@Prepaid Africa Connecting Dots – October 2015
October was a busy month for us – The African Development Bank hosted their first Innovation Weekend in Abidjan from the 9th to the 11th of October. Our contribution was thinking about the problems we face as the starting point for new venture design. Savvy young people from across Francophone West Africa gathered to conceptualize […]
Tsunami of change – design, brands, marketing and the mobile phone
In the 10 short months since I wrote on the market forces influencing the global mobile phone market, and the implications of the democratization of innovation whose early, weak signals I could already foresee, matters have come to a head. I had written: The locus of innovation in handset design, product planning and market strategy […]
New Market Analysis: It all boils down to Interpretation
This isn’t a new diagram for anyone familiar with my writing. Its a diagram I’ve been using to explain where my work fits into the innovation development process since I first saw it on Luke Wroblewski’s blog back in 2006. However, I’ve just been struck forcibly by the realization that there’s a very important piece […]
Phase zero
This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
Reflections on design thinking for government: empowering policy makers and stakeholders
Yesterday I came across a post on The World Bank’s blog, “Design Thinking for Government Services: What happens when the past limits our vision of the future?” Given that I’m in the process of writing a report on the role that human centered design can play in government, that too for a developed nation, I’d […]
Mapping the path to prototyping an adaptable user centered design process
We’ve all seen the classic User Centered Design (UCD) process diagrams, mostly linear, that attempt to communicate the steps yet unable to capture the iterative nature of the activity simply due to the limitations on how many circular arrows one can add without losing clarity. When I first began exploring the process deeply for application […]
Strategic Alliances can be an effective method of promoting innovation
Hybrid Organizations as a Strategy for Supporting New Product Development is the title of a research paper by Alison Rieple, Adrian Haberberg, and Jon Gander of the University of Westminster. A summary of their findings: This article focuses on strategic alliances, in which one firm (normally a large, multi-product corporation) obtains critical product-development resources, such […]
Case study of design strategy failure: Whirlpool World Washer for emerging markets
This is a comprehensive study of the introduction of an automatic washing machine, the World Washer, into the Indian market, by Whirlpool Corporation in 1990. Conceived as an important part of Whirlpool’s global strategy in the late nineteen eighties, it was designed for the emerging markets of Mexico, Brazil and India. It failed dramatically and […]
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 […]
