Design thinking

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched...

Companies like Shell and DBS Bank are using it to change how their work gets done.

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive...

Four traps that hold leaders back.

Consensus is often the enemy of innovation.

Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences,...

When I was in business school, Stanford’s d.school was just a glimmer of a thing living in a trailer across campus, barely known to most of us business students. Five years later, there is much discussion in the business world about design’s evolution from producing of objects to producing a broad framework for ideas and […]

Continuous improvement at Toyota Motor Company is now a business legend. For three decades, Toyota enlisted its employees in a relentless drive to find faster, more efficient methods to develop and make low-cost, defect-free cars. The results were stupendous. Toyota became the benchmark in the automobile industry for quality and low cost. The same, however, […]

It involves a Winnebago.

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With the cropping of its logo, Starbucks has elected to join the limited fraternity of nameless entities — meaning it’s now positioned to rely on a symbol-based logo without any text to serve as training wheels. In doing so, it has freed itself from some limiting baggage No one is saying that this mark will […]

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 amidst the ongoing employment crisis has opened a wide conversation about what ails America and what should be done about it. A vast ideological gap on macro-economic policy divides Washington and much of the nation, but there is almost universal agreement on one solution: innovation. Innovation is now perceived as […]

Leader's active participation in innovation through the full design cycle is key to the organization's success. In partnership with BigThink Edge.

In large organizations, design is moving closer to the center of the enterprise. This shift isn't about aesthetics and product development, however. It's...

Among my favorite examples of great customer experience is Target's ClearRx pharmacy system. Introduced 4 years ago, it provided a radical departure from...

Big developments in manufacturing are finally making mass customization a reality.

While working away on my laptop at a hotel breakfast, I couldn’t help but overhear the four gentlemen poring over an iPad two tables way. Their intense discussion revolved around rolling out their high-tech prototypes in a medical care complex. Since I’ve written about prototypes and prototyping, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop. Forgive me. The […]

An example from Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software...

Sometimes people will pay more for the handmade and the authentic.