GEMBA Innovation Chapbook

Tools for Innovation: A chapbook
GEMBA Innovation, March 2009 for the DESINOVA project
Tools for InnovaTIon: a Chapbook fIrsT DrafT

This chapbook defines, describes, and critiques concepts, tools, and methods used in the related fields of innovation and design. Dictionary.com defines a chapbook as a small book or pamphlet of popular tales and ballads. What could be more appropriate to the needs of innovators and designers? Much of each practice innovation and design is based on knowledge shared via professional grapevines which, if put it to music, would produce entertaining sagas. What follows, then is a collection of our two professions current sagas sung in prose (the written word). There are two major divisions to the topics described in this chapbook. One group of topics, Innovation Tools, is widely used among innovators in business, public agencies, and third-sector organizations. The other group of topics, Design Tools, is widely used among designers. Because the User-Driven Innovation initiative brings together service organization innovators and designers (who may also be innovators), these terms are increasingly common to each profession. We encourage the use of shared meanings. They facilitate the innovation process. There are 42 topics, one on each page, included in this version of the chapbook. One page, Innovation, follows immediately. It is a model for the rest. It states the topic in the title at the top. In the left column it defines the topic and briefly describes its use. In the right column are pros and cons discussed in the literature. Below the columns is a one- or two-line description of the topic as it might be used in a DESINOVA project. At the bottom are links to highly informative references online, chosen to produce a balanced discussion of the topics significance and value. We intend to continue to produce new pages. Please, feel free to contact us if you have relevant suggestions for new topics to be included you can visit us at www.gemba.dk or www.desinova.dk. The chapbook is produced in English because its author speaks English. However, many of the topics described in this chapbook have found their way into Danish, because (a) they are so new that for many, there may be no Danish antecedents; and (b) Danes are continually reinventing Dansk by introducing new terms from other languages. Its a happy coincidence. If however, there are words in Danish that more accurately describe the topics contained in this chapbook, please tell us when this is the case. Better yet, please supply us with entries in Danish and we will be glad to include them. However, ten of the most relevant methods for Danish service companies will be available in Danish.
Robert Jacobson, PhD, GEMBA INNOVATION
Content InnovaTIon AUTHENTICITY BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY BUSINESS INCUBATOR CO-CREATION CONTExTUAL INqUIRY CORPORATE NARRATIVE (BUSINESS STORYTELLING) CULTURAL PROBES CUSTOMER JOURNEY DESIGN COLLABORATORIUM DESIGNING fOR ExPERIENCE DIVERGENCE AND CONVERGENCE ETHNOGRAPHY HEURISTICS (DECISIONMAkING) IDEATION INNOVATION MANAGEMENT INTERACTION DESIGN LATERAL THINkING (SIx THINkING HATS) LEAD-USERS AND LEAD-USER PANELS MIND-MAPPING MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OBSERVATION/USABILITY LABORATORY (TESTING IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT) OPEN INNOVATION PARTICIPATORY OBSERVATION
03
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
CONTENT
PATH DEPENDENCE PERSONAS PREDICTION MARkETS PROTOTYPING raDICal InnovaTIon ROLE-PLAYING GAMES SCENARIO PLANNING SERVICE DESIGN SkUNk WORkS * STAGE-GATE STRATEGIC PLANNING TRANSfORMATION DESIGN TREND ANALYSIS TrIZ USER INNOVATION VIRTUAL WORLDS AND MENTAL MODELS WEB 2.0 AND BEYOND WISDOM Of THE MASSES 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
04
INNOVATION
Definition:
The central process of the User-Driven Innovation project, innovation is a mercurial subject. Its definitions are many and diverse. They have a chicken-and-egg quality: for example, was the first innovation onscious thought or language that enabled it? Dictionary.com defines innovation alternatively as something new or different introduced and the act of introducing something new or different. for our purposes, innovation as used by organizations is well defined by the ThinkSmart blog: People using new knowledge and understanding to experiment with new possibilities in order to implement new concepts that create new value. It may be a tautology, but innovations are always created by innovators, individuals with the capability of thinking beyond the limitations of given wisdom. Methods of innovating may be learned, but the ability to innovate may be innate.
Pros:
Innovation enables organizations of every size and type to positively and favorably change the external environment or the organizations ability to respond to the environment, including how other organizations and individuals respond. It is essential to progress. It is popularly held that the more innovative an organization or individual, the better suited the organization or the person are to acting in the world and achieving success, however it is measured. In modern societies, where change is a constant, innovation has no iconic downside: it is universally favored as a capability, act, or outlook that inevitably moves things forward. Innovators and designers working together can positively change the world.
Current Use: Innovation is encouraged in almost every social setting
except where social mores prohibit it (for example, religious dogma). Currently, innovation is seen as one of the most important ingredients in the success of organizations, the producer of solutions to problems that are not entirely understood or widely perceived; and the generator of opportunities that may not have existed before or that were not exploited. In industrialized and industrializing societies, innovation is valued as a social asset that contributes to global competitiveness and prosperity.
Cons:
Innovation has downsides. An innovation that is improperly conceived, only partially understood, or poorly timed can have deleterious effects. for example, the internal combustion engine made a lot of sense when it was first introduced, providing a way of taking chemical energy on the road to wherever it needed to be applied. Now we know that it also contributes substantially to climate change, the effects of which are still unknown but generally considered dangerous. Also, in some situations, innovations that replace existing solutions for example, growing corn instead of native grains can produce retrograde movement, substituting novelty for tradition that may work better.
Sample use by DESINOVA company:

Links:
Like the World Bank, a large financial institution may want to initiate a PM that indicates how financial markets and investment opportunities will develop, to educate its users with the caveat that its outcome may not bte the truth!
http://www.business.aau.dk/ike/ Aalborg University IkE Group (Innovation, knowledge, and Economic Dynamics) website http://www.innovationtools.com/ Innovation Tools website (new website for business managers and executives) http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/ Innovate, Business Week magazines regular section on innovation and design http://www.foranet.dk/upload/hovedrapport_engelsk.pdf User-Driven Innovation, EBST (Dk), October 2005 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ Harvard Business School Working knowledge website (with a strong emphasis on business innovation)
05
AUThENTICITy
Definition:
Traditionally, the public considered something authentic if experts certified it as genuine or if was commonly thought to be real. (The Danish word for authentic is gte.) Today, when many things can be digitally or physically replicated or simulated, authenticity Is a quality claimed for many products, services, communications, and experiences. Marketing consultants advise their clients to speak authentically to their audiences. Products are designed to appear authentic. Destination resorts and museums feature exhibitions and environments that are alleged to be authentic. Recently, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore published Authenticity, a theoretical and critical review of the concept of authenticity in which they argue that authenticity is negotiable: what is real and what is not, what is authentic and what is not, are all a result of formal and informal negotiations between makers and buyers.
Pros:
Who can argue with authenticity? That which is old and time-tested is clearly superior to its counterparts or so our cognitive machinery tells us. Thus, manufacturers, marketers, and retailers have invested a great deal of resources in the development, manufacture, marketing, and sale of products, services, communications, and experiences that embody in one way or another someones concept of what is authentic. When their point of view coincides closely with consumer attitudes and preferences regarding things that are authentic, then the thing being invented and sold does well in the market. Most products do not attain this degree of excellence, whether as things that are genuinely authentic or as inauthentic things that nevertheless come across as good tries.
Current Use:
Although its use seems to be abating, authenticity was heavily applied to the description and promotion of types of foods, entertainments, and styles of clothing. As Pine and Gilmore point out, what has been important to consumers is that if a thing is claimed to be authentic, it must be. If, however, a thing isnt claimed to be authentic, but only appears to be authentic, consumers may accept it if the mimicry is accurate. further, if a thing is completely false and advertised as false, but done well, it may achieve a new type of authenticity. Disneyland is considered the paragon of real/false inventions.
Cons:
Partial authenticity is an oxymoron (that is, a contradiction). Once a thing has perceptively deviated from reality, it is no longer authentic. It is then only an approximation of authenticity. Claiming or implying that it is authentic can backfire if the intention is to present it as authentic as real. The larger problem with the authenticity paradigm is that authenticity may have nothing to do with a things appeal or appropriateness as a solution to a customer need. In fact, the paradigm may not be a paradigm at all, but simply a marketing fad that recurs with regularity, recycled with each generation as it harkens back to its roots.

Links:
A retail company wants to sell gift packages that are authentic. It conducts historical and social research to determine what Danes think about food that makes some products authentic and others not, and designs new packages to fit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_%28reenactment%29 Authenticity (reenactment), Wikipedia (historical reenactments) http://authenticitybook.com/ Website about the book Authenticity, by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore (contains useful concept discussions) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh3R90HAyOq Authenticity, students short video monologue for kansas State University class http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2008/id20080528_503953.htm How to Standt Out? Try Authenticity, Business Week, May 28, 2008 http://www.hermenaut.com/ fake Authenticity, The Hermenaut Online, Issue 15 (click through to appropriate contents)
06
BlUE OCEAN STRATEGy

Definition:
In a Harvard Business Review article published in 2004, INSEAD professors W. Chan kim and Rene Mauborgne introduced the term Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) to summarize a decade of research on business success. In 2005, they published a book of the same name that achieved business bestseller status. The Blue Ocean Strategy is a branded, attractively packaged collection of kim and Mauborgnes recommendations for business success. Briefly, it defines two regions in which businesses can choose to operate: Red Oceans crowded with competitors, bloodied by energy-sapping conflict; and calm Blue Oceans without competitors. A blue ocean is created when a company achieves value innovation that creates value simultaneously for both the buyer and the company. The innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market.
Pros: BOS can be seen as a new management approach to change the business
core and model for a company. In addition, the value of non-customers is appreciated as a mean to expand the market base. BOS contains a roadmap for assessing a company and its present business and the logic it is based on. Its particular interesting for mature companies with the need for restructuring its competitive base. BOS includes a number of specific methods and techniques for evaluating current product and value propositions, such as the strategy canvas, four actions framework etc., which might be adopted by business executives, consultants and agencies.
Cons: According to Wikipedia, It is argued that rather than a theory, Blue
Current Use:
Popular to speak about, BOS adoption by business appears sporadic (in part because many companies implement some BOS features and not others). Also, because BOS incorporates elements of other popular business practices, a company may be implementing the BOS but not know it. However, some large corporations, like koreas diversified manufacturer LG, have praised BOS positive effects on their plans and external and internal operations.
Ocean Strategy is a successful attempt to brand a set of already existing concepts and frameworks with a highly sticky idea. The Blue Ocean/Red Ocean analogy is a powerful and memorable metaphor [that] can be powerful enough to stimulate people to action. However, the concepts behind the Blue Ocean Strategy (such as the competing factors, the consumer cycle, non-customers, etc.) are not new. The most obvious weakness of BOS is it does not say where or how to find Blue Oceans. Every company is limited by its won accumulated learning and knowledge and cannot escape its own destiny. One needs other methods perhaps opensource innovation to look for and find Blue Oceans.
Sample use by DESINOVA company: Currently, no DESINOVA companies have implemented the Blue Ocean Strategy, but BOS
could prove useful especially when new products/innovations are being conceived and then readied for implementation. Links:
http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/ Official website of the Blue Ocean Strategy inventors, book, and organization http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kim_blue_ocean_strategy.html Blue Ocean Strategy in a nutshell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Blue Ocean Strategy, Wikipedia http://www.slideshare.net/jayrobinson/blue-ocean-strategy-summary/ SlideShare visual presentation of the Blue Ocean Strategy
07
BUSINESS INCUBATOR
Definition:
A business incubator is an institution often a laboratory or research center set up to nurture startups and early-stage companies, thus improving their chances of surviving and growing. This focus on startups and early-stage companies distinguish incubators from general research parks. Incubators are often publicly financed. They include public R&D centers; self-standing nonprofit companies; university R&D units; corporate divisions responsible for commercializing technology and spinning off new companies. A company usually is resident in an incubator from six months to one or two years. In addition to providing inexpensive accommodations and shared office services, incubators offer entrepreneurs business training, expert advice, techniques of innovation, and preparation for fundraising; they seldom provide investment capital but have close relations with VCs and other sources of capital. In Denmark, Vkstfonden, a public agency, acts as an incubator VC. It funds startup and earlystage companies that survive a rigorous competition.
Pros: Its claimed by business incubator directors and incubator advocates
that startups raised in incubators have a much greater survival rate (almost 100% better) than startups that to go it alone. Its certainly true that incubatornourished company executives are more sophisticated when dealing with VCs, corporate venture managers, and potential business partners. Incubators provide a valuable service to the founders and executive officers of startups and earlystage companies: peer support. founders and CEOs regularly report that social companionship with their peers is as valuable to them personally as the technical and instructional benefits of incubator residency are valuable to their companies. Presumably this results in better performance and in turn, business success for these executives and their companies.
Cons:
Current Use:
Today, most industrial nations provide incubators for local startup and early-stage companies, though never enough. Demand greatly outstrips supply. In Denmark, there are many business incubators; most are affiliated with universities and research parks. Among the best known are NOVI, Symbion judged the worlds best incubator in 2005 CAT, and the new Medicon. The resund Region is rich in incubators including those in Malm and Lund. MINC is a well-known incubator in Malm that serves startups and early-stage companies working on both sides of the resund. The economic downturn hurts incubators: scarce capital keeps their companies from leaving.
It has never been established that business incubators provide satisfactory financial or social ROI. Its difficult to know whether companies actually do better or not for having spent time in incubators. There are many ways of measuring success and equally, many diverse paths that companies can take on graduating from a business incubator. Correlating the two to determine the value of incubators is nearly impossible, especially when other variables are factored in. VCs and other investors are divided regarding the value of business incubators. Many VCs appreciate the ease of access that incubators offer to potential funding vehicles. Others believe that residency in an incubator weakens a startup or early-stage company by keeping it dependent on the incubator. Also, they claim, companies remain in incubators too long for the same reason that some students remain in school too long: to avoid competing in the real world.

Links:
DESINOVA companies by definition are not startups or early-stage companies; hence, they are not clients of business incubators. However, its possible that a DESINOVA company might want to spin out one of its units that could then become a business incubator customer.
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/bi/index.htm Business Incubators Database, European Commission, Dec 11, 2003 http://en.fi.dk/publications/publications-2007/exploring-best-practises-in-incubation-in-europe-and-israel/?searchterm=incubators, Exploring Best Practices in Incubation in Europe and Israel, Danish Agency for Science, Technology & Innovation (fIST), April 16, 2007 http://www.nbia.org/resource_center/what_is/index.phphttp://www.nbia.org/resource_center/what_is/index.php What is Business Incubation? U.S. National Business Incubation Association, 2009 http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6479855 Report from Europe: Incubators hatch small successes, Drew Wilson, Electronic Business, Sep 27, 2007 http://www.btds.biz/ New Venture Creation and Sustainable Development, Business & Technology Development Strategies LLC, New York
08
Co-Creation
Definition:
Co-creation is the process by which two or more agents work together to create something. In the case of innovation and design, it is the process of business innovators or designers working together with users or their advocates to specify desired products and services. Co-creation sums up many different innovation-related methodological streams that place the user in the center of things and make the user a principal actor. This is especially true of those streams that have democratization of innovation and design as a principal goal.
Pros:
Co-creation is democratic. It recruits every available person into the research, design, and development of innovative product and service offerings that will be pitched to the co-creators. Co-creation enables many points of view to be gathered, displayed, and analyzed in an easily analyzed framework. Co-creation is the ultimate expression of userdriven influences. It relies on prior education of everyone in the development chain and theoretically should result in alignment of all participants on common goals. In this sense, it is deeply transformative.
Current Use:
Despite the attention given to co-creation in business textbooks, among innovation theoreticians, and prescriptive research outcomes, in fact it is a business practice honored more often in the breech than in the barrel. There are two reasons for this: (1) There are few (and there may be no) co-creation experts in each geographical locale and (2) larger organizations dont really like to share customer information with their supply chain companies, the small-business community, and government agencies.
Cons:
Its impossible to hear or use the term co-creation without recalling the Biblical story of the Creation problems associated with co-creation: Grandiose expectations. Co-creation ideally would lead to a quantum leap solution: absolutely new, a true creation. But more often, it results in refinements to existing solutions. Participating in co-creation is costly in terms of time and emotions, and can result in shared biases. If the results are trivial and expectations for a dramatic change are not met, its unlikely that co-creation for that purpose will happen again. Co-creations promises are still largely hypothetical.

