Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 12
Barack Obama's appointment of a 30-year lifer from McKinsey, the management consulting firm, to Chief Performance Officer of the United States is, well, awful. At a time when the US desperately needs serious innovation to restart and reset the economy, the President-Elect is turning to an efficiency expert for advice. Yes, of course, the bureaucracies of the country could use fine-tuning. Which bureaucracy, private or public, couldn't use some shaping up? But government efficiency is not the most important issue facing us. Anyone with elderly parents know that they get their Social Security checks on time and Medicare, however much some doctors double-bill, works more smoothly than most of our private HMOs.
Corporations for nearly a decade now have expressed disappointment with the McKinseys and Bains and other traditional performance consultants because they all leave heavy books of recommendations (for very hefty prices) on their desks--and then leave. IDEO, ZIBA, Continuum, Smart, Jump, SYP and schools such as the Institute of Design, the Rotman School of Management, the University of Cincinnati, the Stanford D-School and others are being called in by smart companies to show they how to change, how to innovate.
Why? Because the greatest economic value today lies with innovation, not efficiency. And that's true of an entire economy, an entire nation, as a single company.
So I worry about the economic package that will soon be passed to get the economy going again. We're already giving billions to Detroit but nothing to the new electric car-makers, such as Tesla, or pioneers in batteries. Electric cars are a disuptive collective of technologies. We should promote them. There's going to be a lot of money going into infrastructure, but how much into subways and trolleys (go to Portland where people jump on and off trolleys for free--and they are packed, freeing up the streets from cars), bike lanes or electrification (so electric cars can juice up). There are smart transmission lines to be built, battery transfer stations to be built, broad-band lines to be laid.
We need a huge overhaul of TSA and Homeland Security systems, so people will want to come to the US again to study and work. Fast-pass security is still in its infancy.
We need to finance new and better Teacher Education programs and graduate a new generation of better-educated educators. Right now Stanford, Harvard and Columbia Teachers College provide excellent grad programs but most teacher ed schools are mediocre at best. Classrooms have to be completely rebuilt to reflect how children learn today--not how courses were taught in the 19th century (yes, there is talk of doing this but will it be sweeping, big and impactful?). And every high school graduate has be to guaranteed a spot in college. Every one.
We should also be building a whole network of boarding schools overseas for poor children, giving them a modern education--and paying their parents money for each kid in school.
None of this has much to do with performance. I'm hoping Google's Eric Schmidt, who is close to President-elect Obama is talking this stuff. But I don't yet see much evidence that the Obama administration, which is full of middle-aged and elderly Clintonites who formed their intellectual POVs in the 90s, really gets it. Larry Summers is a brilliant economist but he doesn't understand the role of innovation in growth. And McKinsey's Nancy Killefer, who also served in the Clinton Administration, is "an expert in streamlining policies and wringing our inefficiences," as Obama puts it, but she doesn't have a background in creating new options to deal with a new, uncertain world.
The Obama administration has to do better. And soon.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 11
I am a Professor of Innovation & Design at The New School in New York these days, working out of the amazing Parsons School For Design. This is in addition to blogging, videoing and writing for Business Week. I am curating the university's core lecture series this term, starting January 26, and I shaped it to deal with Life in Beta--the social and economic forces generating continuous, cascading change, melting our business models and careers. The goal is to show how design tools, methodologies and approaches can move us forward in this uncertain environment. The course is all about innovation and transformation.
I've invited some of the top minds in innovation and design thinking around the world to speak. About half the 100 students are from the Parsons School of Design Strategies and the others are from all over The New School, from the liberal arts college to fashion. Here is the course outline. Some dates will change.
Design at the Edge—Redesigning Our Lives in an Era of Radical Change.
Bruce Nussbaum 2009.
This course is one curatorial view of the current state of design. It focuses on the forces of demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political change that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives. It will examine the notion of cascading innovation—continuous change that doesn’t pause or end—and how we navigate such a chaotic environment. The course will analyze the key trends that make up cascading innovation and the tools of design and design thinking that we can use to operate and succeed in it. Above all, it will examine the sociological basis of design and offer new frameworks for 21st century life.
Through a series of talks, videos and other engagements by a roster of design stars from around the world, both inside and outside Parsons, the lecture series will push students to think widely about the forces shaping their lives and critically about how to harness the tools and methods of 21st Century Design to deal with them. The course will be shaped to provoke thinking and engagement among students as well as transfer a body of knowledge.
The lecture series will be, in part, about the students themselves, the rising Gen Y or Global Youth Culture (GYC) cohort that is perhaps the most dynamic force remaking societies around the world. It will require the students to do anthropological observations of their own group, map traits, networks and trends, and develop a social tool that would enhance their lives.
