Once upon a time there were some innovative farmers that developed a new hybrid crop that could satisfy the hunger of a growing population. This crop grew best in large farms which had to be situated far from where people lived. The food was so tasty and production could scale so quickly that it became necessary and possible to build a novel way to deliver this food to the population. The farmers built their own transportation network, which they called a “railway”.

To be more precise, analysts value the wave of growth of every new product and heavily discount the post-growth phase assuming commoditization. There is no value assigned to Apple for extending market reach to the mass market.

Weeding out people that don’t have the skills you are looking for is easy, but how do you determine if the person is the right culture fit?

Culture fit is a huge issue, and, in some ways, much more important than the skills the person has. You can teach a person to have the skills, but teaching them to be able to fit into your culture does not work

I’ve know lots of people who got into services thinking that they can use the income from clients to bankroll their own product ideas. That is not an impossible scenario — it’s been done before more than a few times, and it’s a beautiful thing when it happens. But it’s very, very difficult to pull off. To do services, you need to wake up in the morning with a different approach to life from the way you wake up in the morning to do products, and only a few people have the skill — and stamina — to juggle both at once.

But then the Coca-Cola runs out first and the Sunkist is half empty and nobody has bought even a single Grape Soda and should I cut my margins paying more per-unit for individual cans or do I buy full cases and find somewhere to store the extras and why am I doing algebra on the weekend!?

Cambridge Consultants released the findings of a study which examines how device usability impacts patient acceptance, dosage compliance and ultimately health outcomes. Looking at the role lifestyle factors and device features play in patient compliance for drug and device combination products, the research supports the idea that pharmaceutical companies could improve the market share of their drugs if the emphasis was shifted to the broader patient user experience.
Participants in the survey included healthcare providers, which play critical roles in determining a drug’s market success, and over 240 diabetes patients who used combination products daily, such as injection pens, auto-injectors or insulin pumps.

Responses indicated that patient compliance directly influences patient health and drug efficacy, suggesting that delivery device design should be focussed on supporting compliance on multiple levels.

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At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September last year, Justin Rattner, the director of Intel Labs, announced a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) and headed by Genevieve Bell, and also presented a new vision of context-aware computers and mobile devices.
Now the Intel website provides some more background on Intel’s work on Context Aware Computing.

“Context-awareness can make computing devices more responsive to individual needs and help to intelligently personalize apps and services. Using self-learning mechanisms, sensor inputs, and data analytics, Intel research teams are engaged in a number of projects that promise to take machine learning beyond the lab to practical, real-world applications.”

Most interestingly, the site goes into some depth on Intel’s current projects that explore the boundaries of context-aware computing:

Online Semi-Supervised Learning and Face Recognition: Use face recognition in place of a password to log in to any protected site. The self-learning techniques being refined by this project can be adapted to many areas of context awareness.
Context Aware Computing—Activity Recognition: This project is developing techniques so that your computer can adapt to your patterns of activity and, based on your needs and expectations, instruct and guide you on a daily basis.
Context-Aware Computer—Social Proximity Detection: Your friends, family, and co-workers all play a role in determining how your daily activities unfold. This project identifies ways to use the proximity of people important in your life to adjust communications and to help coordinate activities.

There is also more information on Intel’s Tomorrow Project & Futurism initiative.

“The project features science fiction stories, comics and short screen plays based on current research and emerging technologies and examines their affect on our future. “

Check the stories by Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond. Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz. The next one is by Cory Doctorow, it seems.

Misha W. Vaughan, architect of applications user experience at Oracle USA, reflects in this interesting, small article for the February 2011 issue of the Journal of Usability Studies on the challenges explaining the value of user experience to the Oracle sales organisation.
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Controversial British columnist Andrew Orlowski published a long investigating article on Nokia’s failure to build its own smartphone platform.
“When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development of its own smartphone platforms and APIs, and betting the farm on somebody else’s, many people asked why it was necessary. [...]

The question as to why Nokia surrendered its independence lies in why it took so long to engineer a competitive UI, and then under new management, decided that it couldn’t.

I’ve called it the “for want of a nail” question: if Nokia had a UI, it would not have had to lose its independence. And as Nokia gave up its independence, Europe lost its last global technology platform. US and Japanese companies now dictate the market.”