Links:
Over a period of years, a company has spent years cultivating co-creationists as an active part of its organization. In turn, the co-creationists funnel into the company a stream of innovative thoughts and insights.
http://www.12manage.com/methods_prahalad_co-creation.html Co-creation, from Pk Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy, 12 Manage / Executive fast-Track website http://masscustomization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/cocreation/index.html New Blog on Mass Customization and Rapid Ranufacturing,Mass Customization and Open Innovation blog, March 31, 2008 http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/tags/customer-co-creation/page/2/ Is PlayStation opening up their home? Don Tapscott, Wikinomics blog, March 2, 2007 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Courses/StratTech07/Tech/Preso/E-cocreation.doc (download), Business Models of co-creation, iSchool, University of California, Berkeley
09
CONTExTUAl INqUIRy
Definition:
Contextual inquiry is a formal term for a simple process in which most designers engage as a matter of course. To quote Wikipedia, Contextual inquiry is a user-centered design (UCD) method, part of the contextual design methodology, that happens up front in the software development lifecycle. It calls for one-on-one observations of work practice in its naturally occurring context. During or after the observations, discussion ensues wherein users daily routines or processes are discovered so that a product or website can be best designed to either work with the processes or help to shorten or eliminate them altogether.
Pros: Contextual inquiry locates the researcher as close to the use process
as is possible. It results in potentially deep insights that would not be available through either simple observation or reliance on synthetic users like personas. Contextual inquiry also creates a bridge to ethnographic techniques that collect information based on cultural norms and social behavior. This design methodology is a perfect complement to ethnographic methods, making good use of ethnography in ways proven to have positive results.
Current Use:
Contextual inquiry, in which the researcher assumes the role of student to the prospective end user, is widespread. This is particularly true where engineering alone may not produce a usable product or service:, especially when a new category of product or service is being designed. Examples of its use include the design of new types of cellphone interfaces, vehicles that are novel and unprecedented, systems for the delivery of services that were unavailable before, and so forth. Most user-centered designers employ some sort of contextual inquiry in the process of design.
Cons:
Prospective end users dont have all the answers. As with other forms of research that rely on user accounts and experiences, there is a basic vulnerability to the imperfect knowledge that end users have about the way in which new products and services ultimately will be used. Outside the laboratory, people are endlessly creative and always find new uses of products and services unanticipated by their creators, often transforming them into virtually new products and services based on the actual contexts not the projected contexts within which the products and services are used. Contextual inquiry can lead researchers astray because, on its face, it may appear impervious to challenge.

Links:
Anticipating the design of a new cellphone interface, researchers sit down with representative prospective end users and go through the various processes of using the interface under specified conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry Contextual Inquiry, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_design Contextual Design, Wikipedia http://www.deyalexander.com/resources/uxd/contextual-inquiry.html Contextual design and field inquiry, Dey Alexander Consulting website http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/remote_contextual_inquiry_a_technique_to_improve_enterprise_software Remote Contextual Inquiry, Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo and Jeff English, Boxes and Arrows website, 19 April 2004 http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Contextual+Inquiry+Overview Contextual Inquiry Overview, fluid Project wiki
10
CORPORATE NARRATIVE
(Business storytelling)
Definition:
Corporate narrative or storytelling is one way to discover what may be a hidden truth but of greater value, what people in an organization believe and what drives them. Human communities preserve their most precious knowledge as stories and myths or sagas. Myths or sagas are fundamental and long-lasting. They prescribe proper social relationships, social mores, and values to which everyone in the community must adhere. Stories tend to be more immediate, short-term, and particular to the topic or event to which they relate. In a guided session, individuals and group stories are collected, analyzed, and interpreted to give a state-of-the-company overview. When guided methods are unavailable, an investigator can conduct interviews and examine records, press accounts, and publications to reconstruct prevailing stories that can then be used to inform innovation and change processes.
Pros: Everyone likes to talk about themselves, their lives, and their challenges.
Corporate narrative is a popular and enjoyable way to get people to divulge their personal stories, in particular those that pertain to the company, and to invent new stories that may be equally revealing and valuable. Under managed conditions, corporate narrative is a safe way to express praise for a coworker, ideal goals, dissatisfaction with a situation, or a new way of doing things all expressions that are difficult to make in other public situations. Storytelling in Denmark and the Nordic countries is well developed as an educational tool and experts are available to help in business situations. Corporate narrative is democratic in its practice.
Cons: Current Use:

Storytelling is ancient. Today, in most cultures, it is relegated to writers, artists, and performers, although skilled teachers also use storytelling to educate in a lasting way. Corporate narrative professional analysis of myths and stories to understand prevailing cultures and relationships in companies is more recent. Many professional innovation and change-management firms now use corporate narrative as an essential component of transformational innovation and planned change. Practitioners in the field define corporate narrative and storytelling as group processes of discovery and affirmation, respectively.
Observing a storytelling session, a more sober manager might inquire, What for? He or she might note that the company information environment is already saturate with word-of-mouth chatter and gossip. Is it really productive to add to the load? Also, corporate narrative takes time off the job whether in a group setting or during a one-on-one interview. There is a sort of euphoria associated with storytelling and story-listening that feels transformative but its effects may last only days or hours before mundane events bury the sense of accomplishment. The largest barrier to corporate narratives broad acceptance, however, is a factor of its success: too many different practitioners, each with his or her own style, making quality control difficult.
A manufacturing company encounters a problem with interdepartmental coordination. Using corporate narrative techniques, the departments discover many different stories in effect. They then stitch together a collective story that explains why coordination is poor and how to improve it. Links: http://www.anecdote.com.au/index.php Anecdotes vast archive of knowledge and yes, stories about corporate narrative
http://www.makingstories.net/narrative_leadership_by_David_fleming.pdfNarrative Leadership, Dave fleming, 2001 http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/seth-kahan/leading-change/organizational-storytellers-take-economy-focus-innovation-hyper-produ/fast Company, Organizational Storytellers Take on the Economy - focus is Innovation, Hyper-production, feb 23, 2009 http://www.astoriedcareer.com/svend-erik_engh_qa.html A Storied Career, Svend-Erik Engh: q&A http://www.amazon.com/Ugly-Duckling-Goes-Work- Workplace/dp/0814408710/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTf8&s=books&qid=1236216889&sr=1-8 The Ugly Duckling Goes to Work: Wisdom for the Workplace from the Classic Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Mette Norgaard and Steven Covey (AMACOM, 2005)
11
CUlTURAl PROBES
Definition:
Cultural Probes have an antecedent everyone recognizes: The treasure hunt game. In the game, players are instructed to find certain hidden items in a location. Usually, they have to navigate to that location first, which is key to discovering the items. A Cultural Probe is like an open-ended treasure hunt: Users of a product or technology are given instructions, and often actual packages of devices (like a voice recorder), and told to explore the environment in which they live and work, where the innovation being developed will be employed. Individuals are usually required to keep a diary in order to accurately record each discovery emotional and intellectual, as well as physical that is relevant to the innovation. After suitable time has elapsed, probers are called together to report their findings.
Pros:
A Cultural Probe theoretically can detect phenomena that ordinary ethnography or trend analysis might miss. It is a more focused approach, but its main value-add is that the user is the researcher and is accountable in both roles to the development or design team. Rather than deal in gross generalizations, a prober can be very narrow and precise defining the cultural milieu in terms of his or her own experience only. This may be considered a more scientific way of collecting cultural information than less fine-grained methodologies like the various tests and elements in conventional market research.
Current Use: Cultural Probes by other names have always been popular
ways of surveying the social landscape in which products and services must survive and thrive. Now that they have a formal name and a growing methodology, Cultural Probes are becoming uniform and thus scientifically more reliable. The so-called ITC industries IT and communications are heavy users of Cultural Probes.
Cons:
What knowledge exactly does a Cultural Probe produce that cannot be gotten some other way? The very definition of a Cultural Probe is so loosely drawn that virtually anything that the prober brings back can be purported to have some sort of value. Then the act of interpretation can become (a) mystical, because there are no hard and fast rules; and (b) overwhelming, since the number of possible relevant interpretations is large and in some cases nearly infinite. A Cultural Probe absolutely sensitizes researchers to the complexity of the social milieu facing a new product or service, but is this news?

Links:
In preparation for the development of new communication services, a transport company conducts Cultural Probes to see which services its customers will adopt early, and which later on.
www.alistapart.com/articles/culturalprobe Inside Your Users Minds: The Cultural Probe, Ruth Stalker-firth, A List Apart No. 234, March 27, 2007 www.sfu.ca/~benn/iat333/DESIGNING%20A%20CULTURAL%20PROBE.doc Designing a Cultural Probe, Derek Pante et al, Simon fraser University (British Columbia), January 15, 2008 http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/002816.html Cultural probes for intranet user research, Column Two blog, April 8, 2008 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1228219 Moving from cultural probes to agent-oriented requirements engineering, Anne Boetcher, University of Melbourne, ACM Series on International Conferences, 2006
12
CUSTOMER JOURNEy
Definition: Customer journey is a spatial metaphor describing the
customers mental and emotional process from the state of becoming aware of his or her need or want to the moment at which he or she purchases the product or service. Sometimes it includes the customers use of the product, the experience induced by using it, and the aftermath: whether the customer repeats the purchase and use of the product or decides to purchase or use another product. These internal events, diaried by the customer, can be mapped to represent (a) the process itself and (b) all of the other factors in the environment bearing on the customers decisions. This map is the customer journey. In a sense, it is the reciprocal or matching opposite of a customer experience design. When well done, the customer experiences design at each touch point direst the customer on the desired journey, toward a purchase.
Pros: Mapping a customer journey is a valuable discipline:
it totally focuses the experience designer on the customers thought processes and emotions, creating an empathy with the customer that less intimate types of research cannot. The mapmaker is working with the actual customer events as written down or verbally reported by the customer, not a researcher. The customer can critique the journey map while it is being made or later, adding nuanced descriptions of his or her thoughts and emotions as they occurred and as they are remembered -- two different sets of impressions! This level of understanding is often unattainable using other methodologies. Because customer journey maps are usually graphical, they are easily understood across disciplines. Comparisons among different maps are easy. In a company, internal customers maps, although not common, would be useful for determining the right strategy for promoting a desired innovation, at introduction and later during implementation.
Current Use:
for years, advertising firms and retail stores have mapped customer journeys in order to establish the proper force and structure of an argument to buy their products. How does the customer encounter the product and then what? Research survey, focus group, secret shopping, and so forth provides data to build an initial map and then refine it. In the case of innovation within a company, the customer journey may have another use: to map managements response to a demonstrated needed change or new development (a product or process) and its solution, the innovation. Such a strategic use can be extended to project innovation acceptance throughout the company and among the companys customers.
Cons:
One customer does not an audience make. Many maps must be constructed to arrive at a sufficiently general rule to guide development of a product and its introduction to the market, or an innovation in a company. Because customer journey mapping is proprietary, each method is unique; comparability of maps from maker to maker isnt easy. The same is true of the research that goes into producing customer journey maps. It varies widely, in part depending on the extensivity of the journey space defined by the researchers and how many factors are identified and associated with each customer event. It may be difficult to give each event the same attention, in which case it may become the weakest link.

Links:
Looking to introduce a new line of outdoor apparel with a new brand, a company asks prospective buyers and surrogates (individuals with desired characteristics) to go through the process of defining their needs, and finding and buying the product. Their reports become a journey map.
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/public_service_reform/delivery_council/cjm.aspx Uk Cabinet Directive, Customer Journey Mapping, feb 6, 2009 http://www.mycustomer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=133150&d=101&h=817&f=816 Improving the Customer Experience, MyCustomer.com, Jul 31, 2007 http://www.livework.co.uk/our-work/danish-rail Danish Rail Service Usability: Mapping the passenger experience from A-Z, live|work, Nov-Dec 2007 http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tracking-practical-kpis-with-web-analytics/5755/ About online customer journeys, Search Engine Journal, Oct 3, 2007 http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/customer-perspectives-on-service-innovation Slideshow, Customer Perspectives on Service Design, Peer Insight, Oval, Swisscom Mobile, and Hewlett-Packard, Innovation in Services Conference, Apr 7, 2007
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Definition: Designers will recognize the Design Collaboratorium (DC), a
DESIGN COllABORATORIUM
Pros:
In principle, the more points of view and professional evaluations that can be brought to bear on a problem, the better the eventual solution that results. The DC definitely meets the test of variety. At the very least, it is sowing awareness of the nature of complex problems and what each of the contributing disciplines offers for the solution of those problems. In the ideal case, the DC will spawn new product and service concepts and possibly actual products and services that are well suited to the business environment and future markets out of the gate. If it contributes to the top-line of its sponsor/participants that is, if it results in new lines of revenue it may be judged a success.
general model for product and service innovation, as a variation on the complex integrated industrial design methods. The DC is unique because it is applying integrated design practices beyond the confines of design per se and has been enlarged to include disciplines beyond design including systems theory, usability methodologies, user participation in design, and psychology. The DC is a Danish invention uniting the development laboratories of Bang & Olufson, Danfoss, and kommunedata; and the University of Aarhus in a common effort to perfect integrated, multidisciplinary methods of creating complex new products.
Current Use:
One DC currently exists, in Denmark. But analogues exist in other nations in the form of inter-laboratory consortiums and technology centers. The Danish DC, however, is more self-conscious and self-analytical than the other collaborations, which evolved as a matter of fact in response to need. The emergence of new DCs may wait on proof that the Danish DC is effective and that the benefits for the three companies and the university exceed their investment.
Cons: Collaboration within the same profession is difficult enough; across
disciplinary boundaries and companies in different lines of business, the DC becomes its own case study in dealing with complexity. The physical infrastructure of the DC is modest, but the social organization is demanding. A problem common to similar collaborations is the resistance that participating organizations often have to sharing IP, let alone products that may result.
Sample use by DESINOVA company: Business planners within a company participating in a Design Collaboratorium makes a market challenge seeks
suggestions from the DC for how to meet the market with new products that meet usability standards. Links:
http://www.mci.sdu.dk/m/Research/Publications/UCD/fROMUSAB.DIS.fINAL.PDf from usability lab to design collaboratorium: Reframing usability practice, Jacob Buur and Susanne Bdker, Mads Clausen Institute, SDU, 2002 http://www.nwow.alexandra.dk/publikationer/NordiCHI2000.pdf Ethnographic fieldwork under industrial constraints: Towards Design-in-Context, Werner Sperschneider and kirsten Bagger, Mads Clausen Institute, SDU http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=400612&sectioncode=26 Research Collaboration, Harriet Swain, The Times Higher Education, 14 february 2008 http://libra.msra.cn/paperdetail.aspx?id=902647 Understanding experience in interactive systems, Jodi forlizzi and katja Batterbee, ACM Conference on Interactive Systems, 2004
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DESIGNING fOR ExPERIENCE

