Reflecting on managing retail at the BoP
When I think about my time in the Filipino village last year, the most significant learnings from the field are the ones I never really wrote about or pondered deeply at that time. They were too specific to retail, I felt, or business management, and while this shop was one of the sources of income […]
Core values: business models meant to serve the BoP
(Republished from old Perspective 2.0 blog March 10th 2009) The biggest shock for me in the Phillippines was learning that airtime minutes purchased on a prepaid plan came with an expiry date. The smaller the amount the faster the expiration. For example, the lowest amounts of “load” that can be purchased are 10 or 20 […]
Pondering the original concept of Emerging Futures
This tag cloud was my first attempt some two and a half years ago at patterning the dots that I saw dancing in front my eyes whenever I looked up from my laptop screen to squint into the distance. Perhaps it is true as many would say that I’ve left out the entire mainstream consumer […]
We arrive in Shanghai
with the PowerKiss table. The team that took off from Helsinki on the evening of the 20th arrived early morning of the 21st of May and went directly to the Aalto Tongji Design Factory premises in Shanghai. Naturally, the first thing to be the built was the sauna on the roof – construction started in […]
Helsinki to Shanghai
Flying out to Shanghai today with the Design Factory. Lots of exciting things happening over there, not the least is the chance to see the World Expo and the city itself.
The Telco and the BoP (January 2009)
NextBillion.net’s Rob Katz recently posted an Indian news snippet based on research that led the writer to argue that telco’s should focus on their most profitable customers, those at the top of the pyramid. The BoP (Bottom of the Pyramid), as the numbers demonstrate, are simply not worth it. Following some commentary, Rob added his […]
Wisdom or Love? Exploring post-industrial platforms
This spread is the centerfold of an interesting little PDF called Fact, Forces, Fog:: Reckless guesses in a time of change by The Doblin Group of Chicago. I was first introduced to it in the Fall (Autumn) semester of 2003 when I took Larry Keeley‘s class “Design Planning” (or whatever its being called now) at […]
A Wisdom Manifesto – Re:interpreted and Re:framed
I went back to look at Umair Haque’s Wisdom Manifesto I’d linked to last week, as I’d been mulling over things such as values, meaning and understanding after my post yesterday. In context of the values we espouse here at the Design Factory, it struck me that there may be seeds of an entire foundation […]
Core values: In memoriam
Yesterday, via Twitter, I came across this interview on Engadget where Nokia’s new head of Design talked to journalists about the mobile company’s future plans. Regular readers know I have not only tracked Nokia since 2006 but held it in high esteem as a company that has, until now, done well in emerging markets. This […]
Design Globalization – A conversation in four parts (December 2006)
Luke Wroblewski, design strategist and thinker, invited Dirk Knemeyer, Joseph O’Sullivan and myself to participate in a four way conversation a while back. Three of the four parts are now online with the fourth and final part up by the end of the week. Here’s the topic: A conversation about the impact of large scale […]
