Design Thinking for Innovation

Interview with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, and Author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation June 28, 2009. By Vern Burkhardt Vern Burkhardt (VB): What are some of the most interesting and exciting parts of your job as General Manager of IDEO? Tom Kelley: The most interesting and exciting are tapping into the collective brain of the 530 people who work at IDEO. I am not a designer, engineer, or anthropologist so I don't generate the source material at IDEO. I am the lucky guy who gets to tap into the reservoir of great insights that are being generated there every day.

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Pete Alcorn on the world in 2200

The Ageing Workforce - Have you contributed to the research...

I'm researching the views of employers (those who make the final decision whether to hire one person over another) as opposed to HR people (who generally filter applicants and compile short lists of candidates for the consideration of the final decision-maker) in the finance/financial services sector. A survey I'm using can be found by clicking here. It is now well acknowledged that the Australian population is ageing. The number of older adults living in Australia is steadily increasing meaning that the age of our workforce will also increase. The baby boomers are approaching the traditional retirement age, most within the next two decades. It makes sense that the longer baby boomers work, the more beneficial it will be for our economy. Compared to their predecessors, the baby boomer cohort is generally better educated, and this is correlated with higher workforce participation. Further, research has indicated that many do not intend to fully retire but wish to continue working part time or in less demanding roles.

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CROWDSOURCING Eight Ways to Launch Higher Quality Applications

This is a very interesting whitepaper from uTest

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Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds

This must be 'Live Science'... Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse. A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human. The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations. "Our paper proposes a new model for why modern human behavior started at different times in different regions of the world, why it disappeared in some places before coming back, and why in all cases it occurred more than 100,000 years after modern humans first appeared," said study researcher Adam Powell of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. The idea that demography is linked to modern human behavior has been around for decades, but this is the first time scientists have run

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