Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy — Part 1
Global Innovation. Techno-utopia. Flashes of genius. Social entrepreneurship. Innovation and the future of the US Economy. All these topics were packed into the first day of The Ideas Economy: Innovation conference at Berkeley co-hosted by The Economist and the Haas Business School at Berkeley. Program can be found at: http://ideas.economist.com/content/programme The Economist is setting up […]
Design Means Business Workshop
What is this design + business idea really about? And what are the processes and tools that are useful to business students and business leaders as they expand their thinking tool-kits? What is the value-add of design thinking to business? Last Friday afternoon, the Design Means Business Workshop explored these questions with ~130 full and […]
Design Driven Innovation
…changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean. Back to some blogs on the Big Rethink. While participants in the Economist conference were mainly from the UK, there were a few North Americans (2-3) and one Italian –Roberto Verganti, author and Professor of Management of Innovation at the Politecnico di Milano. Roberto’s […]
Shifting business…liberating magic
Nick Jankel, Collaborative Innovation Pioneer, Media Philosopher and CEO was one of the provocative speakers at The Big Rethink. His session was titled: HOW TO COLLABORATE TO SOLVE BUSINESS’ BIGGEST PROBLEMS Nick talked about how technological and social trends are opening up new possibilities for companies to solve problems, and why in his experience, this […]
Building new businesses & business models
Day two of The Big Rethink started out with sessions built around “Fresh Thinking about Business Models”. Grant Thornton were commissioned by the Economist Intelligence Unit to ask the question: “Do existing business models still deliver the goods?” Terry Black, Partner at Grant Thornton reported on the key findings which were actually a bit depressing. […]
Redesigning Business Summit…
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 […]
Diffusing, translating, transferring ideas…
How do people adopt and move ideas from one place to another? One of Paul Groth’s mentors at UC Berkeley was the famous geographer, Allan Pred. According to Paul this lecture on Innovation Diffusion that I enjoyed so much is a summary of Allan Pred’s Fall 1976 undergraduate geography course, “Information Circulation and Innovation Diffusion.” […]
Innovation diffusion…adopting new ideas
There is nothing like being a student so I have taken advantage of being back at UC Berkeley and have attended a class or two. One of my favourite classes back in ’81-’82 was the History of the U.S. Cultural Environment (ED169B). The class was and is taught by then Ph.D. candidate and now full […]
Echoes of DAVOS…
Every heard of Swissnex? Their mission is to connect the dots between Switzerland and North America in science, education, art, and innovation. It is an initiative of Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER). The SF group is part of a network of outposts elsewhere in the globe. Through our public events and […]
The Big Rethink x2
San Francisco is full of energy these days — I guess it always is. There is a lot going on and I have been doing my best to take it all in. Which has meant the design blog has been slightly inactive. But after tonight my College of Environmental Design lecture will be in the […]