Students will be asked to harness the free technologies around them to present reports on the state of their generation. They might even create new products/services for members of their class.
Schedule of Lectures:
#1. 1/26/09. Introduction to Design at the Edge: Forces of Change, Methods of Practice. Bruce Nussbaum, Continuum’s Harry West.
This opening talk will outline the scope of the course content and objectives. The presentation will capture the spread of social networking, the rise of Asia, the integration of bottom-of-the-pyramid village culture into global commerce, global warming, population growth, return of city-states, and above all, the rise of Global Youth Culture.
Continuum’s Harry West will present on GYC. He will analyze global Gen Y demographically, attitudinally and behaviorally. How do they differ from earlier generations Are Gen Yers different because of their generation or because of their life stage? Is Gen Y genuine?
In the course, students will be expected to produce work reflective of their generation using common digital tools and research methods.
#2. 2/2/09. Tools of ethnography. MIT's Grant McCracken. How can students do ethnographic research on their own class? How can they create new products/services/experiences to enable their own generation? Students will be shown various interactive media tools available to them to capture and express their generation’s culture (videos, flickr, blogging, data visualization software). They’ll be asked to break up into groups of 5 and document the range of technologies on the web in order to analyze their own Gen Y class. Briefs due in 3 weeks.
#3. 2/9/09. Global Youth Culture—China. Ziba Design will present current work being done for one of China’s best known brands. Jeremy Kaye, the creative director on the project and Wibke Fleischer, manager of trend research and consume insight, will show the tools and methods of understanding Chinese youth culture—and how to translate that into designing for it.
#4. 2/23/09. The Evolution of Design—From 20th Century’s Focus on Artifact to 21st Century’s Focus on Articulation. IDEO’s President Tim Brown.
To deal with a world in constant change, people are turning to a new design methodology that can more easily sort through chaos and uncertainty, design thinking. User-centric, empathetic, iterative, generative, and collaborative, the approach is being applied to problems in civic society as well as business. It is a new framework for creative work. Tim Brown will share IDEO’s experiences of evolving from a designer of products to a shaper of brands and experiences.
In the last half hour, the groups of students will share their discoveries of free technologies on the web that they can use to analyze their Gen Y class. They will be asked to begin to develop a design brief for their class project. Tim Brown will participate in a discussion of what makes a good design brief.
#5. 3/2/09. The Rise of Design Thinking. Lecture. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management .
The analytical tools and frameworks in design thinking are very different from the rational-efficiency model most organizations currently use. Martin will use his new book, Design Thinking, to explain how design is about empathy, iteration and integrative thinking and how this methodology can be used to solve problems in business culture and civic society.
#6. 3/9/09. The Microsociology of Social Networks. David Armano, Critical Mass creative agency. One of the defining marks of our time is the constant creation of new digital social networks with their own cultures. This massive digital culture creation is a new phenomenon, only now being studied. Some of the best work is being done in digital advertising, which needs to understand the dynamics of social networking. Academia is following. This lecture by a leading figure in analyzing social networking, and designing them, will examine the social dynamics of advertising as it strives to engage the consumer.
#7. 3/23/09 Designing Sustainable Communities. John Thackara. Through Dott07 and City Eco Lab in Europe, Thackara has pioneered the development of collaborative, sustainable communities. A new model of personal and professional living is emerging in cities that revolves around living in a sustainable manner, using less energy. It is, in part, a return to a local, organic, collaborative way of living. It is anti-global, pro-regional. This lecture will discuss how an individual and communities can live a sustainable life. It will show what is happening in Europe in this space and suggest what might occur in the US.
#8. 3/30/09. The Expansion of Design Thinking From Product to Brand Experience. FuseProject’s founder, Yves Behar (date uncertain).
A decade ago, corporations asked designers to design a one-off product for them. Now they are asking designers to design their entire brand strategy, including products and services. Yves will show how his company has evolved since its founding to offer strategic brand advice to companies, cities and countries.
#9. 4/6/09 Social Entrepreneurship. Lecturer: Jacqueline Novogratz, Acumen Fund/ Lisa Servan, Parsons.
For-profit, non-profit organizations using design thinking are a new force in promoting economic development in poor rural villages and towns in Asia and Africa. The user-centric, sociological framework is a bottoms-up approach that is radically different from the top-down philanthropy of the past. Design methods are used to identify local needs, such as water, health, and education, find local business actors who can satisfy those needs and arrange financing. The lecture will describe the approach, the problems with measuring success in portfolios of projects and future projects.
