Combinatorial innovation

Great! So recognizable. Your unique mix of interests may turn out to be your very own super power. As a strategist I am interested in a broad variety of topics. I always have the feeling you had to specialize or stick to one discipline. Otherwise others don’t really understand what the focus of your expertise is. But not to worry anymore. Look at this great TedTalk. Multipotentialites: people with many interests and creative pursuits. Wapnick refers to
3 powers: idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability.

Author, entrepreneur and artist, Wapnick was blessed with so many interests that she was unable to pick just one. She studied music, visual arts, film production and law, and graduated from the Law Faculty at McGill University. After years of feeling anxious about her zigzagging career path and hyphenated credentials, she finally decided to embrace her plural nature and start a movement for others who lean toward being “multipotentialites.” Since launching her website, Puttylike, in 2010, Wapnick has inspired thousands of multipotentialites to stop trying to fit themselves into boxes, and embrace their plurality. Currently, she is working on her forthcoming book, “Multipotentialite.”

Botanical manufacturing

Growing solid wooden furniture without the joins

This is intruiging. Gavin Munro of Derbyshire-based Full Grown explains how moulding trees into one-piece chairs, lamps or mirror frames is far more eco-friendly than felling. This is no ordinary furniture showroom. In a field on the side of a hill 15 miles north of Derby lie row after row of perfectly maintained willow, oak, ash and sycamore trees. What clearly mark this field out from a regular forest are the blue-and-black plastic moulds that are training the trees in pre-defined routes, where they are gently and expertly manipulated into the exact shape of a chair, a table, a lamp or a mirror frame. read more

Design Thinking – Bootcamp

Extensive presentation by Jan Smiedgen about design thinking

PSFK Future of Health Report

Business Innovation by Design

Business Innovation Design, Jeffrey Tjendra

Each of the disciplines – brand, design thinking, innovation management etc.- have overlapping approaches. What if you merge different disciplines into a unified multidisciplinary approach? See here his multidisciplinary approach that guides businesses on what and how to innovate and grow. I truly like the thought of breaking through the existing silo’s and merging visions and disciplines. A good attempt to find a new approach where you have an overview of how elements are linked to each other and get the whole picture.

Creating Relevance by Design

The movie ‘Creating Relevance by Design’ illustrates the changing rol of design agencies from designers of ‘good products’ towards ‘creating value for their clients’.

Design Exchange 2013

The Design Exchange, a creative exchange on intrapreneurship, creativity and design. It was insightful to be there and to meet people from various backgrouds who have all in common a mindset for innovative business strategies.

Saving your creative soul

A well told message from Scott Berkun about how the creative process works. Listen to yourself, independent of others. Keep Going, do it anyway. Because “Making Stuff” is all about sit there and do the work. That’s the challenge. Loved this, made me get back to work with my own ideas about design thinking and strategy.

Teaching to see – Design Thinking film

Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See

A crash course in design thinking! This film is about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]’s own work and that of her students.

Technology, Aestetics & Behavior: universal design concepts

Moving into the area of communication between people and objects there are a range of concepts and challenges never seen or met before online. Three universal concepts have stood out as important to understand better in order to design better: Technology itself, which we by misunderstanding also overcomplicate. Aesthetics – the motivational force of human emotion, and copying behavior – not reality. By Helge Tenno