Definition:
Designing for Experience (DfE) is the preferred term-of-art for the practice of crating and assembling holistic compositions of experiences. A company or agency produces scored arrangements of experiences also called touch points to persuade, provoke, and most importantly, initiate desired behaviors among key stakeholders (most often today, influencing buying decisions among business customers and political action or its lack among citizens). This meta-practice subsumes design disciplines, environmental psychology, landscape architecture, theme-park development and tourism, media of all types, and persuasive disciplines including advertising and public relations. Interest in DfE crystallized after publication of The Experience Economy by Jim Pine and Joe Gilmore in 1996 and has steadily increased.
Pros:
DfE is the other side of the human-centric design coin. It posits that the external environment experiences that individuals have that are not tied specifically to a product or service may be as determinative of their behavior as are experiences tied to specific products and services. DfE strives to create a continuous experience of the sponsor within the mind of the customer or citizen, at least when it comes time to act favorably, in the interests of the sponsor. In that case, it is incumbent on designers to help craft environments that by engendering experiences, induce acceptance of innovations and their sound use. DfE, it is claimed, will have great power as methods for composing successful scores become better known and implemented.
Current Use:
DfE is a very new practice. Most writing about DfE usually traces it back to 1955, when Imagineering interdisciplinary design was use by Walt Disney and his team to create a totalistic immersive experience, Disneyland, evocative of certain Disney themes and commerce. (The even older Tivoli was a major inspiration for Walt Disney.) Because of the fields youth and because DfE designers prefer to remain in the background, case studies of DfE are rare; but hiring patterns and press accounts suggest a coming flood of applications.
Cons: DfE today is ill-defined and can mean many things ranging from the
development of destination resorts (including whole nations, like Dubai) to the design of interactive websites. As DfE case studies are few, its impossible to validate the claims of DfEs) supporters. The construction of full-blown DfEs may prove difficult as individuals and whole societies alter their attitudes and behaviors in response to unplanned for experiences like climate change and the skyrocketing price of petroleum-based fuels. That may be like shooting at moving targets from a platform that is itself moving in response to change.

Links:
A retail client wants to alter its customer base radically, from older to younger and from men to women. To do this, it needs to totally reposition its brand. It initiates a DfE program to totally revamp its customer experience.
http://www.techgnosis.com/experience.html Experience Design and the Design of Experience, Erik Davis, 2001, Techngnosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_economy Experience Economy, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_design Experience Design, Wikipedia http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2008/id20080411_491286.htm Its All About Experience, Sourab Vossoughi, Business Week, April 11, 2008 http://www.dux2007.org/ DUx 2007 (Design for User Experience) website, conference held November 2007
15
DIVERGENCE AND CONVERGENCE

Definition:
Brainstorming and similar group ideation processes often produce storms of inventive ideas, because of the diversity of participants. This proliferation of ideas Is called divergence. Most of these ideas are different from one another. If each of these divergent ideas had to be investigated and for each a separate conclusion drawn, the group leaders and ideators would be unable to get much work done except to plow through the initial bursts of brilliance! fortunately, there is a countervailing mental and social phenomenon, convergence that seeks closure and then fuses ideas, reducing the sheer number of ideas to a manageable flow. The complementary processes of divergence and convergence make it possible to economically ideate and evaluate at the front-end of innovation.
Pros/Cons: There are no pros and cons for divergence and convergence,
though, in order to be successful, an ideation process needs both in proper proportion. Adjusting the proportion correctly requires the ideation session manager to know when to signal its time for the group to reverse its field, from divergent thinking to convergent thinking; or at least, to consider when to do so by consensus.
Current Use:
Divergence and convergence are normal processes of human discourse and decision-making. for decision-making to be effective, the two processes must be balanced which means having an ideation group or population that also is balance between those who favor divergent, inventive thinking and those who favor convergent, consolidating thinking. Here is what to look for, from ChangingMinds.org: Some people prefer diverging, as it means the potential of a wrong decision is never reached. These people often have a preference for perceiving. People who rapidly seek convergence often have a preference for the structure of judging. ZING and similar ideation technologies enforce a divergence-convergence back and forth among brainstorming participations.

Links:
An ideation process initiated to identify new product innovations is time-limited by the session manager to maintain predetermined time proportions for invention (divergence) and synthesis (convergence), thus resulting in a finite, manageable number of innovations to be tested.
http://changingminds.org/explanations/decision/divergence_convergence.htm Divergence and Convergence, ChangingMinds.org, 2009. http://designthinking.ideo.com/?tag=divergence-and-convergence What does design thinking feel like? Tim Brown, Design Thinking, Sep 7, 2008 http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleDetails.asp?a=152 Creativity made simple: Divergence and Convergence are critical to successful ideation, Joyce Wycoff, Innovation Tools, Aug 19, 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_and_divergent_production Convergent and divergent production, Wikipedia http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=1265 Divergent and convergent thinking, Chris Corrigan, Mar 10, 2007
16
EThNOGRAPhy
Definition:
TBroadly speaking, and expanding on Wikipedias stilted description, ethnography is a genre of research and reporting that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnographic practice is derived from cultural and social anthropology, social sciences with reasonably deep roots. The first ethnography, in fact, may have first occurred in prehistoric times, when travelers made notes on communities they encountered, their mores, and their peoples behaviors. Modern ethnography is a relatively young profession most of its practitioners still are trained as anthropologists and the application of ethnography for commercial purposes more recent still. In fact, commercial ethnography is still in formation with an incomplete theoretical base and canons and practices that are highly relativistic. In the USA, there is constant talk of a split between the establishment, mostly academic American Anthropological Association (AAA) and commercial ethnographers, a debate mirrored in other nations.
Pros:
Ethnography is inherently human-centric. It points innovators and designers to user-directed applications of technology and technique to serve peoples needs and solve societal and environmental problems. Its methods place human beings first and foremost as the beneficiaries of wise innovations and the victims of innovations (or lack of innovation) that have negative consequences. Ethnography is gradually coming to terms with its lack of a coherent theoretical base and is developing canons to ensure ethical practices, although their enforcement is currently ad hoc. Ethnographers bring a new way of looking at business and civic issues that challenges traditional mechanistic planning and policymaking. In the coming years, ethnography may enlarge the societal conversation about what is important and what priorities need to be served. for innovators, ethnography can suggest new user-directed innovation methods; and for designers, it can generate new insights for product and service use, and useful constraints.
Current Use:
Ethnography is enjoying a global springtime of new opportunities in companies and public agencies as executives and managers seek better insights into new markets and their customers behaviors, wants, and needs. The use of ethnography in the development of new information services and telecommunications (ITC), for example, is coterminous with the emergence of the Internet and wireless services as dominant technologies for sharing information.
Cons:
Ethnographys value outside of social science remains to be proven; so far, most accounts of its value are anecdotal and unquantified. As a result, in business particularly, ethnographic research may be funded but its findings are often discounted or ignored entirely. Ethnography introduces a new political pole that can be used to distort or defeat innovation as a process. Commercial ethnography, responding to the market, often resembles market research; its ethics remain murky.

Links:
Like the World Bank, a large financial institution may want to initiate a PM that indicates how financial markets and investment opportunities will develop, to educate its users with the caveat that its outcome may not be the truth!
http://www.antropologi.info/antromag/corporate/ Special Report on Commercial Anthropology, Anthropologi.info website http://www.practicinganthropology.org/ National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) website http://www.epic2008.com/ EPIC 2008 (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) taking place in Copenhagen in October 2008 http://www.anthro-phd.dk/ Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography (CU and U of Aarhus) website http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/anthrodesign/ Anthrodesign newsgroup (spirited discussion of ethnographic issues)
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hEURISTICS
(DeCisionmaking)
Definition:
Heuristics is the term of art used to describe human processes of making decisions and learning that are informal and also the psychological and cognitive science that studies this process. A heuristic is a specific informal method, often unique to an individual but more frequently, employed by most human beings who, after all, share physiologies and cultural styles. These are common heuristics from George Polyas 1945 classic, How to Solve It, cited in Wikipedia: Look to the unknown. If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture. If you cant find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that (working backward). If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example. Try solving a more general problem first (the inventors paradox: the more ambitious plan may have more chances of success).
Pros: Heuristics are a part of everyday life.
Individuals use them to solve problems for which they havent the knowledge or time to apply more formal logical methods. In many cases, the heuristics are a more efficient and even more accurate way of determining the best solution for a problem (including devising innovations for problems that the individuals have not encountered before). Because most heuristics are psychologically hard-wired or learned as part of the process of socialization, groups can share heuristic methods to apply many minds to solving common problems and in the process, learning together what works. A trained decision maker can thus pick and choose among personal heuristics, or others that have been described, to create a heuristic toolkit appropriate to the problem or problems at hand.
Cons: Current Use:

Heuristics are part of everyones daily experience. They are a universal alternative to formal, logical methods of solving problems and innovating. In addition, heuristics play a large role in computer programming, design and engineering, and usability testing (also called heuristic evaluation). Innovators make intense use of heuristic algorithms; this may be one of their defining characteristics.
IEach persons heuristic inventory is unique. It contains personal and collective biases. Working on a common problem, team members may have to work hard to arrive at common understandings. Heuristics-based decisionmaking is that it is sometimes difficult for individuals to describe for colleagues how they came to a conclusion, since heuristics are informal and the language used by each person to describe them if they can even recall them after reaching a solution will vary. The informality of heuristics means they cannot be translated into arithmetic, which means they do not lend themselves to quantitative evaluation although their solutions may.

Links:
Business developers contemplating a new line of retail services applies the recognition heuristic to sort through various possible service alternatives and paths to them, eliminating those that resemble past failed attempts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic Heuristic, Wikipedia http://tinyurl.com/5jjamp Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, T. Gilovich et al (Google Books website) http://gilovich.socialpsychology.org/ Dr. Thomas D. Gilovich, Professor, Cornell University, Social Psychology Profile (includes citations) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5423.html Managers Heuristics, R&D Performance Volatility, Harvard Business School Working knowledge http://www.edit-work.com/framework.pdf What Drives Innnovation? A Heuristic framework for Corporate Innovation, Decision Analyst
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IDEATION
Definition:
Ideation is a term invented in the 1820s to mean the process of forming ideas or images. Of course, the first human being ideated. But the formalization of this process was a consequence of the 19th Centurys fascination with human science, how the body and mind function. Wikipedias definition of ideation is more proactive: idea generation. Ideation is the willful act of generating ideas. for each person the precise act is different, but there is enough evidence to believe that ideation occurs in predictable settings and that the ideation process can be improved upon through human agency. Successful ideation that produces many genuinely new and potentially useful ideas is a personal act but also one subject to the social environment. Ideation has a second, related meaning: the ability to envision oneself in the future, a rarer trait than the ability to come up with new ideas.
No Pros and Cons:
Ideation is a necessary process that naturally occurs when humans engage in problem solving. It can be formalized and applied to problems having to do with the front-end of innovation. Ideation as a collective process can be managed. It seems to be the case that the ability to come up with new ideas is widespread, but that the ability to formally ideate to purposefully generate new ideas of a particular type may be a less common human trait. While the evidence isnt all in, innovation managers who seek to maximize their ideation success rates will want to do advance work identifying individuals with striking records of ideation success.
Current Use:
Ideation is at the absolute front-end of innovation. It is the well that gathers thoughts and experiences, and from them distills ideas and visions. Many if not most individuals are ideators from childhood on, some better than the rest. Natural ideators may have unusual mental capacities including a striking ability to think laterally. To harness and enhance ideation on a broad scale, however, benefits from a well-stocked arsenal of techniques (listed and described on Wikipedia; see the link below). Ideas, like electricity, cannot be stored on the shelf. In place of the electrical battery, ideation relies on idea banks and ideation networks to preserve good ideas for future use.
Source: David Armano

Links:
Using ZING (see link below) to speed the process of ideation, a team of designers and business innovators from a leading infrastructure provider developed numerous ways of characterizing the companys line of work and what could be done to describe and promote potential new lines of business.
http://www.haworth.com/Brix?pageID=1374 Haworth Ideation Group: Performance-Driven Office Design, Haworth, Inc., 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving Problem Solving, Wikipedia (extensive hyperlinked list of problem-solving techniques) http://www.id-mag.com/article/Getting_Serious_About_LEGO/ Getting Serious About LEGO, I.D. magazine, undated (2009) http://www.hiit.fi/u/asalovaa/articles/salovaara-et-al-interact2005-future-oriented-information.pdf [PDf] Use of future-Oriented Information in User-Centered Product Concept Ideation, Antti Salovaara (http://www.hiit.fi/~asalovaa/) and Petri Mannonen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, 2005 http://www.slideshare.net/jdpuva/brainstorming-and-ideation-overview [Slideshow] Brainstorming and Ideation Overview, OVO, Mar 4, 2008 ZING: http://gemba.dk/gembazing.aspx?lang=da
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INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
Definition:
Innovation management has two components. The first component is the management of the business processes that support innovation: mission definition, goal setting, team building, trend analysis and scenarios, assignments, co-creation with customers, collaboration with other organizational units, liaison with top management, customer experience design, ethnography and other types of human research, involvement with strategic planning, and so forth. The second component is managing the overall process of innovation and the progress of specific innovations from start (ideation) to finish (implementation). An innovation manager is likely to be balancing many activities simultaneously. Because innovation is seen as cutting-edge, even after its been institutionalized, the innovation management must take on another task, presenting the organizations most ambitious projects to stakeholders: owners and investors, executive and middle management, workers, business partners, politicians, the press, and the public.
Pros:
About the first component of innovation management, managing business processes that support innovation, there is no disagreement: innovation is essential to every thriving organization, public or private, and it needs careful attention and handling. Skilled innovation management of this type keeps the innovation machine running and well situated to contribute to corporate goals and maintain the innovation groups (or groups) integrity and vitality, functionally and financially. In larger organizations, the innovation manager, especially if he or she has a high rank, can also play a significant, valuable part in directing and enhancing the organizations mission, tasks, and capabilities. Its the second component of innovation thats dicey. Innovation managers can bring rigor and order to the innovation process, but can they actually improve the quantity and quality of innovations that can be implemented and thus demonstrate their value? Most innovation managers would respond, Yes! We can and do, and point to innovations, especially radical and transforming innovations as evidence. But.
Current Use:
radually innovation management has become an accepted business activity like finance and marketing, though its still often the junior member among activities. This gives innovation managers the freedom to explore to innovate that more mature activities have surrendered. Today, most large organizations have a designated information manager; some have many and even executives charged with this responsibility. It remains to be seen how information management rides out the financial crisis: innovation is most valuable during challenging times, but its too often seen as the most dispensable. Innovation management may have to transform itself for the times into a type of recovery service providing new ways of staying competitive.
Cons:
How innovation managers can improve the process of innovation remains problematic. Should they encourage broad participation in innovation activities? Should it organize and lead an elite skunk works or distribute innovation champions to each operating unit? And most uncertain, is the role of the innovation manager to train as many individuals as possible to become capable of innovating? Or is it to cull the ranks of workers (and possibly external stakeholders) for individuals who are demonstrably capable innovators serial innovators and who show talent, and then concentrate on supporting their work as innovators, however they do it? The innovation management profession and the research that informs it are each too new for a definitive answer.
In order to speed development of a breakthrough strategy for one of its subsidiary companies, a large parent company appoints a company innovation director and instructs the director to build a team of innovation managers who will integrate with the subsidiarys operating units. Links: http://www.innovationtools.com/resources/innovationmanagement.asp Innovation Management Center, InnovationTools, 2009
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5887.html Where Will Management Innovation Take Us? James Heskitt, Working knowledge, Harvard, Mar 5, 2008 http://www.asb.dk/article.aspx?pid=19334 Innovation Management Program, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, 2009 http://tinyurl.com/mckinsey-innovation-management Innovative management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan, Joanna Barsh, Mckinsey quarterly, Nov 2007 http://www.ispim.org/index.php International Society for Professional Innovation Management, 2009 http://www.worldscinet.com/ijim/ijim.shtml International Journal of Innovation Management (IJIM), World Scientific, 2009 http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0963-1690 Creativity and Innovation Management (journal), Wiley, 2009
20
INTERACTION DESIGN
Definition:
In a very short time, Interaction Design (ID) has emerged as a new, self-identified design discipline and claim to a sizable territory within the practice. According to Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path, author of the leading text on Interaction Design, ID is the art of facilitating or instigating interactions between humans (or their agents), mediated by products. By interactions, I mostly mean communication: one-on-one (a telephone call), one-to-many (blogs), or manyto-many (the stock market). The products an interaction designer creates can be digital or analog, physical or incorporeal or some combination thereof. ID is concerned with the behavior of products, with how products work. A lot of an interaction designers time will be spent defining these behaviors, but the designer should never forget that the goal is to facilitate interactions between humans.
Pros:
ID focuses the attention of its practitioners on human acts of communication and technologies and systems that can support and extend the communication processes. It is a more limited design discipline than general design disciplines, for example, industrial design or graphic design, which are based on the designers skills. ID is defined by its outcomes. ID is thus more delimited than traditional design disciplines, obeys more formal rules, and is more easily taught and communicated as a practice. Its outcomes are more easily evaluated: while a conventional design may or may not be successful, users of ID innovations know instantly whether or not a design has been a success. Learning within the ID community is exponential.
Current Use:
ID gained currency as a profession with the emergence of new media of communications. While Saffer emphasizes that ID is applicable across the board to every system that facilitates human communications, in fact its greatest application remains to communication and media technologies: the Internet, wireless communications, kiosks, digital TV, and similar systems.
Cons: Because of its relative youth among design disciplines, and despite its
characterization as a fast-learning profession, ID is still largely a matter of intuition and common sense. The profusion of poorly functioning wireless devices (and a few standouts that work well, like the iPod and iPhone) is testimony to the uncertain quality of much ID. Perhaps once education in this field has become more robust, practitioners will be held to higher standards. for the moment, however, ID solutions are wildly erratic in terms of performance.

