Growing by Design
Talking SHOP
Tomorrow I am speaking at the SHOP conference at the University of Arkansas on Design Thinking. I will be joined by many executives from the retail industry, including Wal-Mart, as we explore Retail Innovation. I am excited. I think the Retail Industry overall is...
IMPOSSIBLE!
Last night I spoke to a group of women entrepreneurs on a culture of innovation. I shared a bit on Framing, one of my favorite parts of design thinking. How you frame something or look at it makes all the difference in the world in terms of what opportunities you...
Little things mean a lot
I have been on a college tour with my daughter over spring break and design thinking even showed itself in this context. At one college, they were quite proud of their new classroom design which included round tables on wheels, walls that were white boards with dry...
Rockin Robin….DT Tweet Tweet
Michael Jackson sang about it long before its time…. He rocks in the treetops all day long Hoppin' and a-boppin' and singing his song All the little birdies on Jaybird Street Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet What is this Twitter thing? Tweeting? Tweet...
Don’t drop the ball
I was watching my son's spring basketball practice the other evening and despite a lot of talented boys on the court, a lot of balls were being dropped. I started watching more closely. There were a lot of balls flying through the air and it felt oddly familiar. In...
A Decision Allegory
"We don't make decisions." "Nothing ever gets done around here." "No sooner than we make a decision in a lead team meeting it is undone by all the conversations behind closed doors." "Sales and marketing refuse to cooperate." It was true. This business' decision...
Making It Great!
A decision has been made. What is a typical reaction? A team celebrates, breathes a sigh of relief, or feels they can "check this one off the list". Actually, no. Decision design recognizes you are still in the decision making process. It doesn't end with the...
The Design of Decisions. Yes!
For most of my career I thought of decisions as a thing, an event, a point in time. Perhaps decisions were positioned throughout the stage gate process. Or, a decision was a "go/no go" final decision. That perspective is naive and incomplete. Decisions are not a...
Crossing the Chasm
There is a great divide between creating/imagining a new idea or invention and crossing over to launching it as a successful innovation in the marketplace. One way this divide can manifest is between the innovation team and the commercialization team in a large...
The Dilemma: how to create innovation in an established business
Recently I was conducting a training on innovation at a client and was bombarded with questions about how to create innovations in an established business. These were important questions which many people share. In his book, The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton...
