborative by dropping in a Wave

Google Wave is currently available in a developer preview as the APIs and product continue to evolve. Accounts on the developer sandbox will be given out to people intending to build with the Google Wave APIs prior to the public release.

The best and most frequently-used Twitter apps run via the service’s API. Why is that? Well, perhaps the reason is best explained by Rich Friedrich’s famous quote:  ”All Of The Innovative People Don’t Work For Your Company.” With Google Wave, we’ll undoubtedly encounter significant innovation powered by the API. Both freeform experimental applications and professionally designed interfaces will emerge, perhaps leading to a revolution in how digital conversations take place.

I’m particularly excited to see how academia will leverage it, enabling search around the conversations typically restricted to classrooms and lecture halls. How do you think it might be used?

4. Opportunities with pattern recognition

Sergey Brin once rhetorically asked (paraphrasing): Why ask humans to do what computers can do much better?

One of my favorite examples of how Google leverages pattern recognition to provide users with a powerful and valuable service is its “did you mean?…” feature. Whenever you type something incorrectly into Google’s search engine, it will almost always correct your spelling. Not only that, but sometimes it’ll recognize common phrases or articulations that appear to have been generated through some type of futuristic mind-reading capability. How does it do this? Is there a gigantic dictionary? No. Each time a user executes a search and then immediately corrects the term and searches again, Google considers this a typographical correction. There’s no handmade dictionary in the Google brain, but rather a clever pattern recognition system that detects common misspellings or lazy keystrokes.

We can expect Wave to feature some powerful pattern recognition services as it accumulates users and data. By analyzing how people use it, Google can hone Wave into a hyper intelligent facilitator of communication. It’ll predict our need for media assets as we engage in discussion; it’ll recommended resources for knowledge enhancements; it’ll tap into the social sphere and introduce you to others of like-minds. Of course, privacy options will exist to protect those who fear the over lookers, but for those who embrace digital openness, the possibilities are astounding.

5. Integrative Features

The last theme that interests me is a speculative one of hope and desire. I work with a lot of different software and media formats. My job requires me to regularly integrate multiple forms of media from multiple applications into a synthesized experience. To anyone else with this work-style, you know how time consuming and frustrating the little tasks can be. The preview of Wave demonstrated some handy manipulation of images with some neat drag and drop features, among others. I am an advanced user, who can assemble almost anything I encounter. But for others, it’s a burden that hinders the quality of their output and is demotivating right from the start.

My hope is that Wave will be a leader in the race to truly integrate most formats into a collaborative sandbox. File management, video playback, voice conferencing, asynchronous access to PDF, etc. I want it all. And like Freddy Mercury said, “I want it now”. Not just for me, but mostly for others who are less savvy. It’s time that we simplify the process of integrating typically incompatible features. Hopefully, Wave will do that by heightening the average user’s willingness and effectiveness of working with data forms more sophisticated than text.

Summary

This will definitely be an app to keep an eye on. Wave bears a lot of promise. I have a feeling that, like other Google apps, it’ll improve smoothly and naturally as more and more users adopt it. It’ll likely find a few core user groups at the beginning and then spread like wildfire among the increasingly vibrant community of web-service-early-adopters. Perhaps it’ll leverage the Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook APIs along with a native connection to Gmail, creating a single environment for one’s web needs. The permutations are scary-huge, as is my appreciation for the Google crew who push forward and break standards in the hopes of developing something more efficient and effective.

For those who want to watch the preview video, all 80 minutes can be enjoyed here.  Cheers, AMR.