Links:
A portal created to facilitate management of a customers account is assigned to interaction designers for evaluation in its initial conception stage and then for development as a fully functioning system.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2006/id20060728_334148.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories Interaction Design: An Introduction, Dan Saffer, Business Week, July 28, 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design Interaction Design, Wikipedia http://www.designinginteractions.com/ Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, IDEO, interactive website (highly recommended) http://www.ixda.org Interaction Design Association website http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/kaptelinin/http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/kaptelinin/ Excerpts from Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, Victor kaptelinin and Bonni Nardi, MIT Press 2007
21
lateral thinking
(six thinking hats)
Definition:
Edward de Bono, a writer and consultant dealing with creativity, coined the term lateral thinking in 1967. According to de Bono, There are several ways of defining lateral thinking, ranging from the technical to the illustrative. Lateral thinking literally means thinking sideways. According to Wikipedia, Lateral thinking is about reasoning that is not immediately obvious and about ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-bystep logic. de Bono further prescribed several techniques for stimulating lateral thinking. As an extension of this concept, de Bono devised a simple cartoon now known as The Hats to describe six different types of thinking and how they relate to create a complete thought process. figuratively putting on a hat of a different color compels one to think in that manner.
No Pros and Cons:
Lateral thinking is a useful technique for working around mental barriers that conventional logic cannot overcome. The more one uses lateral-thinking techniques, the more second nature they become.
Current Use:
Lateral thinking is a personal practice. Because de Bonos ideas are popular around the world, it is practiced widely but usually privately. By itself, lateral thinking helps one to solve problems; when combined with other techniques of perception and cognition, it can be an important part of the earlystage innovation repertoire of problem-solving tools. One can practice lateral thinking in ones own way, according to rules that are personally palatable and effective.
White Hat: facts Red Hat: Emotional thinking Yellow Hat: Positive thinking Black Hat: Critical thinking Green Hat: Creative thinking Blue Hat: Big picture thinking
A brand manager, concerned about not having a completely thought through plan for migrating a brand from one market segment to another, convenes a hat wearing session complete with Thinking Hats = and follows de Bonos methodology to arrive at a more holistic plan. Links: http://www.debonoconsulting.com/ de Bono Consulting website (dense with material)
http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/lateral.htm Lateral Thinking and Parallel Thinking, Edward de Bono, Edward de Bonos Web, 2009 http://www.realinnovation.com/content/c081110a.asp Lateral Thinking Stimulates Creativity and Innovation, Paul Sloane, Real Innovation, 2009 http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm Six Thinking Hats, MIndTools, 2009 http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/channel/StrategyOperations/news/674496/ The Gospel according to Edward de Bono, Management Today (Uk), Aug 1, 2007
22
leaD-users anD leaD-user Panels

Definition:
In the 1980s and 1990s, MIT professor Erik von Hippel and his colleagues pioneered the concept of user-initiated innovation, later refined into the process of customer co-creation. So-called lead users who are deemed to have special insights into their practices are recruited individually and as panels, provided with alpha and beta versions of technology and/or prototypes of actual products and services, and then asked to use the devices for some predetermined period of time. During and at the conclusion of this test period, the Lead Users are brought together on a scheduled basis to report on their experience and make suggestions for improvement to the future products and services.
Pros:
By definition, Lead Users are considered more knowledgeable about the things they are evaluating than laypersons or testers selected randomly to evaluate new products and services. Lead User Panels multiply the value of Lead Users by creating multilateral conversations on the Lead Users findings and opinions in which common threads become evident and idiosyncratic opinions are balanced against dominant main streams of opinions. Another advantage of Lead User Panels is that they are tied into networks of influence in their respective fields, so that they feed in opinions from larger communities and reciprocally, send out problems for general consideration. Individual lead users may also prototype new products.
Current Use:
Because of the relatively high cost of recruiting top talent to devote time for Lead User evaluation, and because it relies on being able to provide them with at least approximate forms of the final products to be evaluated, this process is most often used by large, well-resourced organizations: Large laboratories and commercial enterprises. Nevertheless, this type of innovation support is common within those strata of product and service developers to help evolve designs of low-tech as well as high-tech devices and systems.
Cons:
In the same way that Lead User panels can enhance the input of individual Lead Users, they can also amplify incorrect assessments of a product or services performance and its utility in a future market. The Delphi Effect in which members of a group coalesce on a centrist position the more they converse applies to Lead User panels as it does to any group. Another potential disadvantage of a Lead User panel, and Lead Users overall, is that knowledgeable individuals are also opinionated and prone to reifying the given wisdom.
Prototypical new products are distributed by a maker of outdoor goods to selected lead users who relate their experiences with the products before they go into production and distribution. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_innovation User Innovation, Wikipedia (discusses von Hippels lead user concept
http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/wuw/institute/entrep/forschung/userinnovation/leaduser/index Lead User Research, Institut fr Entrepreneurship und Innovation, Wirstschaftsuniversitt Wien website http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm Downloadable Papers, Eric von Hippel website (also has videos, tutorials) http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2006/02/lead_users_vs_l.html Lead Users vs. Lead Customers and the Role of Toolkits, Patricia Seybold, Outside Innovation blog http://www.telenor.com/telektronikk/volumes/pdf/2.2004/Page_126-132.pdf Creating breakthrough innovations implementing the Lead User method, Erik L. Olson and Geir Backe, Telenor website
23
minD-maPPing
Definition:
Mind-mapping is the latest version of the classical analytical map pioneered in Classical times by Aristotle and other Greek natural scientists. Mind maps are used to deconstruct complex patterns of thought, objects, and events; and to graphically illustrate how these relate to a theme or a larger idea. These are called mental constructs. In modern practice, mind maps always have at their center a theme or idea to which all of the other ideas on the map are related, directly or via other ideas and factors in the environment. A mind map is a way of indexing ideas, revealing how streams of ideas radiate from a central thought and divide into sub-thoughts, and interact with other elements as they do. Seen the other way around, mind maps describe how ideas combine to form larger ideas, interact with the environment, and ultimately congeal as the central theme or big idea of the mind map.
Pros:
Mind maps are useful tools for describing all of the elements of a complex system. Because they are inherently modular, different individuals can work on different portions of a mind map or make new contributions to portions of the map that were earlier thought completed. When a mind map is used to index ideas to relate them in a logical order so that each leads to others it can be a powerful cognitive assist. A dynamic mind map can be manipulated in three dimensions, in effect immersing its user in the idea space created by others. A mind map can be used to quickly orient a team of individuals relative to a problem that they are assigned to solve. More imaginative mind maps that use metaphors rather literal meanings, while less applicable to conventional problem solving are nevertheless capable of producing great insights. The Atlas of Experience (see link below) has become a surprise bestseller because it has this magic.
Current Use:
Mind-mapping is often an adjunct to methods of ideation including brainstorming, lateral thinking, and scenario building. Mind maps which can be dynamic with the proper software capture all of the known factors that create a system, contribute to an outcome, or result in a new understanding. Mind-mapping, like gap analysis, is also used to reveal voids in mental constructs: items that are uncertain, about which information must be obtained; and weak or nonexistent connections between elements of the mental map that need investigation to determine if they exist and if so, the actual relationship between the elements. Mind maps are used to share complex knowledge In an easy to use graphical form.
Cons:
The more complex an idea space, the more complex the mind map to represent it until the map becomes do dense as to be visually unusable without magnification, at which point the image loses its totality. Because human beings are only capable of holding in their minds about seven distinct items in the same category, the impressive data-handling of which mind maps are capable is often wasted on its human users. It then exists mainly as a reference. Only a very large team can master high complexity and that risks a division of the solution that requires great energy to reintegrate. The same goes for the use of mind maps. Another issue is that ideas occur in multiple dimensions, more than two or three. Conventional mind maps are only two-dimensional and computer-supported mind maps are only three-dimensional. Lastly, what is mapped is often taken as what is true but of course, most mind maps are incomplete and time-bound.

Links:
A complex service design for managing company-customer sales interactions needs reinventing and a new implementation. A mind map of the interaction process is composed to (a) fully understand the process and its elements, and (b) to assemble a better process for implementation.
http://www.mind-mapping.org/ Software for mindmapping and information organization, Society for Mindmapping and Information Organisation (non-commercial site offers articles on mind-mapping and links over 200 mind-mapping software products and reviews) http://www.worldofexperience.com/Startpage/start_startpage.asp, http://www.myworldofexperience.com/, and http://www.companymap.com/cmc/ The Atlas of Experience (2000), Louise van Swaaji, Jean klare, David Winner; The Business World Atlas (2006); and Company Mapping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software List of mind-mapping software, Wikipedia (free and proprietary, online and stand-alone) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qq Mind-Mapping, Tony Buzan (claims to have invented modern mind-mapping), YouTube http://amakar.com/articles/pm-tools-and-techniques/110-mind-mapping-risk Mind-Mapping Risk, Project Management Tips (case study)
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Definition:
Morphological analysis is used to assess extremely complex, multidimensional problems in which relationships are uncertain, dynamic, and difficult to transform into solvable mathematical equations. It is a computerbased problem-solving technology created by astrophysicist fritz Zwicky at California Institute of Technology (which gives some idea of its origins and degree of difficulty of use) and further developed by Tom Ritchie of the Swedish Morphological Society. Morphological analysis which means form-based analysis is used to create and analyze sets of attributes that have relevance to solving a problem. These can include the three aspects of problem-solving: the problem or problems, the possible solutions to the problem(s), and the environment that creates a context for the problem(s) and their solutions. Testing their power with Bayesian (statistical) mathematics one of several methods reveals how the entire system may respond to changing circumstances. The results of morphological analyses reflect their uses: scenarios for futuristics, specifications for product development, policies for international diplomacy, and so forth.
MORPhOlOGICAl ANAlySIS
Pros:
Ifor those who practice morphological analysis usually in public and private laboratories with plenty of computing power and a broad mandate to experiment with solving complex problems in an uncertain, sometimes far-off future there is no substitute. Big thinkers, they consider their work practical in an unconventional way. Unlike conventional problem-solving and innovating, which is evaluated mathematically (How much better, at what cost?), morphological analysis discourages a priori simplification of the problem. Complicated phenomena are not externalized as occurs, for example, when scientists, managers, or designers purposely ignore factors for which they have no suitable mathematics or data; instead, they are incorporated.. The presence and interaction of these mathematical imponderables are grist for the morphological analysis mill and what makes morphological analysis so intriguing and attractive for those solving big problems.
Cons:
Current Use:
Problems for which morphological analysis is preferred to more traditional problem-solving techniques have usually been of a size and complexity beyond the ken of business innovators and designers. Defense agencies, governments, energy companies, climatologists, and so forth are more frequent practitioners of morphological analysis. However, as the power of affordable computers increases to rival supercomputers of the past, morphological analysis may become a commonly used problem- and solution-characterization tool.
Morphological analysis requires substantial computing power. It also requires time and effort to identify, categorize, and arrange in a matrix all of the relevant factors that may affect the solution of a problem; then to run analyses and see how and which of these factors determine likely and less likely solutions; and then to test the solutions themselves. There is a good case to be made that one of the great values of business innovators and designers is their ability to mentally short-circuit complex problems and arrive at intuitive solutions rapidly and with tolerable, even commendable rates success rates. This is more art than science, however. Morphological analyses can produce reliable solutions that can be compared and of them, the best chosen; this gives morphological analyses their power. But the expense in time and effort for doing these analyses is substantial.
A leading transportation company wants to determine which of many alternative services it can provide that will prove advantageous with customers and authorities vis--vis the offerings of other transportation providers vying to serve the markets the DESINOVA company serves. Links: http://www.swemorph.com/ Swedish Morphological Society (enter of the Scandinavian morphological-analysis universe)
http://www.mycoted.com/Morphological_Analysis Morphological Analysis, Mycoted Wiki for Creativity & Innovation, Science & Technology, Apr 16, 2006 http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_03.htm, Attribute Listing, Morphological Analysis, and Matrix Analysis, MindTools, 2009 http://www.diegm.uniud.it/create/Handbook/techniques/List/MorphoAnal.php Morphological Analysis, Pros and Cons, Dept. of Engineering, University of Udine, Italy, Aug 8, 2007 http://www.diegm.uniud.it/create/Handbook/techniques/List/MorphoAnal.php Morphological Analysis and Relevance Trees, European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, 2007
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OBSERVATION/USABIlITy lABORATORy
(testing in a ControlleD environment)
Definition:
Usability isnt an innovation methodology per se, but it can be used to test innovations, particularly product and system innovation. Usability was pioneered by DEC in the early 1970s to test new computer systems before they became available to buyers. The method was simple: set up a system, bring in engineers posing as potential buyers, and observe how the system functioned. The engineers made copious recommendations that proved as useful as what the observers could physically see for themselves. Usability today employs sophisticated metrics to measure suitability of a design.
Pros:
Usability is easy to understand and it is quite easy to apply parameters and develop metrics to reveal a range of subject behaviors, and also to detect where a product is defeating appropriate use. Usability laboratories are relatively inexpensive to construct (depending on the technology assembled to launch tests) and, once established, inexpensive to maintain. Recruiting usability testers is considerably easier than recruiting for other types of innovation methodologies that require professional preparation, education, and training.
Current Use:
Today, usability as a methodology has been extended to everything from new hardware and software to new services on the Internet, including online services like eye-tracking and keystroke monitoring, and even for non-digital purposes (for example, testing how subjects interact with kitchen appliances, autos, and clothing. Because usability in this sense requires controlled conditions, it is usually conducted in a laboratory setting that is made to mimic real-world situations as closely as possible. Video and other digital records, on review help to capture the nuances of product performance and user experiences.
Cons:
Laboratory personnel employing usability testing tend to overvalue the reliability of usability test outcomes. As in the old adage, When all you have is a hammer, all else is a nail, observers performing usability tests can become enamored of empirical, usually numerical test results and subject reports. This can prevent them from understanding the deeper causes of product success or failure. Because laboratory settings are inherently artificial, they can introduce biases into the test situation that may make a product solution seem more or less successful than it actually is. This is even truer of services tested in-house. Experience shows that users are spoiled after a few participations, becoming biased toward particular styles.

