Making Innovation Happen
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 09:55PM In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—McKinsey alumnus Kevin Coyne describes how companies can use the business system to evaluate their choices at each stage in the process of creating and delivering products. Aligning conduct at every step with the company’s value proposition creates a truly integrated business strategy.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 01:08AM As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set.
You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.
Visualization got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.
If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.
Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s , where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.
Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system.
Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.
For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.
Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.
You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.
Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.
Friday, May 8, 2009 at 12:21AM How do you find Innovation? Can you find innovation blind-folded or using the same lens? Can you even look for Innovation? Or it just happens. Innovation is coupled in some ways to imagination where every time you see something, you open your eyes to endless possibilities. Literally. According to Chuck Palus and David Horth, authors of The Leader's Edge: Six Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex Challenges, you need to “see with new eyes” in order to find innovation. We had discussed earlier on how leadership can drive innovation inside your business. We naturally fall into a habit of looking at things around us with the same eyes, analyzing it with the same logic and creating the same perceptions. It is easy to get used to this routine. Most managers act the same way. According to the authors, most managers “act on what they expect to see”, take shortcuts, do not spend enough time analyzing information and making a sound judgment. It’s as if the managers are walking around blind-folded since they have already created built-in perceptions of what they see.
Friday, May 1, 2009 at 12:43AM Creative Leadership: leading your staff out of the box Innovation – in 2009 it’s not just a word to be bandied about. The economy is forcing us to get creative. Innovation could be just what we need and it could be very good for business. What exactly is creative leadership? It’s not an easy question to answer, but Ralph Kerle is one person who is well qualified to offer an answer. Ralph is the Program Director of the AGSM Executive Programs Leading for Creativity and Innovation program. He is also the Executive Chairman of the Creative Leadership Forum and Founder of the Creative Skills Training Council, Asia Pacific. If asked to define creative leadership, Ralph can conjure 1001 different definitions off the cuff. When asked to pick just one, he chose the following: Creative leadership is the ability to lead others into a new, innovative and unknown future. Ralph compares creative leadership to the process of sculpting or playwriting.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 09:59PM Everyone thinks about creativity and how it is applied differently. Every single creative conversation is different. Every single explanation for how creativity and its outcome, innovation is correct. So how can we know and differentiate between which process is right for us, what works for us and doesn't? Research around creativity and the way we behave has been going on for over 150 years. Out of the generally discredited science of phrenology in the 18th century grew 19th century psychiatry and now neuroscience. The Journal for Creative Behaviour, an unheralded academic journal, has been turning out erudite and insightful research articles quarterly for over 60 years on creative thinking, creative processes and creativity generally.
