What qualifies as true innovation? The word ‘innovation’ does get passed around a lot nowadays. From large businesses to startups and perhaps even consultants like myself. If you take a moment to think about it, innovation is not as commonplace as we might assume it is. If you had an almost infinite budget, and you…
Anti-crime colour balls Imagine you are a store manager, and a masked thief has you at gun or knife-point, asking you to empty the cash into his or her bag. How would you recognize the thief outside in a crowd of people? Especially if he or she had an accomplice, and the bag exchanged hands?…
Changing User Behaviour I am currently reading the book Hooked, and happened to read something very important. I shared the excerpt with a design thinking group I am administrator of. The snippet read: John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while…
Buffer Browser Google has become increasingly intrusive over the years. Keep all your location-related settings off, and she still knows where you are. And if that’s enough, she’ll shamelessly ask you to write a review about the place. If privacy means nothing to you, there is no problem. But in case you’re one of those…
Who Does Recruiting Best? An acquaintance on LinkedIn recently tagged me and some others including a friend, on a post. It was about how design thinking and good practices are applied to several areas of any business, but how recruiting often goes neglected. He said that hiring managers and candidates were often unhappy with the…
I recently came across an article about an initiative to create awareness about marine pollution. Some folks living close to a beach (can’t seem to find the beach’s location), created a giant, transparent fish. Made of mesh and barbed wire, it had a signboard which read, ‘Goby loves plastic, please feed him.’ It made for…
One of the fundamental ingredients of an impactful innovation or successful design thinking exercise, is empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Often, in our enthusiasm to create something someone (a customer segment, employees, or even society), or to solve a problem for them, we tend to knowingly or unknowingly speed…