End of the era of “Business as War” metaphors?
My recent nostalgic meanderings and reflections on the thinking and writing about design that I was doing 6 years ago led me to realize that there might have been a significant shift that has taken place in the language of design and of business. Or at least, in the language of business and strategy. The […]
CK Prahalad on the BoP market creation: user driven innovation process
Here is a PDF of what is probably C.K. Prahalad’s last published article “Bottom of the Pyramid as a Source of Breakthrough Innovations” from the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management. What catches my attention in this article are the process diagrams he shares: Note that immersion in the BoP environment […]
M-PESA and the service innovation framework (review)
A former student of mine just mailed me this article “Extracting Key Lessons in Service Innovation” (pdf) by S.Wooder and S. Baker, recently published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, January 2012 edition. Here is the abstract of the article: This paper describes how Sagentia—working with Vodafone, Safaricom, and other organizations—played a significant role […]
Lessons from the Amul brand for grassroots enterprises
We also mourn the passing of Dr Verghese Kurien this weekend. The man behind India’s Operation Flood – a grassroots social enterprise based on dairy farmer’s cooperatives that grew into India’s biggest FMCG brand – Amul – while becoming the replicable model for converting India from a net milk importer to the world’s largest producer. […]
Remembering Bill Moggridge, a different era in design
Tonight I heard that Bill Moggridge had passed away last night. Or rather, I learnt it from a kind reply to my shocked question. I came here thinking I’d be able to write about my last distinct memory of him, having lunch with me in the sun, outside the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco, that […]
Metadesign and designing culture
Two extremely thought provoking pieces of writing found their way to me recently. The first was Designing Culture by Colin McSwiggen, where he writes about the role that material artefacts play in society and culture’s embedded messaging: This is a big deal because one of the main ways that people are socialized is through using, […]
Europe could stop fighting it and see if informal economy has lessons to teach
Scanning recent writing on the informal economic activity in the wake of the Great Global Recession brings to light the ongoing struggle to deal with it. Is it good or is it bad? Will it help or is it hindering? Don’t forget the taxes being left unpaid by the economically challenged citizens trying to feed […]
Self centered design vs user centered design: Its good, but in what context?
I started this train of thought last night on Twitter with the title of this post, that arrogance did not make for good human centered designers if they thought they knew better than their end users and were not listening to them. Dirk Knemeyer encouraged me to write it all out in more than 140 […]
5 lessons from design planning for the bottom of the pyramid
1. Consider the design of the entire ecosystem in a holistic manner rather than the product alone The majority of industrial designers in studios and corporate departments around the world are tasked with the design of a specific product or application, isolated contextually, for the most part, from the larger ecosystem of the market primarily […]
Understanding at the bottom of the design pyramid
source Before we can give form – and it does not have to be a tangible product but could even be a service, a business model or a strategy – to what we wish to do, its not enough to step back to just the function level, one must step even further back to envision […]
