Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm
To its proponents, it’s a new paradigm for product development and strategic marketing. To its detractors, it’s a pair of empty buzzwords. Either way, it’s called “design thinking”--a mashup of the strategic marketing and design disciplines that is being credited with bringing great new consumer products and services to market in record time, with startling success rates. Brandweek explores the phenomenon and asks: If designers are such great strategic thinkers, then why did it take them so long to land a punch on the marketing establishment?
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."
Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.
more media file links for January 5, 2009:
The coming creativity boom
From the ashes of the financial crisis, what is likely to emerge? A new and sudden boom of entrepreneurial creativity and invention, writes Forbes author and futurist George Gilder, based on four intersecting technological developments: cloud computing, advanced graphics processing, nanotechnology, and green building materials. The rapid advancements that these breakthrough technologies will make in the near future will dwarf any losses incurred in the current market collapse--demonstrating that creativity is the ultimate source of freedom and power, the author asserts.
Using design to crack society’s problems
Fast Company profiles Participle, a London-based agency that specializes in applying design solutions to intractable social problems. One example: redesigning healthcare delivery for chronic disease sufferers, shifting the focus away from hospital-based care to community-based solutions. Another example: repackaging support services for seniors in collaboration with Britain’s Sky TV. According to the article, Participle represents a new wave of design firms that believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing, and that design can help to build new ones better suited to the demands of 21st century.
Agile programming: A good model for media innovation?
Can journalists learn something about creativity and innovation from the software community? MediaShift Idea Lab blogger Rich Gordon chronicles his experience mashing top-tier journalism and computer science students together to create next-generation media development teams. From the start, the computer science students set the tone and pace for the collaboration by introducing cutting-edge “agile programming” methodologies to the journalistic creative process. The experiment offers a potential role model for building successful media projects in the interactive age.
Obama’s seven lessons for radical innovators
As Barack Obama prepares to take the reins of the presidency, Havas Media Lab Director Umair Haque reflects on what got him there: a radically innovative approach to organizational management that caught all his competitors flat-footed. Writing on his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, Haque lists seven qualities of the new kind of organization that such management innovation produced: self-organizing design; resilience in the face of threats; minimal attention to gamesmanship; maximum attention to authentic purpose; a unifying approach to the market; “thick power”--the power to inspire and lead; and an embrace of the world-changing power of ideals. In the business world, only a small handful of companies have yet to adopt anything quite like this kind of radically innovative management approach--Google, among these few--but its seven features represent the starting point for anyone wishing to build an institution suited for the 21st century.
Unintended consequences: Ten years under the DMCA
The Electronic Frontier Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a review of its negative impact on free speech, scientific research, innovation, competition, privacy, and commerce. Did anything go right? Not really, the report concludes in exhaustive detail.
Evidence of a global super organism
Is Google an avatar of a global, super-intelligent organism that transcends anything we have seen or imagined on this earth? According to Kevin Kelly on The Technium, that’s exactly right. A planetary-wide super organism is emerging from the sum of the world’s digital infrastructure, with its own life, mind, intelligence, and consciousness. How far away are we from its birth? “Closer than you think,” Kelly writes.
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