How China accelerated the pace of technological innovation
It is purely by accident that I stumbled on Justin Yifu Lin‘s 1995 article “The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China” this morning and my thinking on the nature and function of the processes of innovation has been significantly elevated. A short quote encapsulates Lin’s hypothesis (1995:275-276) sets the context […]
Are you letting data from the past drive your future strategy?
Yesterday, I was deep inside Google looking for datapoints to connect that would add up to give me a sense of what was going on in these turbulent times, and I came across this insightful article on strategy. It was clear the author felt as obsolete as I did about the way strategic planning for […]
Sensemaking sparks creativity
The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over. ~ Charles Eames This […]
Situating sensemaking in the process of innovation
“the bottom-line goal of Sense-Making from its inception has been to find out what users – audiences, customers, patrons, employees – ‘really’ think, feel, want, dream” (Dervin, 1998) Morente & Ferràs (2018) paper, based on the practical and theoretical contributions of Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Theory (2015), provided me with this quoted reference that set me […]
Exploratory User Research to Inform and Inspire Innovation Frontiers: Nokia’s legacy
Swedberg (2020) offers a glimpse of the legacy of an exploratory approach to research. The reasons for using such an approach, based on his analysis, are: The empirical situation makes it necessary to use an exploratory approach. Swedberg (2020) gives the example of a study conducted in 1937 by Lazarsfeld & Stouffer on the effects […]
The power of sensemaking lies in its ability to reframe the challenge and its context
A key characteristic of participatory design is the use of physical artefacts as thinking tools throughout the process. This process is a key characteristic of the various participatory design practices emanating from the Scandinavian research-led tradition (e.g. Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991). As highlighted by Sanders (2006), users in participatory design serve as “expert[s]of their experiences” […]
La petite tristesse de le numérique
There do not seem to be the words in English to capture the sense of loss I was experiencing by the time I’d reached the point where I concluded yesterday’s post. I cannot say finished writing it because I was moved by my own recollection of the emotions I’d experienced that I needed to get […]
Or, why I need three different pairs of spectacles and simply trifocals won’t do
As my writing out of my thinking progresses, I am coming up against the natural barrier of things I do not want to unpack on the blog. On one hand, this is a good thing because it informs me my blog is serving the function it used to serve back in the day. On the […]
Response to “How to Think about Consumer Innovation in Africa”
Encouragement from my Nigerian tweeps to go ahead and write a rebuttal to a recent article in TechCabal shared on Twitter yesterday has led to this post. Given that my doctoral dissertation is based on my past decade of work in innovation & design planning for the vast majority of the population that comprises the […]
Can the structure for innovation planning be used to disrupt itself?
This diagram is from Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Methods. It is the basis for his structured approach for innovation planning, and the essence of what is taught at the methods driven human centered design program at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago. Today I want to question some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie it […]