# 10. 4/13/09 The New Field of innovation Economics. Mike Mandel, chief economist of Business Week.
Traditional economic discussions focus on taxes, budgets and markets. While these categories remain important, the shift to creativity-driven economic growth requires a new field of economics that emphasizes the factors that promote new ideas and innovation. Greater value has to be given to intangibles such as R&D, clusters, creativity education, human capital, etc. There will be a discussion on Green Growth and the public policies required to generate new forms of economic growth.
We will take time to discuss progress on student media projects on Gen Y culture.
#11. 4/20/09 ZipCar Capitalism and New Models of Capitalism. Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar (date uncertain).The rise of Gen Y and their use of collaborative tools of organization combined with the spread of sustainability as a social philosophy is generating new models of capitalism. The ZipCar is a singular model that reflects global attempts to reduce carbon emissions. Other models in modern and traditional societies will be examined.
#12. 4/29/09 Service Innovation. The Rise of Post-Product Innovation. Designing Organizations and Experiences. Peer Insight's founder Jeneanne Rae and Parsons' Lara Penin.
The field of design has evolved so that the methodology can be applied to designing business and civic organization, brands and experiences, as well as one-off products. Education, transportation, finance, entertainment--are all new frontiers for thinking.
#13. 5/4/09 Building Creative, Sustainable Lives: More Insight Into How. Ezio Manzini. Manzini is a pioneer in researching how to build creative communities and sustainable lifestyles. His latest research involves using mobile technology to foster collaboration.
#14. 5/11/09 The Rise of the Rest: Connecting to Creative Global Cultures. Native Designers Pat Pruitt and Marla Allison. Technology enables all cultures, however “remote,” to connect to the global network. People everywhere around the planet can now become global creators/consumers/players. Two native artists from Laguna Pueblo outside Santa Fe on the Rio Grand, present their paradigm-breaking work in painting and jewelry. Globalization links us all.
#15. 5/18/09 Presentation of Student Work. What Have We Learned? Team of Parsons’ profs examines presentations.
That's it. Please let me know what you think. I want the 100 students in the class to engage in important design and innovation conversations going on in the blogosphere--so tell me what are the 12 most important blogs in design/innovation.
And what web sites, books, blogs, articles, etc. should I assign for homework for each of the topics?
Thanks.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 04
Here is an interesting factoid that I picked up visiting Craig Vogel's LiveWell Collaborative design and innovation program at the University of Cincinnati a few weeks back.
According to Procter and Gamble, if every household in the US switched to Tide Cold Water, and didn't use hot water to wash clothes, the results would be:
1) a 3% decline in total US energy consumption;
2) a $67 annual saving for each US household in energy costs;
3) 8% of the total US pledge to reduce CO2 in the Kyoto Protocol (which it didn't sign) would be met.
This is from one product doing one thing. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to reduce CO2 emissions, if we really tried.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 03
We are having a great conversation on one of the most important subjects in our lives--how we can change our broken institutions and out-dated culture to survive and thrive within 21st century forces. The thread is brilliant and I'm learning a lot.
Here are the reasons why I think the concept of "transformation" is of great utility and power than "innovation at this point in time.
1- Our institutions aren't working. They are broken. Corporations, investment banks, health care, schools, universities, Congress, transportation. The current crisis is accelerating the breakdown in the major institutions of our lives that began in the 90s.
2- Digital technology is disintermediating every organization, eroding the role of all middle men and women, from ad agencies to college professors, from newspaper editors to hospital administrators, from political parties to savings banks. The shape of all our institutions is radically changing.
3- The power to create and participate is moving to the masses. Digital technology is giving everyone the tools to tinker again, to design and shape their learning, their working, their play. Craft is back in newly significant ways that we are just beginning to understand.
4- "Innovation" is inadequate as a concept to deal with these changes. You have "game-changing" innovation, which is big but rare and incremental innovation which is small but common. "Innovation" implies changing what is. "Transformation" implies creating what's new. That's what we need today, a huge amount of totally "new."
5- Design is the answer. I use the term "transformation" to capture the immensity of the task ahead of us and to guide us in the magnitude of that task, but the actual tools, methodologies and, yes, philosophy of that mission is found within the space of design and design thinking. This is what many of those in this thread of a conversation are saying and I agree. It is the design schools that are creating the tools of transformation and graduating the people to implement them, not the business schools (one exception--The Rotman School of Management). It is the Institute of Design in Chicago, The D-School in Stanford, DAAP at The University of Cincinnati, the Parsons School of Design in New York City, The Art Center College in Pasadena and RISD in Providence where "Transformation" is being developed.