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DPPI 11, the 5th conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, will take place in Milan, Italy this year and Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken is part of the scientific committee.
The DPPI conference originally began through the desire to move away from talking purely about usability, and look at the role of experience in human-product interaction. As products and services in mature markets become increasingly standardised, the DPPI organisers realised there was a space to debate the the end-user’s perception of products, and to explore a more experiential approach to innovation.

This year the conference, which will take place from the 22-25th June, at Milan Polytechnic, will have the general theme: “How can Design Research serve Industry? – Design visions, tools and knowledge for industry,” thus trying to stimulate the discussion on user driven design within the context of other design approaches and its role for industries.

The conference will provide a mix of workshops, paper presentations and other activities. It aims to get participants “listening, doing, researching, designing, discussing, learning and having fun.”

Keynote speakers are:

Prof. Bruce Brown, professor of design at the University of Brighton and co-editor of Design Issues Research Journal (published by MIT press)
Jon Kolko, founder and director of Austin Center for Design
Dr. Donald Norman, co-founder and principle of the Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO fellow, and professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Kaist (South Korea)
Dr. Ezio Manzini, coordinator of DESIS International of the INDACO department at the Milan Polytechnic
Dr. Roberto Verganti, professor of management of innovation at the Milan Polytechnic, and visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School

As member of the DPPI 11 scientific committee, Mark Vanderbeeken is responsible for reviewing some of the conference papers.

Organisers have been pleased to note that this year the committee received an unprecedented number of responses to their call, giving them a deep pool from which to select the highest quality content for the conference.

When Experientia’s four partners decided to start a business back in 2005, one of the important discussions then was about the name. After brainstorming on the philosophy, concepts and strategies that would underlie the business, Experientia president Michele Visciola came up with “Experientia”, with inspiration striking him in the Milano Centrale train station on the way back from a business meeting.
Today Experientia has completed the process of trademarking our name in our business category (activities related to user experience and interaction design). With the trademark, we can, if we choose to, also go beyond consultancy and have legal protection when selling concepts, products and services with the brand name – made by Experientia.

After five years in business, we still love what the name “Experientia” expresses about our company and our philosophy. It is easy to pronounce in many languages. It reflects our Mediterranean roots and our commitment to serious, dedicated research.

With a nod to our Italian location, “Experientia” is the Latin word for experience, and actually carries the extra meanings of “trial, testing, attempt; knowledge gained by experience”.

To us, it reflects not just the value of people’s experiences, but also the importance of testing, trying and learning through successive reiterations, in order to create something that really connects with people’s inner desires and needs.

(The trademark was published on the CTM-Online database of The Trade Marks and Designs Registration Office of the European Union – you need to do a search with our trade mark number 005677216 and our trade mark name Experientia).

There are two essential concepts of location for the World Wide Web. One is you: the individual, the reader, the writer, the customer, the singular entity. The other is the World.

I live and work mostly in the U.S. I also speak English. My French, German and Spanish are all too minimal to count unless I happen to be in a country that speaks one of those languages. When I’m in one of those places, as I am now in France, I do my best to learn as much of the language as I can. But I’m still basically an English speaker.

So, by default, when I’m on the Web my language is English. My location might be France, or Denmark or somewhere else, but when I’m searching for something the language I require most of the time is English. That’s my mental location.

So it drives me nuts that Google sends me to http://google.fr, even when I log into iGoogle and get my personalized Google index page. When I re-write the URL so it says http://google.us, Google re-writes it as http://google.fr, no matter what. On iGoogle I can’t find a way to set my preferred language, or my virtual location if it’s not where I am right now. I can’t do that even when I have Google translate, instantly, in my Google Chrome browser, the page text to English. (I’m sure there’s a hack, and I would appreciate it if somebody would tell me. But if there is why should it be so hard?)

Bing comes up all-French too, but at the bottom of the page, in small white type, it says “Go to Bing in English”. Nice.

So now, here in Paris, I’m using Bing when I want to search in English, and Google when I want to search for local stuff. Which is a lot, actually. But I miss searching in English on Google. I could ask them to fix that, but I’d rather fix the fact that only they can fix that. Depending on suppliers to do all the work is a bug, not a feature.

What matters is context. I’m tired of having companies guess at what my context is. I know what my contexts are. I know how they change. I want my own ways of changing contexts, and of informing services of what those contexts are. In some cases I don’t mind their guessing. In a few I even appreciate it. But in too many cases their guesses only get in the way. The Google search case is just one of them.