usability techniques. Links:
A retail company initiates lab tests a new method for delivering services online or via a POS terminal using
http://upassoc.org/ Website of the Usability Professionals Association http://www.uie.com/articles/ Articles on usability, on User Interface Engineering website http://culturalusability.cbs.dk/ CBS Project exploring usability as cultural artifact in Denmark, India, and China http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040315.html Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience, Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 15 March 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing Usability testing, Wikipedia
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Definition: Open innovation is among todays most popular innovation-
OPEN INNOVATION
Pros:
Open innovation is graced with any number of virtues, at least in concept. It is liberated, free, collaborative, and co-creative. In many ways, to listen to its proponents, open innovation resembles the open research and development that takes place in universities and public institutes only, in concept, open innovation is even broader, its practitioners leaping across professional and disciplinary boundaries. Based on the experience of the open software movement, products and services that are invented and developed in the open will be less expensive, more versatile, and highly reliable, with armies of volunteers available to answer users questions and continuously improve the products and services. Open innovations greatest appeal may be as an answer to widespread recognition that (a) in complex modern society, experts know less individually and more collectively; and (b) most innovations fail, usually for lack of knowledge that is available outside of the innovating organization or that would become apparent, collaborating.
management themes. Its leading champion is Professor Henry Chesbrough at UC Berkeley. Derived from the concept of open software to which numerous individuals freely contribute, and which is therefore non-proprietary i.e., open to amendments and alterations by its users open innovation is the ideal form of collaborative innovation. In an open-innovation environment, all stakeholders in an organization owners, managers, workers, customers, business partners, and regulators, even competitors -- are invited to submit innovations for implementation. Proactive organizations seek sources of invention and innovation at conferences, comb published reports and online websites and blogs, and interact with expert groups professional associations and university faculties to discover relevant, high-value ideas and concepts.
Current Use:
According to pundits at conferences, online, and in the press, every organization especially companies and public agencies should be practicing open innovation. Many do. A. G. Lafley, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, an innovation leader, says his company leaves no stone unturned. When necessary, Lafley turns to competitors to arrange partial truces so that they can pool technical resources and discoveries to create shareable innovations. Despite the popularity of open innovation as a concept, however, more sharing has taken place as a result of traditional business-intelligence activities and espionage than openness. Nevertheless, given the shortages imposed on companies by economic crisis, the social networks that can support open innovation for example, Linked In are rapidly growing in size and influence. Will open innovation cease being just over the horizon?
Cons:
IIndividuals, companies, and agencies operate in competitive environments, even in societies where cooperation is favored. With openness comes a lowering of barriers to the free flow of information, which can destroy competitive advantage. for this reason, most companies and agencies do not practice open innovation or practice it only under very limited conditions (for example, all invited collaborators sign mutually binding non-disclosure agreements). The collective cost of privacy is high: redundancy, partial solutions to problems, ineffectual products and services these and other results damage the commonweal. But the private cost of openness is perceived to be higher. Until companies and agencies are motivated by or forced to assume a responsibility to the whole society, open innovation will remain mainly a good personal practice and a social ideal.

Links:
Looking for a breakout strategy in stressful times, a manufacturer puts out the word that it is welcoming ideas, inventions, and collaborations with firms in its sector but also companies operating beyond it. It creates a Wiki to capture and share this knowledge, and to identify potential partners.
http://openinnovation.haas.berkeley.edu/ Professor Henry Chesbroughs Center for Open Innovation at the University of California-Berkeley http://www.openinnovation.eu/ OpenInnovation.eu, the European Unions Internet portal for open innovation http://www.siliconvalley.um.dk/en, http://www.icdmuenchen.um.dk/en, http://www.shanghai.um.dk/en Innovation Center Denmark http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/02/collaborative_innovation_for_the_post_crisis_world/ Collaborative Innovation for the PostCrisis World, Paul Stoffels, Chairman of Pharmaceutical R&D, Johnson & Johnson, Boston.com, feb 2, 2009 http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Information_Technology/Networking/next_step_in_open_innovation_2155 The Next Step in Open Innovation, Mckinsey quarterly, Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson, Jun 2008
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PARTICIPATORy OBSERVATION
Definition:
The philosopher William James (also known as the father of modern psychology) was perhaps the first participant observer in his case, observing his own mental state in reaction to memories, events, and expectations. James considered it essential to his method of knowing (epistemology) to be consciously involved in the world. In the same way, participatory observation today is a method for understanding social behavior by participating in it. The participant observer joins a work team, lives in a community, and takes leisure time with the subjects of his or her study. A modern variation is to involve oneself in a buying experience or, in the virtual worlds, play a videogame or join a social network for the purpose of understanding what occurs in these environments.
Pros:
Participatory observation is one of the mainstays of active research. It enables the researcher to get insider the heads of the subject population. (Some would say, it forces this type of mental deep-sea diving.) The participant observer has an advantage over other researchers who must interpret motives and emotions based on external observation. They dont know what to look for. Participant observers have inherent credibility when they report on their subject communities and related phenomena.
Current Use:
Participatory observation is commonly used to intimately study group behaviors (among groups like those above, but also in many other types of groups). In the field of innovation, participatory behavior can substantially contribute to trend identification, trend analysis, and scenario planning. Another type of participatory observation is to place oneself in a group attempting to innovate, to discover what promotes and what retards innovation.
Cons:
When the US military invaded Iraq, it included among its ranks embedded journalists. Embedded journalists later complained, as did their critics, that living with the soldiers day in and day out impaired the journalists objectivity in two ways: It limited what they discovered in the environment, and it affected their ability to interpret what they discovered. Being closely involved with a subject population often leads to identification that affects a researchers perception and objectivity. Participatory observation limits the researchers ability to escape the situation in which he or she is participating. This distorts an accurate worldview. The reverse is also true: A participant observer can skew community behavior as it otherwise would not be.

Links:
Designers work in a successful alternative restaurant as wait staff to understand its cultural milieu and its staffs attitudes (for example toward new food-preparation technology) and then alter the Buying Experience.
http://champpenal.revues.org/document471.html Champ Penal (Penal field) blog, Participant Observation as a Tool for Understanding the field of Safety and Security, 2005 http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/partobs.html Participant Observation Research, The Psychology of Cyberspace http://tinyurl.com/5mv8bj Module 2, Participant Observation, qualitative Research Methods: A Users field Guide, family Health International http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/10/what_constitute.html What constitutes ethnical participation in MMOG ethnography, Terra Nova blog, Oct 15, 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_observation Participatory Observation, Wikipedia
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PATh DEPENDENCE
Definition:
Path dependence is a socio-technological theory. Its axiom is that past decisions and outcomes limit successive choices and futures. A good example is the use of automobiles for mobility. Worldwide, substantial public investment in roads and highways has enabled ease of use and encouraged private ownership of vehicles, which in turn has made the global auto industry and oil producers powerful policy actors domestically and internationally. These factors taken together have severely crimped many nations ability to plan for or support non-automotive public transportation thus in part setting the stage for global warming, climate change, and their results. This evolutionary view of history differs from traditional historical accounts in which powerful people dictate events and economic accounts in which economic rationality dictates history. On a smaller scale, business innovators deal with path dependence all of the time. It must be reckoned with in planning an innovation strategy including its implementation and post-implementation.
Pros:
Path dependence, like physics, is a plausible theory capable of convincingly explaining how things work and difficult to ignore. Applied in business and government settings, it is a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how and why prevailing policies and attitudes persist. So informed, business innovators and designers can a) use favorable policies and attitudes in their favor, (b) intelligently plan to change these policies and attitudes when they must and can be changed for example, by calling into doubt the underlying rationale for these policies and attitudes or (c) work around them if necessary. An old adage says, You cant get where youre going if you dont know where you are. Path dependence informs where one is and what forces currently exist and are likely to be deployed in the event of an innovation.
Cons:
Current Use:
Academics in the social sciences, especially history, developed path-dependence theory. It has since been adopted as a working theory by strategic planners in government and industry as a way to locate an innovative initiative in space and time, understand its antecedents, anticipate its support and opposition, and plan for its adoption and implementation. Path dependence is as important as current and future conditions to determining the success of a companys innovation initiatives, internally and externally.
Critics of path dependence observe that paths are socially constructed realities, not inherently true but taken as the truth because they are agreed upon. Path historians, the critics note, are often selective in the events and relationships they choose to compose paths: its safe to do so because, whether or not a path is accurate, history ultimately produces the same Now. Believing an incorrect path, especially one created by oneself, can result in a tragic outcome missed environmental cues, overestimating acceptance, underestimating opposition, and so on. Because the theory of path dependence is so appealing, paths assume a quality of inevitability, as The more things change, the more they are the same. But time and time again, history has proven less predictable than the paths would make it seem.
faced with a new competitive environment caused by the financial crisis, an insurance provider commissions a thorough investigation of the history of finance in similar past situations, including the Great Depression in the 1930s. The resulting paths suggest a unique strategic approach. Links: http://www.dime-eu.org/working-papers/ral3/2008-01 Innovation-systems, path-dependency and policy, Jan fagerberg, David C. Mowery, and Bart Verspagen, EU-DIME (Dynamics
of Institutions & Markets in Europe), Jul 8, 2008 http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2007/proceedings/apolloanteportas/dobusch.pdf [PDf] Schumpeter vs. Path Dependency: Innovation Lessons from breaking through Innovation Barriers, Leonhard Dobusch, 5th Intl. Critical Management Studies Conference, Jun 2, 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence Path Dependence, Wikipedia
http://people.virginia.edu/~hms2f/Path.pdf [PDf] Down the Wrong Path: Path Dependence, Increasing Returns, and Historical Institutionalism, Herman Schwartz, University of Virginia, 2003 http://people.virginia.edu/~hms2f/Path.pdf [PDf] Incorporating Path Dependency into Decision-Analytic Methods: An Application to Global Climate-Change Policy, Mort Webster, Decision Analysis, Jun 2008 (case study)
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PERSONAS
Definition:
Personas literally are the identities that human beings and social organizations assume as they live their lives in society. The term comes from literary and theatrical tradition, in which characters in a story are called personas, which the actors in a play or the reader of a story fill in and make real, physically or mentally. In the field of contemporary design, personas are invented characters, archetypes with traits that are intended to resemble the traits of many actual people condensed into one. They are assembled using demographic and psychographic research among real people. Researchers and designers imagine the personas behaviors and extrapolate how real people would behave faced with similar events and design solutions.
Pros:
Personas are one of the most controversial of design tools used today, in part because they were developed for another purpose - storytelling. Over the last decades, the use of personas has become standard within most design agencies as a way of dealing with social and cultural factors affecting the introduction of new products and services. Personas are easier to use as testers than real people. Theyre economical and can be crafted to emphasize personal characteristics most relevant to a new product or service. Personas sharp reactions enable designers and their clients to quickly detect possible problems and arrive at more refined solutions, Personas challenge conventional marketing assumptions (e.g., segmentation).
Current Use:
Personas are very popular for testing digital systems and environments that do not yet exist, but which can be fairly well characterized by their developers that is, their qualities and characteristics are specified. Examples might be online communication systems or online stores. In the material world, personas are commonly used to test new products in concept, to see how people would adapt to them; and campaigns to have people act in new ways, for example, working with local development initiatives.
Cons:
Personas are 100 percent fabrications, so their behavior is really the sum total of their inventors preconceptions. A persona may seem real enough when defined in the design charrette, but actual human beings may act very differently under the same circumstances. A persona may over represent a particular personality type or behavior, which then skews design results. Their use may breed a false sense of security among designers. Personas are sometimes used to prop up designs or simply to engage in pseudo-research.

