Systems Thinking Fuels High-Velocity Organizations - Steven Spear, MIT Engineering

Companies that are in the same industry, use the same basic technology, and address the same market needs can nevertheless exhibit huge disparities in performance. Consider Honda vs. Chrysler, for example, or Intel vs. Advanced Micro Devices. Through a combination of low cost, efficiency, timeliness, and responsiveness, some companies just perform more efficiently. In the course Creating High-Velocity Organizations, an elective offered in MIT's System Design and Management (SDM) program, students examine how and why some companies succeed while others fail through written and video case studies, lectures, and in-class simulations. Examples center on heavy and high-tech manufacturing, new product development and manufacturing, healthcare, and the military.

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Creativity Loves Constraints - Business Week

When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. But if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the "rules." Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained. But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change.

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Stanford's Fresh Entrepreneurship Factory - Forbes

If you could get people who love the values of design thinking — such as the push to turn ideas into prototypes that customers can use — to apply its principles to new business building, you’d produce more winning entrepreneurs. That’s the premise of the Stanford Design School’s Launchpad program — a 10 week course consisting of 20 assignments to which students from all over Stanford can apply. On May 25, I interviewed Launchpad’s co-founders Michael Dearing — a former eBay (EBAY) executive who earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School — and Perry Klebahn, formerly chief operating officer at Patagonia with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford who invented a market-leading snowshoe.

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OpenIDEO: The Social Causes Arm of IDEO - Meena Kadri, Community Manager, IDEO

“That OpenIDEO thing is great isn’t it?” My mother, approaching 80, discovered Google Buzz a few months back and has been following me on Twitter from there. Via one of my tweets, she had a look around OpenIDEO and was fascinated by the scope of inspiration and global collaboration. As a doctor she has always been somewhat in the dark about what I do for a living but from following my Twitter links she’s started to get the idea. “It’s about design and people and making the world a better place, right?” she offered as a perspective on my professional pursuits.

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Evolutionary Entertainment: A 5-stage Development Process for Corporate Storytelling

The key to creating a great transmedia project is to see it as a living, breathing, evolving entity. Even though my preference is always to plan rather than wing it, trying to find all the pieces of the puzzle from the start can be exhausting, demoralizing and may later prove to be misplaced. Right now all media and entertainment experiences are built on shifting sands: better not to be locked in to one particular set of ideas if you don’t have to be. The figure below expands on the transmedia business model to incorporate the idea of “evolutionary entertainment” – that is, entertainment that evolves. It evolves with time, technology, audience preferences, financing and your story. Adopting this approach will keep you open to new opportunities.

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