General impressions and highlights from Day 1. Around 300 people registered for the conference being held in a new space called “Kings Place” close to the Kings Cross-St Pancras tube & train stations. The Economist runs a professional conference — other sponsors are the Design Council (www.designcouncilorg.uk), Brand Union (global branding agency) and Grant Thornton.
Vijay Vaitheeswaran from The Economist is the host and speaker interviewer — he does a fine job of keeping people on track and on time which helps make it a successful event.
I enjoyed virtually every speaker — from Robin Bew, the Editorial Director and Chief Economist with the Economist Intelligence Unit:
…old business strategies won’t work — need new strategies to respond to slower growth and emerging markets…
to Will Hutton from the Work Foundation who showed an interesting graph about global stimulus packages — the UK virtually put no $$ in stimulus…
to Nick Jankel, Chief Innovation Pioneer at wecreate whose presentation I’ll summarize in a future blog but here is a surprising factoid:
...average age of tweeter is 39 and average age of facebooker is 38…
To Steve Evans, Professor of Life Cycle Engineering at Cranfield University:
…moving from a labour is scarce and nature is abundant paradigm in the first industrial revolution to a nature is scarce and labour is abundant in the next industrial revolution…and emphasizing the importance of whole systems design…
To Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano and author of Design Driven Innovation: Changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean.
Really enjoyed the Case Studies on the “new competitors” –people who used design thinking to build their companies. The first was Hugo Spowers from Riversimple — they have designed a completely new kind of car with a completely new kind of business to go with it. Then Jeff Denby, the Chief Creative Officer and Co-found of PACT — underwear –stay tuned. We then had two case studies about “disruption” at established companies — Samsung and Microsoft.
Afternoon was an IDEO facilitated workshop — not my favourite part of the day other than I met some good contacts from the Design Council and Alan Livingston who was, until recently, the Rector of University College Falmouth (UCF) in Cornwall. He built UCF …from a small art school into one of the world’s most highly respected institutes for Art, Design, Media and Performance. The College attracts students from across the globe and is renowned for the employability of its graduates in the creative industries. Was fun to talk to such a “transformer”.
The final piece was an historical summary by Craig Sams, Co-founder of Carbon Gold and Founder and President of Green & Black’s (that great organic chocolate). He talked about growing his businesses with the help of the Fair Trade certification and the Soil Association Organic Standard. Had lunch with him prior to his speech and met his design team (pearlfisher). Lots to think about.
Over and out until tomorrow.