Links:
When a new product has been conceived for example, a new type of home (e.g., a collective housing) it is populated with personas representing different categories of people, to see how they would behave in it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas Personas, Wikipedia http://www.cooper.com/insights/journal_of_design/articles/the_origin_of_personas_1.html, The Origin of Personas, Alan Cooper, Cooper Design website http://www.peterme.com/?p=624 Personas 99% bad? Peterme blog, Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path, 1 Jan 2008 http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=262 Persona non grata, Steve Portigal, Interactions of the ACM, feb 2008 http://www.thewatchmakerproject.com/journal/375/using-personas-to-inform-design Using Personas to inform design, The Watchmaker Project blog, 10 Oct 2006
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PreDiCtion markets
Definition:
Prediction markets (PMs), also known as information markets, decision markets, idea futures, event derivatives, and virtual markets are betting games used in business and by governments to harness the wisdom of the masses for forecasting future events, reducing risk, and making plans more certain. As in a stock exchange or futures market, individuals use money or tokens to bet on the likelihood of future events. If the events occur, they win; if they dont, they lose. The real winner is the bookmaker who, for very little investment, gets a window on the future that may be fuzzy but better than none. Like scenario planning, PMs sensitize participants to forces in the environment but PMs are relatively crude, involve hundreds or thousands of participants, and require little skill to participate (although what you know about the subject matter may determine your success).
Pros: PMs are a wonderful way to involve large numbers of people in
decisionmaking regarding future events, conditions, plans, and policies. Although participation in a PM isnt yet available to everyone all the time except in Monaco, Las Vegas, and betting parlors around the world, where real money trades hands both real and experimental PMs are proliferating. Several are operating online at any time, thereby enabling more people to become future proficient and one supposes, better planners. In the case of corporations and others applying PMs, their results may be better than the common mill because the PMs they run are specific to issues confronting the organization, and the game players, usually employees and other shareholders, have good knowledge to apply.
Current Use:
The most notorious suggested use of a PM was by a US military spy agency to predict the futures of overseas regimes. It never was implemented. Today, the World Bank, major corporations and marketing consultancies, governments, and universities operate PMs. Though popular, PM results remain problematic. They have been wrong as well as right and the reasons for one or the other remain unclear.
Cons:
Unfortunately, the Wisdom of the Masses, though a reasonable logical assumption, has yet to be proven. PMs fail just as they succeed. If players are misinformed, misled, or partake of a popular delusion (e.g., the earth is flat), the games they play are doomed to produce faulty and unreliable outcomes. Perhaps the smartest way to employ PMs is the same as for scenario planning: as an educational, informational tool that can also result in social cohesion around a particular issue.
Like the World Bank, a large financial institution may want to initiate a PM that indicates how financial markets and investment opportunities will develop, to educate its users with the caveat that its outcome may not be the truth! Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_markets Prediction Markets, Wikipedia
http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/Predictionmarkets.pdf Prediction Markets, Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitewitz, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2004), Wharton School of Business, U of Pennsylvania https://bet2give.com/b2g/index.html Bet2Give, a model prediction market in which earnings are given to philanthropies http://us.newsfutures.com/home/decisions.html Newsfutures webpage (commercial supplier of corporate PMs)
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PROTOTyPING
Definition:
Prototyping is a common way to test designs. It involves creating a working model of the design which, when subjected to critical review and use, reveals where improvements must be made for the design to fulfill its purpose. Often, a prototype will result in scrapping the original design or finding an entirely new use for it. Prototyping has traditionally been the domain of inventors dating back to prehistory; in modern times, engineers have refined the prototyping process for developing technology, products, and systems. Industrial designers introduced prototyping to the design profession. Three popular methods are paper prototyping, building and running the model in concept (used mainly for Web design); iterative prototyping, which takes place over a series of tests; and rapid prototyping, which features immediacy at the possible expense of reliability. A recent offshoot is the prototyping of service designs, a practice popularized by the Uk Design Council and IDEO.
Pros:
Prototyping value is self-evident. Inventions that are prototyped are less likely to fail under the stress of actual use. Designers are familiar with most prototyping methods and skilled in their use, depending on the designers areas of expertise. In the case of service design, because there is often little or no hardware or machinery to redesign only information systems and processes its possible to move rapidly from prototype to actual service implementation. In that sense, the prototype is a cost-effective stage in the final product or services development. The involvement of users with prototypes gives them a more solid basis in reality than other types of testing that do not involve users. Prototypes, because they are visible and often tangible, can be shared with executive decision makers in order to gain quick approval of proposed designs.
Current Use: Prototyping is used in every manufacturing sector, in
Cons:
agriculture (testing new strains), in construction, and in the design of service processes and experiences. Which type of prototyping is used depends on (a) the particular design disciplines used to create a solution, (b) the domain for which the solution has been created, and (c) the urgency of the designers or the clients need for the solution. Service design now almost always involves a prototype stage that involves representative end users in the process.
Prototyping can lead to spurious conclusions. Because prototypes generally are tested under controlled conditions, not all factors bearing on the success of the proposed implementation may be taken into account. (This is particularly true of service designs.) Conversely, a prototype may be tested under conditions that over estimates the importance of irrelevant factors, leading to a negative evaluation and redesign or project cancellation that may not have been necessary. Prototypes of large, dynamic, and complex projects are especially prone to each type of error.

Links:
In order to test a new Web-based consumer services, a prototype of the service is tested for one month among a carefully selected sample population chosen to resemble, and trained to react as, the intended service audience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototyping Prototyping, Wikipedia http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/ideo_prototypes.html Ideo Prototypes the future Exhibition (2006), VC Ross Mayfields blog (with links to podcasts) http://designingforservices.typepad.co.uk/ Blog documenting interdisciplinary academic research conducted by Oxford U. on four service design projects and five events, Dec 2006 Oct 2007 http://www.springerlink.com/content/v25632/?p=10b08ea2a2c747c2968fb742d3b761ed&pi=0 Service Science, Management and Engineering Education for the 21st Century, Springer-Verlag 2008, $129 (website requires payment for downloads of book chapters)
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RADICAl INNOVATION
Definition:
innovation initiatives vary widely in terms of their scope and intensity, but for the sake of convenience when discussing innovation, practitioners usually discriminate three classes of innovations: incremental (small changes in business as usual), standard (larger changes that require executive participation), and radical (game-changers requiring institutional transformation and that instill fundamental changes in business and/or government. Of course, scale is a matter of scope and experience; one companys incremental innovation may seem radical to another. Among the three types of innovation, radical innovation is what most people think of when they think of innovation: the steam engine, electoral democracy, vaccination, Copernican theory, aqueducts, romantic love, Einsteins Relativity, evolution, telephony, digital photography, the Internet, organized sports, and Coca-Cola.
Pros:
Whether one tries for a game-changer or a lesser innovation depends on the situation: if a company is a leader, perceives no serious challengers, and is risk-averse, it can muddle through the competitive market and widespread hard times making only incremental or at most, standard innovations. If its seriously challenged or facing imminent disaster due to internal problems, however thats when companies go for radical innovations. If they succeed, they transform the market and themselves so thoroughly that competitors are left competing in the past while the companies enjoy rich rewards for bold action. Of course, some radical innovations are planned and result from well-informed and wellconstructed strategies and corporate cultures. Virgins multitude of subsidiaries are well versed in strategic radical innovation. Apples iTunes/iPod duet succeeded that way, too.
Current Use:
The tripartite classification of innovations and the meaning of radical innovation are universally recognized and understood among professionals who practice and study innovation. Increasingly, however, gamechanging is the preferred term among business innovators, meaning an innovation has positively changed the playing field for industry or government. Game-changing has a more positive thrust than radical, which has anarchistic overtones; it relates to the outcome of an innovation, whether it was successful or not, and not in relation to the quality of other innovations an extremely subjective judgment.
Cons:
Radical innovations get the press, but more often its the less dramatic incremental and standard innovations that are successfully and economically implemented. Radically innovating frequently can be a go for broke proposition, gambling the store. A failed radical innovation is costly, potentially demoralizing, and as demonstrated by the financial crisis, which started with radical innovation in financial instruments (securitized debt and wild derivatives) potentially destructively of the company and disruptive of an entire industry (or indeed, the world economy, if the failure is big enough). When radical innovations succeed, their authors and champions become business heroes. When they sink, they usually take the lifeboats down with them.
Sample use by DESINOVA company: (Purely hypothetical) faced with the long-term or permanent loss of a significant share of its customer base due
to the economic downturn, the company transforms itself and ceases to be a product company: now its entirely in services and its product legacy is an asset, not a burden. Links: http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/innovation_radical_vs_incr.html Radical Innovation vs. Incremental Innovation, Vadim kotelnikov, 1000ventures.com, undated.
http://tinyurl.com/Innovation-Playground Radical Innovation Requires 3 Distinct Capabilities: Ability To See With New Creative Lenses; Ability To Apply Creativity And Imagination In Solving Customer Unmet Needs; And Creativity With New Business Model Design, Idris Moutee, Innovation Playground, feb 20, 2009 http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/07/23/disruptive-versus-radical-innovations/ Disruptive versus Radical Innovations, Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm, Jul 23, 2007 http://www.ideo.com/publications/item/informing-our-intuition-design-research-for-radical-innovation/ Design Research for Radical Innovation, Jane fulton Suri, IDEO, Rotman Magazine, Winter 2008 http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/redefining-innovation-incremental-side-effect-transformational.html, Redefining Innovation: Incremental, w/ Side Effects & Transformational, Avinash kaushak, Occams Razor, Oct 13, 2008
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role-Playing games
Definition:
Role-playing is the assumption as ones own of another persons perceptions, conceptions, thoughts, likes and dislikes, feelings; senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch; and especially, the others values, aspirations, and life experiences as much as is feasible. Players collaborate with other players to create realistic historic, contemporary, and future events, cultures, and societies. In the physical world, costumes may be used to heighten the players identification with a role (as in living history reenactments). In virtual space for example, role-playing game environments avatars assume unique, easily recognizable visual and behavioral identities. The uses of role-playing as an adjunct to innovation are many, including being able to see things differently in a new identity and communicating more or less freely. The increasing popularity of simple role-playing games and more recently, of complex computer-supported games, has produced two valuable offshoots: the first, games in which innovating in the game world is the reason to play, as in Second Life; and the second offshoot, so-called serious games or simulations in which innovations can be devised and tested in real world conditions set by the players and simulated to the limits of their technologies.
Pros:
Role-playing, with able expert guidance, is a challenging way to confront ones emotional intelligence, cultural biases, expectations, biases, and capacity to live with the past and make the future. Collaboration and co-creation abound. In a game setting, the purpose can be foreordained by the designer or left to the community of players ranging from two to hundreds of thousands, online to decide upon. Games are particularly good for identifying challenges and testing solutions. The players can decide how many variables and degrees of freedom are valuable for satisfactory play. Playing games that represent the real world (simulations) gives the players the experience of setting goals and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty that they can adjust to be more or less realistic. Players individually or collaboratively can discover how to characterize and prioritize innovations, discovering in the process how much time and energy devoted at the front-end of innovation reduces or increases resources required to evaluate and implement innovations depending, as in the real world, on the games purpose and the goals that have been set.
Cons: Current Use: In organizations, role-playing in the past had mainly personal
and social therapeutic purposes (T-groups and the like). No longer. Today roleplaying, especially serious-game role-playing, has as its purpose improving the world or some portion of it.
As with any tool, role-playing and game playing have their limits in terms of what can be accomplish through their use. Some individuals have personalities for which play-acting can become addictive and an excessive misuse of time and energy. All games are inaccurate to some degree because modeling all of the factors and relationships in any environment is difficult. The solutions that games produce can be simplistic and inapplicable in all but the most limited circumstances.

Links:
A complex service design for managing company-customer sales interactions needs reinventing and a new implementation. A mind map of the interaction process is composed to (a) fully understand the process and its elements, and (b) to assemble a better process for implementation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roleplaying Roleplaying, Wikipedia http://appliedimprov.ning.com/ The Applied Improvisation Network http://workplayexperience.blogspot.com/ Work Play Experience, Adam Lawrence http://terrainnova.org/blog/?p=105 and http://terrainnova.org/blog/?p=106 Role Playing Games in Innovation, Parts 1-2, Demitris, Terrainova, May 5 and 28, 2008 http://www.gdconf.com/conference/sgs.html Serious Games Summit, Game Developers Conference 2009 http://www.seriousgamessource.com/ The Serious Games Source, hosted by The Think Services Game Group http://swi.indiana.edu/ The Synthetic Worlds Initiative, Professor Edward Castronova, Indiana University
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SCENARIO PlANNING
Definition:
Scenario planning is the use of various predictive techniques to forecast possible futures, and then to plan for these futures on (1) the basis of their likelihood and (2) the consequences of each of these futures. Scenarios are not intended to depict actual futures. Their purpose is to identify key factors in the environment, their interactions and outcomes. Scenario plannings purpose is to sensitize planners to these factors and other forces in the environment that require monitoring and possibly, reaction and adjustment in business, of existing business plans and models; and in the public sector, of policies and implementation.
Pros: Scenario planning has three major benefits. The first is identifying forces
in the environment that might bear on the future. The second, achieved through constructing possible futures scenarios from the interaction of these forces sensitizes planners to possible futures it is claimed more holistically than does traditional strategic planning. A third benefit is scenario plannings capacity for enhancing team building. When participants collaboratively build futures that they then incorporate in their worldviews, it can be a powerful bonding experience. Teams so equipped are often able to react better to changes in the environment than teams that are more loosely bound by formal organizations.
Current Use: Scenario planning achieved prominence during the Cuban
Cons:
Missile Crisis in 1962 and later in the 1970s, when Shell Oil alone among the oil companies avoided that decades crises due allegedly to prior scenario planning. Today, scenario planning is a component of strategic planning as practiced by companies and governments in virtually every sector. Scenario planning often is employed wrongly as a predictive method. Equally problematic is the use of scenarios, much weaker and less robust than the scenarios used in scenario planning, to test marketing and design hypotheses against possible futures.
The misuses of scenarios are manifold. Everyone would like to have a reliable crystal ball and superficially, scenario planning may appear to approach this standard of predictability. Scenario planning is not intended to predict the future, however. Moreover, even as a sensitization technique, scenario planning varies in its power by each teams knowledge, intuition, quality of collaboration, and ability to project themselves collectively into the future. There is no reliable method to measure the effectiveness of scenario planning and no proof that scenario planning improves planning capabilities.

Links:
Using trends and heuristic methods to forecast three possible futures scenarios -- based on key drivers, an organization can develop alternative plans to cope with anticipated changes in the business and social environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenario_planning Scenario Planning, Wikipedia http://www.well.com/~mb/scenario_planning/ Scenario Planning Resources, Martin Brjesson, The WELL http://www.sric-bi.com/consulting/ScenarioPlan.shtml Scenario Planning, SRI Consulting (home of scenario planning) http://www.gbn.com Global Business Network website (SRI derivative). http://www.risoe.dtu.dk/business_relations/products_services/foresight/sys_scenarios.aspx?sc_lang=en Ris DTU
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SERVICE DESIGN
Definition:
Service Design (SD) goes by many other names as well: Customer service design, customer experience design, customer relationship management (an earlier, technology-based practice seeking new relevancy), retail merchandising, organizational development, and service ecology. As recently as the 2007 Emergence conference on service design, there was no agreement among professionals and academics on the definition of what constitutes a service or how it should be designed. A simple way to recognize service design still circular is that it is the orchestration of a collection of actions and affordances by which an organization and those it serves communicate and connect.
Pros:
In the late 20th and 21st Centuries, the growth of the service sector which technically comprises the provision of everything from medical care to fast food, including design -- has occurred in developed and developing nations alike. Service design has grown in parallel, bringing order to the design and implementations of services, which before were largely ad hoc processes. Reciprocally, engagement with the service sector has been good for the design community, provoking designers to expand beyond their earlier preoccupation with physical objects to engage with the intangible world of relationships. While modern SD is still a relatively young practice, there is a lot of room for experimentation and development.
Current Use:
According to the Uk Design Council, Only recently have managers in organizations involved in the service sector realized that a conscious effort in applying design techniques to services can result in greater customer satisfaction, greater control over their offerings, and greater profits. Service design tends to be associated with retailing and sales, but also with product development in the many cases where products and services are developed to complement one another. Its application is becoming universal, though with different degrees of rigor (for example, in defining touch points).
Cons:
Service design is an umbrella concept that covers an extraordinary variety of design activities. In such a situation, coming up with a protocol and pedagogy common rules and education is nearly impossible. Thus, service designers learn primarily by doing, and most jobs require reinventing the wheel. No agreed-upon metrics exists to measure the value of most services or of their improvement. Service designers have few constraints to facilitate their mission. In Service Design today, everything is an experiment!

