March 2012
24 posts
An expedition into inspiration
A conversation with Meg Lee, Innovation Director at WDHB, San Francisco, USA
Meg begins: “You can see society at large, and very visibly the business world, moving towards greater empathy. Inclusion and involvement, engaging internal and external stakeholders, is becoming an organizational and innovation process that many businesses are beginning to focus real attention on in the...
What is the public for?
A conversation with Peter MacLeod, Principal and Co-founder of MASS LBP, Toronto, Canada
Based in Toronto, MASS LBP is a new kind of company which works with government to change how governments and citizens interact. According to the company’s founder and principal Peter MacLeod, MASS works at the intersection of twenty-first century mass society and the 18th century political institutions...
Answering questions, integrating communities
A conversation with Giordano Koch, Specialist in Innovation Communities and Open Government at HYVE AG, Munich, Germany
HYVE AG is an innovation company that focuses on three areas: 1) innovation research which is searching the internet for discussions on products and analyzing the discussion threads, 2) innovation design which involves designing new products closely with users often...
Co-creating value on the inside and the outside
A conversation with David Dencker, CEO at MUUSE, Copenhagen, Denmark
“People use the terms relating to our field in so many different ways,” David begins. “At Crossroad Innovation we use the word co-creation as a sub-branch of open innovation. A sub-branch of co-creation is community-based innovation, where you work with crowds or groups of people. This is what we focus...
The fine line between creating frames and letting...
A conversation with Lama Juma, Initiator of the KaosPilot Alumni Community, Copenhagen, Denmark
“Being offline, being online, essentially you are still the same person. Online communities are best when they also exist offline, when they have their own culture and the online platform is actually just a great tool for figuring out when would be a good time to meet up and get a beer or a...
Open minds and open processes
A conversation with Jakob Ipland, Business Designer and Human Centered Researcher at Innopia, San Sebastian, Spain
At Innopia they operate with five types of innovation: Product, service, experience, social and business-model innovation. They involve users in all the types, though not necessarily through the entire process. They select as a team where it will benefit the most to integrate...
Doing Design Thinking and learning business
A conversation with Andrea Scheer, Design Thinker at inventedhere, Berlin, Germany (with the participation of around ten of her colleagues)
inventedhere is a constellation of about 20 design thinkers, graduated from Potsdamer D-School. Because they all know each other from the school days, but have not been doing business together for very long, you could call them a new company with an old...
Radical evolution, radical innovation
A conversation with Nuppu Gävert and Ville Tikka, Founders of Wevolve, New York, USA
Wevolve work with systemic radical innovation. They start from a broader, future perspective when dealing with design. “System change takes time, and bigger problems need bigger solutions!” Nuppu and Ville state. “We look at what is happening on the macro level, the big currents that have...
The physical frames of freedom
A conversation with Attila Bujdosó, Senior Research Supervisor at Kitchen Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
Kitchen Budapest, or KIBU, is a place of freedom. Here young people come together and bring their ideas to life. Technological innovation and communication is the purpose here, but the clear emphasis is on the social aspects. It is a place of collaboration and a space where creativity...
Amplifying differences to move beyond consensus
A conversation with Benjamin Aaron Degenhart, Free thinker and student at the KaosPilots, Aarhus, Denmark
“First of all, in terms of effecting change, I am not dealing with companies at all. I am not really interested in it,” Benjamin begins. “What I deal with is people empowerment.”
He continues: “It is interesting to think of communities and how they can...
From tool to mindset
A conversation with Liz Sanders, Founder of MakeTools, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Working as a consultant, Liz Sanders explores participatory design and other collective forms of creativity to find ways of addressing the challenges in society today.
It is her perspective that it is in the initial stages of a process or project where the important things happen; this is where the biggest...
The praxis of use-driven innovation
A conversation with Jannie Friis Kristensen, Experience Design Lead at HeadFitted and former Head of Innovation at InnovationLab, Aarhus, Denmark
Jannie is educated from Information Science at Aarhus University, a place considered by many the cradle of participatory design. According to Jannie, user-driven innovation is a term that is a bit misunderstood. The users don’t have the...
