The Africans are not beneficiaries anymore
Innovating without knowing your customer is like being lost in the dark with your eyes closed: you’ll never know if you hit the light switch ~ @bdoorn My colleague on my current project in The Netherlands, Bart Doorneweert, tweeted that insight after our next to last user interview today (tomorrow is our last). While I’ve […]
“Life is Hard” – Original slides with written speech, BxD 2008
This is more or less the written version of my Life is Hard presentation (slides,video, reference) as first given in October 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island at the Better World by Design conference held at Brown University. Some of the details have become more nuanced since then, some parts have spun off into blogs, projects, […]
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, […]
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 […]
Why is design important?
Design is first and foremost a philosophy, based on a system of values, which seeks to solve problems. What are we creating? Why and for whom? Are we correctly framing the problem to be solved? These are the questions to which the answers are then manifested tangibly in the form of a new product, service […]
Published! Pathways Out of Poverty by iBoPAsia Project
Innovating with the BoP in Southeast Asia. The iBoP Asia Project has published the complete set of small grants funding innovation projects for those at the Bottom of the Pyramid in the ASEAN region. One of the first projects to win the Small Grants competition in 2008 was The Prepaid Economy Project: Understanding BoP household […]
User driven innovation planning and strategy in development
It was with feeling of satisfaction that I read Eric Smallberg’s recent post titled “Thankfully, ICT4D is Now About Strategy and Implementations, Not Technovelty” where brings up the lessons from failure and the shift in emphasis of technology based development projects and social enterprises. He says: Richard Heeks wrote about the early history of these […]
Shared value simply means its human centered investment planning
The good news is that factoring shared value into valuations is a straightforward process. Investors simply need to ask companies the right questions. While these might vary by company or industry, the four below offer a good starting point: 1. Where will future revenue growth come from? Namely geographies, demographic groups, etc.2. How will (new) […]
Hub and spoke model for new product introductions
Nairobi’s Central Business District – Luthuli Avenue is the heart of the electronics and consumer appliance trade for Kenya. Chinese businessmen can be seen mingling with Somali traders and wholesalers come from all over the country to see “what’s new”. I saw recently introduced solar powered refrigerators (just 60W) on display, direct from China but […]