Phil Windley (disclosure: I’ve done work for Phil) gives a talk in which he provides a brief history of e-commerce. It goes, “1995: Invention of the cookie. The End.” Thanks to the cookie, we have contexts — but only inside each company’s silo. We can’t provide our own contexts except to the degree that each company’s website allows it. And they’re all different. This too is a bug, not a feature. (Just like carrying around a pile of loyalty cards and key tabs is a bug. Hey, I know more about who and what I’m loyal to than any company does — and I’d like my own ways of expressing that.)

At this moment it is commonly believed that the contexts that matter most are “social”. This is defined as who my friends are, and where I happen to be right now. This information is held almost entirely by commercial services: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Groupon, Blippy and so on. Not by you or me. Not by individuals, and not independently of all those services. This too is a bug. Who your friends and other contacts are is indeed a context, but it should be one that you control, not some company. Your data, and how you organize it, should be the independent variable, and the data you share with these services should be the dependent variables.

Some of us in the VRM community (including Phil and his company, Kynetx) are working on context provided by individuals. In the long run these contexts can work for any or all commercial and non-commercial institutions we deal with. I expect to see some of this work become manifest over the next year. Stay tuned.

Although design and design thinking are having a positive impact on management practice and education, Youngjin Yoo, an associate professor at Temple University , doesn’t think that the current wave of design thinking will address the fundamental crisis that contemporary management is facing in this post-industrial economy.
“Design thinking, as it is currently popularized with the emphasis on human-centered product and service design, deals only with the problems from the separation of production and consumption, leaving other and possibly far more serious challenges that today’s management is facing. Many of these challenges arose as a result of separations of management and finance from production. For example, design thinking has little to say about the recent financial crisis that raised many fundamental questions about the continuing viability of the current form of capitalism and the role of management schools. [...]

My concern is that the current obsession with the design thinking can have unintended harmful consequences on the future of management in the long run. As it is currently being applied, design is seen as a quick fix of profitability problems, new product developments, and consumer satisfactions, rather than dealing with more systemic and serious issues. Indeed, it might lead us to the emergence of new form of capitalism, design capitalism, where creativity is separated from production and consumption.”

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The real lesson of the iPhone turned out to have very little to do with the phone at all. The iPhone–and now Android–experience underscores the versatility of business platforms and ecosystems when connected to a powerful mobile device. But the mobility experience has also taught us another thing: there are new vistas of human behavior and tremendous opportunities for industries and institutions are being revealed—opportunities that many companies and governments misunderstand when they judge the value of mobility in their futures.

Many see mobility as simply another communication channel or another medium. Others mistakenly view mobility as simply another information technology, much like those that preceded it. They do not see how a mobile device combined with a business platform (elsewhere I have discussed the characteristics and success factors of business platforms) can lead to new business models, entirely new businesses, and new growth options.

Here are five critical elements executives must understand about mobility. Mobility creates:

Micro-tasking. How small can a meaningful piece of work be? Is not the right one-word answer immeasurably productive at the right time? What about a single word of encouragement at the right moment. Rehearsing a new set of phrases for a new language as an adult or reviewing multiplication tables during a couple of available minutes as a child can be remarkably effective and efficient. This is the power of micro-tasking and mobile platforms enable this behavior in ways and times not possible before. Multiply this by the millions or perhaps billion moments per day and you have new levels of potential human productivity and significantly revised time budgets. And there are examples: The Extraordinaries harnesses voluntary micro-tasking to help those in need and see Denis Hancock’s post, “The iPhone, growing up digital, and my daughter’s education,” on the way micro-tasking changes the way pre-schoolers learn.
New Creativity. Humans are fundamentally asynchronous and associative. We require props to operate on schedule. Most of the time our ideas, inspirations, and breakthroughs seem random or triggered by some event, association with another idea, or situational experience. Because our devices are always with us and allow us immediate access to tools that were formerly attached to a desk or office, mobile platforms enable us to work in a more natural way – asynchronously and associatively. When did you have your last creative idea? Being connected to a global infrastructure, able to access capabilities at a whim, or simply using an appropriate app at the appropriate time enables new levels of creativity.
The Growing World of Sensors. Mobile devices loaded with sensors will revolutionize health, safety and security. Sensor technology is growing in its ability to sense the world that is visible to humans as well as the world that is not. When you integrate sensor technology (biosensors, temperature, radiation, personal sonar/radar etc) into mobile devices married to platform infrastructures, every human being becomes a sensing station that can measure environmental pollutions, noise pollution, unhealthy emissions, or dangerous hazards. The implications for health, safety and personal care surpass any in a non-mobile, non-sensor based world.
Enhanced experience or augmented reality. Much like the headphones issued at some public museums enhance the one’s understanding of museum artifacts, all facets of daily life can be enhanced by location, context and proximal awareness. Location data can enhance the experience of the local opera, theatrical performance, or visit to a museum. Commercial enterprises, whether serving B2C or B2B marketplaces, have the ability to augment the entire procurement process through mobile platforms. Employees can be augmented with relevant information and tools when serving customers and providing contracted services.
Digital Identity and the Rich Digital Self. As remarkable as the human capacity to remember is, it remains limited in many ways. The same is not true of devices that sense and store, activities that mobile platforms do in unique and often helpful ways. If my rich digital self is only based on what I can recall, it is limited. On the other hand, a rich digital self enhanced by streams of unbounded data collected through my mobile platform can create personal value and protect my privacy.