An invitation to open up
A conversation with Jerri Chou, Head Strategist at Lovely Day and Co-founder of All Day Buffet, The Feast Social Innovation Conference, and TBD, New York, USA
“It’s bubbling up all over the place!” Jerri starts. Usually innovation is about getting ahead to get money, but what we are seeing now is a shift. There’s an increasing focus on socially-based or open...
Parallel tracks - the community and the pipeline
A conversation with Dalhia Hagege, Consultant at bluenove, Paris, France
Open innovation is a fairly new concept in France. Not more than two years ago, it wasn’t part of the business world’s vocabulary. Now innovation departments in companies are more and more interested in scouting, meaning using innovation companies like bluenove as trust agents to build relationships within...
Dust and matter - feeding in, out, and back
A conversation with Chris Barez-Brown, Author, Founder of Upping Your Elvis and former Head of Capability at ?WhatIf!, London, UK
Chris frames innovation as a process to get from insight and ideas to impact. Through his experience he has gained a lot of insight into this process and how it works when it’s working best.
“What helps open innovation work is to give a really good brief...
Gardening a community - long tails and social...
A conversation with Tommi Vilkamo, Head of Nokia Beta Labs, Helsinki, Finland
Nokia Beta Labs is a lead user community where Nokia can prototype and get feedback on new applications for mobile phones. It has evolved from a blog Tommi started in 2007 to a living community with over 700,000 people having signed in so far. Through Beta Labs, Nokia has tested over 80 applications out of which...
Between innovation and communication - credit and...
A conversation with Shaun Abrahamson, Organizer at colaboratorie mutopo, New York, USA
What you see in communities, is that where it of course can’t exist without the people, it also can’t exist without its leaders. An example of a great community leader is Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. He is a developer, yes, but he is also a very smart communicator. He responds to...
Passion and purpose
A conversation with Daniel Walmsley, Director of Technology, Purpose Campaigns, New York, USA
After many years of valuable innovation generated by volunteers collaborating via the Internet, it’s natural that large corporations want to get a piece of the pie. But too often they fail - not because of a failure of engineering, but because they don’t understand the personal passions...
After the Millennium Clash - guiding people and...
A conversation with Christian Schneider, Design Thinking Mentor and Tutor and former Design Manager and Director of IDEO Milan, Hamburg, Germany
Christian Schneider was one of the pioneers trying to communicate the user-centered design approach right from its beginning in the early nineties. “It is really about taking a closer look to peoples’ life, exploring and building on your...
Creating the frames for innovation
A conversation with Jeppe Spure Nielsen, Project Leader of HandiVision at Alexandra Instituttet, Aarhus, Denmark
Innovating and designing with end users is worthwhile, but it starts with culture.
Jeppe and HandiVision is exploring how to develop aids for the mentally and physically handicapped by involving them in the design process. The project has over 20 partners and is aiming to both...
When the user is a partner
A conversation with Mette Freisner, Global Innovation Partner at Vestas, Århus, Denmark
When working in a field like building wind turbines, the technical requirements for being able to innovate are often very high. So what good are regular users in these cases?
“Well, first of all, who are the users?” Mette asks and answers herself: “I, as a regular person, am not a user...
User logic
A conversation with Rebekka Høy Biegel, Consultant at ChangePilot, Aarhus, Denmark
The users don’t drive anything! What matters is understanding what matters to people. This is what Rebekka calls user logic.
User logic is all about seeing things from the users perspective. It is a human-centered approach to design and innovation that has its roots in anthropology and ethnography. At...
Meaning-driven innovation
A conversation with Carl Damm, Co-founder of Strong Bright Hearts, Aarhus, Denmark
Innovation without meaning and motivation makes no sense - it might happen, but it won’t create long-lasting value!
Carl Damm and Strong Bright Hearts collaborated with Aarhus Main Public Library a couple of years ago on a project to involve and engage its users more. What he learned quickly though, is that...
Cultural probing 2.0
A conversation with Bo Schiønning Mortensen, Research Assistant at Aarhus School of Architecture, Aarhus, Denmark
Bo Schiønning Mortensen, together with his friend and colleague Mikkel Lindskov Pedersen, has taken cultural probing one step further.
Cultural probes as a concept were developed in 1999 by Tony Dunne, Bill Gaver and Elena Pacenti. They are a means for the designer to get...
