Lean Production inspired Lean Startup I’ve explored the similarities of Lean Startup to Design Thinking. Both approaches support innovation by maintaining a focus on actual user need and emphasize frequent iteration to ensure that the work being done meets that need. Lean Startup takes its inspiration from Lean Production which in turn has roots in…
South of Fortinos I live in Maple south of Fortinos, the “Italian” version of the Canadian grocery company Loblaws. (I’m still trying to make “SoFo” – South of Fortinos – a thing.) It’s a scandalously short drive and I sometimes walk to get small loads of groceries. As a consequence I’m in the store four…
My favorite subject Long ago I met a woman in a bar. True story. So far. She told me that she worked on a stud farm and that her job was to help horses mate. Still a true story. I was excited to be talking to a woman in a bar about my favorite subject…
One on top of the other Solitaire is a game played with a clear objective. “The first objective is to release and play into position certain cards to build up each foundation, in sequence and in suit, from the ace through the king. The ultimate objective is to build the whole pack onto the foundations,…
Old wine in new bottles d.school describes the Design Thinking process as five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. IDEO has a shorter three step process: Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation. Nevertheless, the two process definitions are very similar. Both d.school and IDEO were founded by David Kelley and many individuals have worked for both…
On and off The typical home in Canada has a thermostat to control a furnace. Each thermostat has a gap between how cold it can get before the furnace turns on and how warm it can get before the furnace turns off. The wider the gap the longer the furnace will run and the longer…
Design Thinking – when somebody else designed it While every organization is unique, those differences do not always justify the investment and upkeep of customized software development and localized computer services. Often it makes much more financial sense to adopt existing software and services and adapt them to the organization’s needs. In these pages I…
What matters is the pace of innovation “I think moats are lame. They are like nice in a sort of quaint, vestigial way. If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long. What matters is the pace of innovation, that is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness.” Elon Musk –…
Is Design Thinking a fad? If you have been employed in a large organization you have seen management trends come and go. First we centralize, then decentralize. First we organize functionally, then divisionally – ooh, then in a matrix with dotted lines! You could be forgiven, then, if you thought all this hype around Design…
Complete transformation “We have been undergoing a complete transformation into a design-like culture.” Lorna Feeney, Co-Chief Creative Officer at IBM Interactive Experience IBM made Design Thinking central to its culture in 2013. Since then IBM has assembled more than 1,600 formally trained designers globally. They claim this is the largest corporate design team in the…