Links:
A retail store wants to complement the introduction of a new category of products with service innovations that become associated, in the minds of its current and future customers, with the store brand. Call in the service designers!
http://www.howardesign.com/exp/service/ Service Design Research (25-year survey), Jeff Howard website http://www.design.cmu.edu/emergence/2007/ Emergence 2007 Conference, Carnegie Mellon University (next conference, 2009) http://www.nd.edu/%7Ejsherry/pdf/2007/fruitfliesLikeABanana.pdf fruit flies Like a Banana, John Sherry Jr., in Multi-Lever Research (Oxford 2007), mind-blowing state of the art thinking about the role of time in service design http://www.lraworldwide.com LRA Worldwide, customer experience design firm with emphasis on service design http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/kwo/win00/facultynews/index.htm Metaphysical Merchandising: Marketing professor John Sherry explores the postmodern retail theater and discovers that marketers want you to see God, Matt Golosinki, kellogg Business School blog, Northwestern University
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(* The term Skunk Works is trademarked by the Lockheed-Marietta Corporation. However, uncapitalized, skunk works has entered common usage.)
skunk Works *
Pros:
Definition:
In the throes of World War II, Lockheed Aircraft was given the assignment to design and develop a new fighter plane in record time, the highly successful P-38 long-range fighter. The secret laboratory in which this was accomplished was nicknamed Skunk Works because of a pervasive odor that reminded the engineers of the Skonk Works distillery in a popular cartoon. Lockheed kept the name and the laboratory, run under a set of protective rules published by its founder, kelly Johnson, has produced a steady stream of striking new aircraft, seagoing vessels, and spacecraft. kellys 14 Rules defended the Skunk Works autonomy for getting things done its own way but declared its responsibility to always get them done on time and with the highest quality. In contemporary practice, a skunk works is a special group within a company, sometimes fully independent, sometimes within a planning unit, with autonomy and responsibility for leading key innovation initiatives and providing advice to other innovators within the organization. Until it became a PR asset, Disneys Imagineering unit played a similar role.
Skunk works and their activities typically are not widely advertised. However, from what we know of the skunk works that have been opened to public view, they pride themselves on being the elite in their respective organizations. This is a two-edged sword. Being elite means the skunk works have sufficient resources and the best possible staff to accomplish their assignments naturally, the most challenging given to them by executive officers and divisional managers. On the other hand, being elite means encouraging envy and lack of cooperation among less well-endowed units where conditions are not so comfortable and where the work can be tedious yet equally exacting. This division can retard necessary innovation and change. It needs bridging via the personal attention of leaders on each side of the relationship. In one exceptional case, the chief of a skunk works delegated to each of his top staff members a corporate division and its manager to befriend and assist. Soon information was flowing freely again. The employees in the divisions learned from the skunk works emissaries and replicated their style. for its part, the skunk works had a waiting list of volunteers eager to join its ranks.
Current Use:
When the Skunk Works first became public knowledge, in the mid-60s when its output was unmistakable, other companies rushed to establish their own skunk works. In many cases, the laboratories became isolated from the operational units of their host companies and thus less effective at implementing innovations. Conversely, given the presence of a hard-working skunk works, employees in other units wrongly assumed that they neednt innovate. Today, large companies judiciously run skunk works that are regularly reintegrated with the other divisions on a continuous or periodic basis.
Cons:
IOperating a skunk works in a company with an innovation culture and every front-running company should have one is like gilding the lily, redundant and not necessarily productive or profitable. Innovations should proliferate throughout the organization. If the skunk works takes a leading but not exclusive innovative role and helps other units to innovate, it can multiply its value. If the skunk works becomes isolated or withdrawn, so secret that not even its colleagues in the company have an inkling of what it is about, that can destroy trust and inhibit collaboration, co-creation, innovation, and implementation.

Links:
In order to create a leading-edge innovation capability for the future, recovery, a DESINOVA company is investigating optimal methods of institutionalizing skunk works-like activities within its organization. The key to its success will be its ability to find a leader with ability and compassion.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aeronautics/skunkworks/ and http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aeronautics/skunkworks/14rules.html The Skunk Works and kellys 14 Rules, Lockheed-Martin Aeronautics Skunk Works website http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/92/ibm.html Building a Better Skunk Works, Alan Deutschman, fast Company, Dec 19, 2007 http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11993055 Management Idea: Skunkworks, Economist.com, Aug 25, 2008
http://www.hrcapitalist.com/2008/09/culture-dead-cr.html Culture Dead? Start a Skunkworks to Leapfrog the Lameness In Your Culture..., kris Dunn, The HR Capitalist, Sep 24, 2008
http://www.cazh1.com/blogger/thoughts/2006/06/guidelines-for-success-with-your-skunk.shtml Guidelines for Success with Your Skunk Works Project, James. P. MacLennan, Cazh1.com, Jun 19, 2006 (nominally about software projects, but much broader than that and still a quick read)
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Definition:
Stage-Gate - invented by Robert G. Cooper - can be defined as a business process to manage new product development (NPD). It is based on years of analysis of the factors that define success or failure on development projects.. The basic principles of Stage-Gate is to ensure optimal use of product development resources - ie. support viable development projects and kill the bad ones. Stage-Gate consists of a number of stages typically 5 and concurrent gates from idea discovery to launch (see figure). At Gate-meetings, a review board makes regularly go/killdecisions on all ideas and development projects. The structure for each gate consists of: - Deliverables from a project that typically follow a particular format that allows you to compare different projects - A set of criteria that the project can be measured up against such as market potential, strategic fit, return on investment etc. - Output / outcome of the gate review. Resolution on the go / no-go typically taken by a review panel - performance and justification must be available for project teams
stage-gate
Pros:
Stage-Gate offers a transparent and simple decision-making model with a proven track of best practice examples. It combines development stages with a management model and concurrent easy-to-use tools. It may cut down development time, motivate for efficient use of development resources and seed the soil for a higher success rate in the market. It can be combined with other methods in the front-End such as Voice-of-Customer, Ethnography, Ideation etc. It allows for portfolio management of all development projects which is often modest in the innovation management process.
Cons:
Templates, checklists, guidelines etc. are developed to support the ideation team and project manager. In theory, the Stage-Gate process ensures only the most prosperous projects to go continue through the gate. A portfolio system has been developed to monitor the total amount of development projects.
Stage-Gate does not in itself ensure the quality of the content of the ideas and projects in the pipeline. furthermore, it motivates for a linear project cycle that does not take into account iterations that often is the defacto process in many development projects. The model is rather corporate / introverted in its nature and does not come up with suggestions on how to manage external sources of innovation - such as users, customers, suppliers, researchers, experts ie. open innovation.
Current Use: Stage-Gate has since its birth in 1985 become a state-of-the-
art system to manage NPD in larger companies. According to Product Development Institute, Stage-Gate is used in 73 pct of the larger North American Corporates* and in many European companies as well. Stage-Gate are implemented and used in different scales - full scale as well as in more lighter versions to capture different types of innovation and development projects (ie. radical, semi-radical, incremental innovation and line-extension projects).
figure/source**

Links:
A larger service company are using the principles of Stage-Gate, though are improving the front-End of Innovation by using principles and methods from Ethnography, User Innovation and Strategic Design to feed the Stage-Gate model with higher quality ideas and concepts.
www.prod-dev.com Product Development Institute ** http://stage-gate.com/ - the official website of Stage-Gate http://stage-gate.com/knowledge.php - white papers that describes Stage-Gate http://www.stage-gate.eu/ - European partner on Stage-Gate
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STRATEGIC PlANNING
Definition:
Strategic planning is essential to the running of every organization, whether it takes place formally, in a coordinated fashion, or haphazardly unit by unit. Strategic planning takes as its fundamental premise that strategy defined simply as getting from where we are now to where we want to go is the proper basis for every organizational decision. The origin of the word strategy is revealing: it is the Greek word for both leadership and military command. Strategic planners favor thinking of themselves as helping to lead an organization; others may see them as imposing control-and-command, a style of management that is militaristic and hierarchical. Strategic planning can be dynamic or static. Its methods tend to favor quantitative tools, but some of the most successful strategic planners are more intuitive. Innovators are likely to be more successful if they can characterize their results in ways that are measurable or emotionally compelling, depending on the strategic planning methods in use within their organizations.
Pros:
Strategic planning gets at the core of organizational competency. It focus management on the future, compelling attention to what must be done for an organizational to fulfill its mission by achieving goals in the long term, not just momentarily. Usually it is coordinated and therefore, holistic. Often, strategic planners assume leadership positions within organizations because they have the most complete picture in mind of the organization functioning in the evolving public or private environment. Strategic planning, as opposed to operational management, ideally takes into account all of the factors that bear on an organizations ability to function well, using the most complete and diverse collection of management tools. Also ideally, strategic planners should be most open to innovation as a way of solving problems that are impervious to, or even the result of, established ways of doing things.
Current Use: Strategic planning occurs in virtually every organization,
Cons:
whether in a large organizations formal strategic planning unit, in operational units trying to plan for their separate futures, or in the head of a small organization like a family-owned chain of retail outlets. Strategic planning may take place in a separate unit or it may be folded into other units including general management, business development, or marketing. Consultants may be brought in to assist a client organization with strategic planning because they are believed to be more objective regarding the clients future and their plans can be challenged.
Strategic planning is a management process that, based on prevailing conditions, comes into and out of favor as a driver of change and a user of innovation. When times are good, managements engage in strategic planning. When times are more difficult, managements tend to discount strategic planning as a luxury. Some executive believe that strategy is the property of executive management and that planning strategically at lower levels is contradictory. Strategic planning can constrict innovation at lower levels. Because strategy is a fundamental process, when things go well, strategic planning is credited. When things go wrong, strategic planning is derided as a useless and only history can tell which judgment is correct..

Links:
In order to prepare across all of its operating units for radically changing travel habits due to the skyrocketing cost of petroleum-based fuels, a large transportation company produces and enforces an organization-wide strategic plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning Strategic Planning, Wikipedia http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/032/strategy.html Increasing the firms Strategic Iq, Graziado Business Report, Pepperdine University http://www.sps.org.uk/ Strategy Development and Implementation, Strategic Planning Society (Uk) website http://www.nonprofitexpert.com/strategic_planning.htm Strategic Planning for Nonprofits, NonProfitExpert.com website http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2005/sb20050119_9832_sb037.htm A Better Scheme for Strategic Planning, Business Week, January 19, 2005
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TRANSfORMATION DESIGN
Definition:
Many designers and design scholars believe that the ultimate evolution of design, at least as can be foreseen today, is transformation design (TD). Wikipedia offers an excellent description: Transformation design is a human-centered, interdisciplinary process that seeks to create desirable and sustainable changes in behavior and form of individuals, systems and organizations often for socially progressive ends. TA is a multistage, iterative process applied to big, complex issues often, but not limited to, social issues. Its practitioners examine problems holistically rather than reductively to understand relationships as well as components to better frame the challenge. They then prototype small-scale systems composed of objects, services, interactions and experiences that support people and organizations in achievement of a desired change. Successful prototypes are then scaled. Because TD is about applying design skills in non-traditional territories, it often results in non-traditional design outputs. Projects have resulted in the creation of new roles, new organizations, new systems and new policies. These designers are just as likely to shape a job description, as they are a new product.
Pros: TD recognizes that true innovations, expressed as design solutions, cannot

occur unless there is accompanying change in the social setting and among the participating organizations and individuals in which the solutions are to be implemented. This applies even to the innovators and designers who are advising the solutions! In many ways, the discourse of TD resembles the discourse of therapy. Context makes a huge difference to the successful implementation of any design solution. Because TD takes into account so many factors, if the designers can manage the process, the projects overall success is more likely since the designers are determining the social and environmental contexts for the solution as well as the solution itself.
Cons: TD requirement are large and all encompassing, with many participants
Current Use:
TD was a response to then-new Uk PM Tony Blairs call to action by the Uk Design Councils RED unit, led by award-winning designer Hilary Cottam, TD is now applied widely in European public sector projects.
to identify and coordinate, and processes to initiate, They can remain incomplete works in progress forever. TD occurs more often in the public sector because there performance is measured in the long term, by social indicators. In the private sector, TD is more difficult. Besides the time and cost burdens associated with practicing complex TD, how many leaders VDs and CEOs are prepared to undertake a personal or corporate transformation, putting themselves or their organizations on the line even if transformation is warranted, even if it means the life or death of the organization? History says, not many.

Links:
Observing a financial organizations lack of market success implementing incremental process solutions, an innovator-designer team recommends to executive management a transformation design project for the entire organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_design Transformation Design, Wikipedia http://www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/transformationdesign/ Transformation Design, Uk Design Council RED website with link to TD paper (PDf) and http://www.participle. net/ Announcement of Participle, new company formed by former RED Director Hilary Cottam http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=61-1 five or Six questions for Irene McAra-McWilliam, ACM eLearn http://www.kks.se/upload/diverse_filer/2008/Societal-Entrepreneurship-Programme2.pdf Societal Entrepreneurship Program (Sweden) http://www.wie.org/j22/hock.asp, Transformation by Design, WIE (2002), interview with Dee Hock, designer of VISA Card system
40
TREND ANAlySIS
Definition:
Trend analysis is a technique for surveying the current social, political, and cultural terrain and determining the opportunities for pursuing a particular plan or policy. Another term for trend analysis proposed by the eminent sociologist and policy analyst Amitai Etziioni is environmental scanning, looking for clues in the immediate environment and long-term that can tell us how best to bring about a desired plan or policy. There are as many ways to analyze trends as there are types of trends. These fall into two non-exclusive categories, qualitative methods employing awareness and expert knowledge, and quantitative methods that employ statistical tools to parse data. Most analysts use both methods to complement one another and validate the results.
Pros:
Although anyone can analyze trends (and fads, which are short-lived rends), but experts who are trained and experienced at detecting significance based on their clients needs within the constant welter of social, political, and cultural phenomena produce the most valuable trends analyses. knowing what existing trends are and their significance, clients can then prepare agendas that exploit these trends and that dont work against them (unless that is a clients purpose for example, a public relations firm that wants to change public opinion). Trend analysis can suggest which innovations will succeed and which will not, thus permitting innovators to invest their time, energy, and resources most effectively, developing innovations that fit with current or anticipated future realities.
Current Use: Numerous consultancies provide trend analysis services to
clients in the private and public sectors. In the private sector, marketing and advertising have long relied on trend analysis to make their plans. In the public sector, trend analysis traditionally was used for policy planning and for political campaigns. The popularity of trend analysis has increased as the world has grown more complex and today, virtually every type of enterprise, public, private, and third sector (NGOs and non-profit organizations), uses one or another form of trend analysis to guide its planning and activities. Because future realities can be extrapolated from trends, trend analysis is used to forecast the future.
Cons:
In the present moment, significant trends may be difficult to distinguish from short-lived fads. A trend analysis that mistakenly but convincingly identifies fads as trends can be misleading, and even more damaging to an innovation project than a trend analysis that is blatantly inaccurate. Because the experts who conduct most trends analyses belong to professional networks in which information and opinions are shared, entire communities of experts can operate on faulty assumptions (as todays financial sector demonstrates). Trends analyses that are only qualitative or quantitative require further testing.