Are these areas where the greatest opportunity awaits? Are there others that I have missed? Are there companies and institutions that seem to really recognize—and leverage accordingly—the power of mobile platforms? Is there a role of for mobile business platforms to meet the special needs of your marketplace? Or will you stand by and let others, competitors and new entrants till the fields of mobility?

With the global economy still on shaky ground and the auto industry taking a huge hit, I found it refreshing to find an automotive company thriving, and doing business in a completely new way. Local Motors is a custom car company best known for its Rally Fighter,  the first openly developed and community created car. The Rally Fighter is the result of 35,000 designs submitted by 2,900 community members representing over 100 countries. As you can see in the below picture, the community sure put together a pretty cool looking car. To me it looks more like a mix of a fighter plane and a tank.

The Rally Fighter was built for racing in the desert, and after checking out a few other designs I quickly realized that each car was built for specific geographic preferences. Other designs include the The Miami Roadster, The Green Apple (for The Big Apple) and my favorite The Boston Bullet, described below:

For “a city that gives innovation in a spirit of tradition.” The Bullet is Boston’s car, designed for narrow streets and a smooth ride while managing to capture the city’s cultural and ideological heritage.

Local Motors is challenging how new cars are created, holding design contests for each piece of the car from overall design, to the electrical systems, to the interior, to the name. The community prioritizes the ideas and develops those designs that have the most support. My favorite part is that once a full car design is complete, people order them online and the actual manufacturing is done by the new owner. Did you hear that? The new owner builds their own car! With help from the Local Motors team, owners learn how and then actually build an engine, put in windows, craft a brake system, everything! So not only is Local Motors offering designers a great way to collaborate around an exciting concept, they are offering their customers a very personalized experience. Taking the prosumer concept to the next level is no doubt creating a loyal following and a significant group of lifelong customers.

So, what about the major auto manufacturers? Is Local Motors planning to compete with them? How would that work? While the concept is most likely too specialized to ever take off in the mass market, Local Motors is hoping to work with major automakers. They see an opportunity to fill a niche that the major players just can’t fill as it is too cost prohibitive. I anticipate seeing some type of partnership, but given the innovative nature of this company it will most likely be structured like nothing we’ve seen before.

I can’t wait to see what new product development concepts and of course really cool cars come out of this company. As you can imagine the Local Motor’s website is central to its business model, and it is built to keep you interested. Everything from the live shop camera to the design wall to the community and forums are designed to get you thinking, wanting to learn more and maybe even participate. The newest contest launched January 27 and closed February 9 was for a Texas hunting truck described as

a vehicle for Texas that could easily meet the demands of hunters and could adapt depending on the requirements of the different types of game — white tail deer, quail, dove, and javalina to name a few. Essentially, design a base vehicle that could have various modules easily attached to it depending on the needs of the user.

Did you happen to notice how fast this contest is? 2 weeks from launch to close…not bad turnaround time for innovating new ideas. That efficiency is what the collaborative enterprise is all about.

So…what aspects of this model could your company use to improve innovation? What new products or services could be developed in this rapid, community-driven approach? Who among us will jump in and become the next cool car designer? One thing is clear, it will be really fun to watch!