With so many companies focusing more intensely than ever on innovation, why are so few seeing results?
Adam Richardson, creative director at the award-winning global innovation firm frog, gets to the bottom of this dilemma in his new book, Innovation X. Richardson argues that companies’ efforts to innovate are being thwarted by “X-Problems,” a new class of 21st century challenges that defy conventional planning. But Richardson has hope. If used in the right way, these problems can present massive innovation opportunities.
Grounded in insights about how customers, competitors, and technologies change quickly and often, Innovation X is the manual for leaders looking for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses. The book provides practical innovation strategies that will work in dynamic markets, and offers tactical methods that can be put to use immediately.
Combining frog's approach with insightful analysis of companies such as Apple, BMW, Clif Bar, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Salesforce.com, and Zipcar, Richardson illustrates how to envision and realize successful new business ventures, products, and services. Innovation X is an essential guide for companies looking to get the jump on their competition in today’s disruptive environment.
Excerpts
Table of Contents (PDF)
Chapter 1: Living in an X-Problem World (PDF)
Thoughts from Adam's design mind blog
Adam presented at TEDx Taipei on July 24 in the Huashan Cultural Park in Taiwan. The theme of the event was “Unlearn. Play. Inspire.” TEDx conferences are independently organized local TED events. TEDx Taipei featured 23 speakers, including designers, entrepreneurs, explorers, storytellers, photographers, scientific pioneers, visionaries, and provocateurs are going to share their stories with a 500 person audience.
read more on design mind
Adam gave the keynote speech at Amsterdam’s Next Web conference, the fifth annual gathering to discuss trends in the digital landscape, on how “The Future of the Web Will be Invisible.” Richardson discusses the intersection of the physical and the digital, and his term “Webjects,” the blending of objects and the Web.
read more on design mind
At the beginning of May, frog design partnered with the Lift Conference in Geneva to do a bold experiment: conduct design research on the conference itself to understand what was working well and not so well about the conference. The organizers wanted to see if a design research approach based on real-time observation and interviewing of attendees could provide better and richer feedback, allowing them to further improve the already highly regarded event. Here is what we found.
read more on design mind
Recent
It’s a well known bromide of user research: customers don’t always know what they want - even when they think they do. Just because they can articulate it explicitly and provide detailed use cases, is no guarantee that once they get the thing they’ve asked for and desired, that they will in fact want it.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Economist Innovation Conference, held at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. It was a fast-paced (almost too fast), jam-packed event, with lots of good speakers and a heady flow of ideas. The downside to the 1-day format was that there was little time for networking, however they did make sure to get Q&A from the audience in almost every session, which was good.
The major announcements at this year's Mobile World Congress have mostly revolved around Android handsets. The heavy competition is pushing companies to be more adventurous with their designs both aesthetically and functionally. A common theme this year has also been the emphasis on photography and music quality out of the handsets. Let's look at the style, imaging, and sound trends in more depth. In this post I'll talk about the handset design highlights, and in Part Two I'll look at imaging and sound.
Recently Fast Company ran a lengthy piece on the four companies that will dominate the tech economy in the next ten years: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google. All four are tremendously powerful companies that each started in one category (book selling, search engine, etc.) and are branching out to disrupt adjacent categories. Because of this, they are all coming into conflict with one another. And they are all strong forces in mobile.