Links:
To better inform its strategic plans, a health-services organization engages trends analysts to describe how patients currently view and use health services and which new technologies and treatments may affect this use, and how.
http://www.henrikvejlgaard.com/?id=161 q&A, Henrik Vejlgaard website (Danish trend analyst and author, Anatomy of a Trend ) http://www.sirc.org/ Social Issues Research Centre website (leading independent European trend analysis consultancy) http://iftf.org/ Institute for the future (IfTf) website (pioneering trend analysis organization in the USA) http://sric-bi.com/Explorer/techlist.shtml SRI Consulting-Business Intelligence Explorer Program (technological trend analysis) http://www.cifs.dk/ Institut for fremtidsforskning
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Definition: TRIZ is the Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem
TRIZ
Pros:
Solving. TRIZ is a logical, knowledge- and model-based problem-solving methodology and technology that reportedly accelerates team solutions. Its based on (to quote the TRIZ Journal) the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles can be identified and codified, they can be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. Sixty years later, TRIZ is still a research project in progress, but it is widely used by clients who seek breakthrough ideas products and services to gain market superiority. Its solution path is: specific Problem general Problem general solution specific (Creative) solution TRIZ comprises 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving as well as various means of classifying and filtering problems so that the right Principle is applied. The Principles in each domain resemble the elements of Christopher Alexanders A Pattern Language published to explain the built environment.
Practitioners claim that TRIZ makes problem solving scientific (which implies that other methodologies and methods are not). By rigorously applying TRIZ principles and processes, consultants and clients allegedly rip through alternative solutions to complex problems and rapidly come up with the best solutions after having discarded all of the rest. The infusion of computer power to TRIZ makes this claim more plausible because if creativity variables can be identified and isolated, running the numbers basically, comparing all possible permutations should result in at least a preliminary culling of ideas, which is useful regardless of TRIZ ultimate value to solving a particular problem. The quantitative component of TRIZ ensures a certain degree of rigor when choosing variables (Principles) and processing them. Many of the Principles so discovered are alternately cryptic or commonsense but taken together, they supposedly create a matrix of innovations (or at least, rules) that when followed result in a desired product or service.
Cons:
Current Use:
TRIZ was invented in the 1940s by the late Russian engineer Genrick Altshuller. With his death the discipline fractured and now has many practitioners of different stripes in many fields. Though most adhere to the basic TRIZ principles, their offerings come in different flavors; and there are also many derivative methodologies. Some TRIZ are in the public domain, others are proprietary. Its claimed that major corporations have made use of TRIZ, but there is no way to confirm this.
TRIZ has assumed the status of a cult among many of its practitioners, in the sense that only the anointed experts, like ancient priests, can successfully lead the way to innovation nirvana. The TRIZ hypothesis is compelling on its face, but the tests to which it is subjected leave a lot of wiggle room to interpret whether it is valid, generally and in specific instances. Because many of the TRIZ variations and their results are proprietary, Its difficult to confirm that TRIZ works the way its champions say it does, let alone that the results are valuable. Relying on TRIZ requires a combination of science and faith, something that has not stopped believers from doing good work. Whether using TRIZ was the cause remains to be proven. TRIZ real power may be its ability to inspire the search for innovative solutions to difficult problems with the certain expectation that they can and will be found.

Links:
forced by the inclement economic climate to reconsider its entire business from top to bottom, a manufacturer employs TRIZ to eliminate as many unsatisfactory or problematic business alternatives as possible. It then formulates a new business model and derivative rules for operations.
http://www.aitriz.org/ Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies (site authorized by Genrich Altshuller) http://www.triz-journal.com/ The TRIZ Journal http://www.mazur.net/triz/ TRIZ, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, Glenn Mazur, 1995 http://www.innovationtools.com/resources/triz.asp TRIZ Problem Solving Resource Center, InnovationTools http://www3.sympatico.ca/karasik/ Anti-TRIZ Journal (Educating the public in the real TRIZ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ TRIZ, Wikipedia (excellent treatment)
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USER INNOVATION
Definition:
The concept of user innovation, or user-driven innovation, is the intellectual basis for the many methods of innovation that require participation by users: customers in business and citizens in government. MIT professor Eric von Hippl first wrote about the concept in 1986. von Hippl identified end users as the people who actually use a product or service, not its creators or the intermediaries who sell or deliver it. von Hippl recommended that manufacturers and service providers set up lead-user panels to obtain expert advice and valuable ideas from top customers with a stake in a products development, because they intensively use the product. Scott Cook, the inventor of Intuit software, in 2008 created the User Contribution System as a way to facilitate and broaden the collection and review of user generated ideas, opinions, and advice. The DESINOVA project has user innovation as one of its foundational methodologies.
Pros: User innovation is now an innovation-management axiom. User innovation
Current Use:
User innovation is practiced in every modern industrial economy and by every modern government to a greater or lesser degree. The enhanced global information environment supported by the Internet has made customers and citizens better informed and capable of more easily sharing their experiences with planners, business innovators, and designers. This represents a quantum leap in the intelligence that can be applied to solving problems and innovation solutions in the economic and social spheres. The existence of online surveys, forums, opinion websites, and reputational ranking systems makes user involvement almost ubiquitous. In the field, applied ethnography, in-person focus groups, and design events give user innovation a tangible reality. User innovation has been proposed as an essential element of modern democracy that should be formalized in law and enabled via various systems.
is now as central to the practice of innovation as any other single concept. Although there are critics who dispute the profitability of user involvement it takes effort or who credit creative inspiration with the best outcomes, most business innovators pay tribute to the concept (even if they occasionally stray from its tenets in practice). User involvement has proven its worth. At the least, users can comment on existing solutions to problems they experience, helping business innovators to zero in on the proper decision space. Users can make suggestions that lead to superior innovations or, in the best case, actually propose innovations that have extra value because they originate with the customer or citizen. The Uk was the first society to require government agencies and public services to publish charters of customers rights. Besides penalties paid for poor service, these charters which are considered binding contracts also specify how agencies and service providers must interact with customers who suggest improvements, thus making user innovation a condition of performance and a part of the law. The same ideal of user innovation and responsibility to customers and citizens to consider their advice prevails in Northern Europe, although in most instances it has yet to be turned into law. Swedens Societal Entrepreneurship takes this to the ultimate conclusion, institutionalized revolution as a solution for problems too large for conventional governance.
Cons:
The arguments against user innovation grow weaker, boiled down to two: (1) the cost and difficulty of implementing user innovation programs and (2) the lack of quality control when users become involved. A third criticism, now seldom heard, is that involving users means revealing IP secrets and organizational weaknesses. Even critical users can become advocates when brought into an organizations inner circle of advisors, something the Web makes easier.

Links:
A retail chain sets up lead-user panels to provide it with the most current, accurate understanding of how its service satisfies its customers needs and what remains to be done. It callibrates the lead-user advice with customer roundtables to which it invites randomly selected customers.
http://userinnovation.mit.edu/ MIT User Innovation Homepage, Professor Eric von Hippl and others http://usercontribution.intuit.com/ User Contribution System, Scott fosters Wiki http://www.wwtf.at/projects/research_projects/details/index.php?PkEY=807_DE_O Implications of Tool kits for User Innovation and Design Research Project, Nikolaus franke, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Vienna knowledge, Research & Technology fund, 2009 http://www.ebst.dk/innovation_og_bdi Programme for user-driven innovation, Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority (EBST), 2009 (also in Danish) http://www.kks.se/templates/StandardPage.aspx?id=12615 Societal Entrepreneurship, kk Stiftelsen (Sweden)
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virtual WorlDs anD mental moDels

Definition:
Virtual world can mean many things. Of late, its meaning has been appropriated by online games and services like Second Life and There, to indicate alternate realities sustained by information technology. A meaning that is more appropriate to our project, however, and the original meaning, was given by the organizational theorist Peter Senge: the mental, multidimensional picture or model of an organization in operation held in the mind of an executive, manager, worker, customer, or other stakeholder. This virtual world can be illustrated or simulated and thus made interactive, so that its structure can be altered to produce alternative methods of operations and management. Since Senge provided that definition in 1980, the concept of the virtual world has grown to encompass markets, policy domains, and other phenomena; and discreet objects and forces, like CAD models and GIS.
Pros:
Virtual worlds exist in everyones mind. They are a potential universal language of forms and forces that, when translated into graphics, prose and poetry, and as freestanding multi-dimensional models, provide almost immediate shared information and frequently, understanding. Scientists, engineers, doctors and designers commonly use depictions of virtual worlds to portray invisible and obscure relationships among objects and with their environments. Rendering or building a virtual world model Is one way to make complex phenomena simple to understand and because they are the basis of simulations, easier to work with throughout the product- or service lifestyle.
Cons:
Current Use:
Virtual worlds have been simulated to illustrate how individuals see their organizations and what needs to be done to improve the organization or the experience of working within it and with it. Many professions work with virtual worlds in this way, including planning, therapy, architecture and civil engineering, and so forth. More recently, online virtual worlds have received a lot of publicity, but objective measures of these systems value have not been encouraging. New technology will make it easier to capture and share mental virtual worlds.
Virtual worlds are only as good as the data that informs them. If there are gaps in knowledge or the facts are wrong, the virtual worlds that result will also be inappropriate. (Although, a failed virtual world as does any wellconstructed model -- points out where knowledge is lacking or wrong a virtue.) Often, individuals work from virtual worlds that are misleading because they are incomplete or composed of incorrect information purposely induced by others for their own purposes. New technological forms of virtual worlds (like Second Life) are not as rich and informative as the virtual worlds we hold in our minds that an artist, designer, or therapist can translate into a shareable form. This may change with time.

Links:
A designer has her clients executives describe the how they mentally see their business, not just as an organization but also as a structure of connections and forces. She then creates virtual worlds that can be reviewed and critiqued.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/pdfs/3211.pdf Peter Senge, The Leaders New Work: Building Learning Organizations, MIT Sloan School Management Review, fall 1990. http://www.tcd.ie/Psychology/Ruth_Byrne/mental_models/ Mental Models website http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/ Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, Louis Rosenfeld website http://www.managementhelp.org/systems/systems.htm Systems Theory, Carter McNamara, free Management Library
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WeB 2.0 anD BeyonD

(mashuPs, WeB tools, soCial netWorks, etC.)
Definition:
Web 2.0 is the term associated with the entire range of technical and social innovations that has emerged to characterize the Web the graphical, largely inter-human component of the Internet as a thoroughly social phenomenon. Web 2.0 innovations include: Advanced search Google and specialized niche-search Web-based services Travel, finance, software, entertainment, and other services offered via the Web, often exclusively (only on the Web) Mashups Combinations of services (e.g., maps and travel information) Web-based social networks MySpace, facebook, and many more specialized communities based on Web connections; blogging Convergent media Computer, cellphone (voice and text), video and audio broadcast, and similar services available across all media
Pros:
The initial use for the term Web 2.0 was as a device to persuade investors to fund new services, but its proven socially beneficial as a prod to independent development as well. Being a part of Web 2.0 meant to be on the forefront of media and communications developments. As a result, opensource and other communal development projects, many without obvious sources of outside support but often with social benefits have become more common. Another aspect of Web 2.0 is the fuller integration of offline life and online experience: the activity of people online is not just computer play; its fundamentally a part of contemporary life in advanced societies. Web 2.0 has another dimension: Web and computer use is now universal, potentially empowering individuals in the developing world to play a more decisive part in the global economy and society.
The next evolution of the Web, labeled Web 3.0, will feature ubiquity (computing everywhere), embedded intelligence in physical objects, and semantic wisdom the ability of the Web to anticipate users needs and respond accordingly.
Cons:
Current Use:
Web 2.0 is a function of the use of the Internet by large numbers of people in all walks of life. Its evolution is a consequence of this use. The free, commercial use of the term Web 2.0 is now impeded by a highly controversial trademark awarded to OReilly Books (a computer book publisher).
Many observers believe Web 2.0 is nothing more than a marketing device for Internet entrepreneurs and the investors who bank them. They say that OReillys trade marking the term is a direct slap in the face of Web 2.0 advocates, directly contrary to the Web 2.0 ethos. More to the point, critics note that many Web 2.0 services are redundant; trivial in terms of the services content; and because of Web 2.0s data intensively and personalization, terrifically invasive of personal privacy. from an economic standpoint, free services like file-sharing of copyright material are problematic, with the potential for dampening creative invention.

Links:
A growing network of private medical facilities uses the Web to provide information to patients; sell its services to new customers; coordinate services among medical staffs; and manage its inventory of beds, technology, and supplies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2 Web 2.0, Wikipedia http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html What is Web 2.0? Tim OReilly, OReilly website http://www.webguild.org/2008/04/shame-on-you-tim-oreilly.php Shame on you, Tim OReilly, Webguild.com, April 24, 2008 http://www.techsoup.org/toolkits/web2/ Everything you need to know about Web 2.0, TechSoup.com (website for social entrepreneurs) http://www.schillmania.com/content/opinion/2005/10/dont-believe-the-web-20-hype/ Dont Believe the Web 2.0 Hype! Schillmania.com
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WisDom of the masses

Definition: The Wisdom of the Masses (also known as the Wisdom
of Crowds) is a hypothesis in social science and heuristics. It claims that the collective opinions of a vast number of people will usually produce more creative and better solutions to a problem than the opinion of one or a few experts in a field. The hypothesis is testable but not provable, as every report, confirming or denying, can be dismissed as statistically insignificant given the vast number of decisions that are made by the masses each and every day. Nevertheless, the hypothesis has produced significant products with global audiences used on an everyday basis: Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, and so forth.
Pros: The Wisdom of the Masses is the logical foundation (and excuse) for such
common phenomena as trading markets and political governance. It is assumed in these cases that the masses are in fact comprised of large populations of individuals who are relatively knowledgeable. The hypothesis feels right and in keeping with democratic theory and aspirations. Even if the hypothesis is not entirely correct, it seems to produce correct estimates of situations and solutions to problems enough so that we can say that something is happening when multitudes of people contribute their knowledge to a search for the truth.
Current Use: The Wisdom of the Masses is the basis for prediction markets
and similar tools used to forecast future events. It provides a rationale, if not an absolute proof, for systems that gather information from great numbers of people, the results of which become proprietary information (of risk management companies or political campaigns, for example) or information reflected back to the public in order to change popular perceptions and opinions. Most of these systems are of recent origin and have yet to be thoroughly studied and critiqued, but one of the most common of mood barometers the public opinion survey, or poll is now considered a relatively reliable tool of measurement. Most polls are taken among pre-selected audiences, but increasingly, many are not.
Cons:
Markets fail on a regular basis, throwing into doubt the Wisdom of the Masses. The alternative is command and control exerted by one or a small number of leaders. Since modern societies generally find this alternative abhorrent, they willingly close one eye when gauging the value of Wisdom of the Masses as a concept used by business and governments. Even if the hypothesis succeeds in explaining certain good societal choices, it is not absolutely the case that Wisdom of the Masses is responsible. The concept remains and may always be problematic, since it is so difficult if not impossible to prove as a general case.

Links:
Examining the popular and press discourse for key trends that are significant to a service companys longer-term goals, a designer uses Digg to find those articles and online publications most highly rated for this purpose.
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-Collective-Economies-Societies/dp/0385503865 Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002422.htm Crowdsourcing, Business Week, September 25, 2006 http://www.smartmobs.com/ SmartMobs:The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold blog (author of Smart Mobs book) http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/08/08/opinion/IHT-08edcohen.1.html Is there a wisdom in crowds? Roger Cohen, NY Times, August 8, 2007
46

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Tools for Innovation: A chapbook

GEMBA Innovation, March 2009 for the DESINOVA project

Tools for InnovaTIon: a Chapbook fIrsT DrafT

Robert Jacobson, PhD, GEMBA INNOVATION

Current Use: Innovation is encouraged in almost every social setting

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BlUE OCEAN STRATEGy

Cons: According to Wikipedia, It is argued that rather than a theory, Blue

Pros: Its claimed by business incubator directors and incubator advocates

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Cons: Current Use:

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Pros: Mapping a customer journey is a valuable discipline:

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Definition: Designers will recognize the Design Collaboratorium (DC), a

Cons: Collaboration within the same profession is difficult enough; across

DESIGNING fOR ExPERIENCE

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DIVERGENCE AND CONVERGENCE

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Pros: Heuristics are a part of everyday life.

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No Pros and Cons:

Source: David Armano

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leaD-users anD leaD-user Panels

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Definition: Open innovation is among todays most popular innovation-

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Pros: PMs are a wonderful way to involve large numbers of people in

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Current Use: Prototyping is used in every manufacturing sector, in

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Current Use: Scenario planning achieved prominence during the Cuban

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Current Use: Strategic planning occurs in virtually every organization,

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Pros: TD recognizes that true innovations, expressed as design solutions, cannot

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Current Use: Numerous consultancies provide trend analysis services to

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Definition: TRIZ is the Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem

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