SPEC’s research revealed a breathtaking finding:  one of the six cultures had a 100 percent survival rate through the dotcom bubble, was the fastest to go to IPO, and continued to hit growth targets as a maturing public company. 

Building the connection between your brand and your audience doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to cost an arm and leg, either. Most of what goes into building a solid brand is just extracting the good stuff you already have in your head. How we go about organizing the stuff what comes out of your head, that's another story...but no worries, this is why we use archetypes to set up a solid foundation on which to build a brand's personality.

Survivorship Bias suggests that, minus outliers, things themselves statistically do not survive like we think they do. The Lindy Effect, however, seems to suggest that ideas don’t follow the natural laws of decay over time. If important enough, these ideas can survive the odds, perhaps even through periods of undulating popularity. Which takes us back to bike seats.

What struck me about Simon’s talk was his assertion that the only way to play an infinite game is through consistency in adhering to values, regardless of the short term expense. Consistency in applying values gives employees, customers, vendors, and partners something to trust and believe in. 

As designers we're constantly trying to improve people's lives by tailoring a product or system's function, appearance, and aura to perfectly suit them. Which is why Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are particularly intriguing to me. Cryotpocurrecies represent the redesign of an entire facet of the global economy: money.

These potential customers have busy lives, but they also expect more from the products and services that are pushed at them.  I think its only fair that we, as researchers, provide an environment that works best for each individual, so they can effectively lend their voice to a new product or service that is relevant to them.

Marketing as we know it is at a cross-roads. Countless pieces of software and strategic frameworks have been built around how to fit the customer into its marketing process, and not the other way around. 92 million Millennials, the largest generation in history, is expecting more. Until about 2040, if you want your brand and business to survive, you’ll need to build your strategy around how “millennials will be the key consumer segment driving the U.S. economy.”

There is a big, bright world of inspiration out there!  So why are so many people still sitting in windowless meeting rooms with empty tabletops and beige furniture?  When is the last time you came up with a brilliant idea while staring at a blank wall?

Cookie Monster Groups enjoy better creative performance than traditional team brainstorming groups.  We know this because of science.

You can easily spend far more to design the product than it is worth. However, with a good understanding of risk management, situationally appropriate new product design methods, and clear-eyed forecasting, you can make smart investments that will make a positive return across a portfolio of ideas.

I’m compelled to start with a great lesson illustrated in the book, “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. That lesson: If you take the manufacturing process developed by Toyota (better known as the Toyota Production System or TPS), and implement that process in your manufacturing facility - it won’t work.

What is the difference between design thinking and human centered design? It’s hard to ignore all the talk around human centered design (HCD) and design thinking these days. A quick google search of those terms, in quotes, reveals a combined 23 million results. Digging into those results, and the opinions on the topic might make a head spin.

A testable product concept is a clearly illustrated and articulated idea that follows a specific format. The concept illustration provides minimal details to express the product idea such that a customer can understand, believe in, and evaluate the concept. The concept description is persuasion-neutral, but describes the solution, benefit, and reasons why the concept is believable.

Cool hunting is the practice of researching the youth culture in the street or underground scenes in order to predict future or upcoming trends, in the context of design. The term cool hunting has an inherent sociocultural element to it, since it is the current society’s ideals that dictate what is cool and uncool, the zeitgeist, or the “spirit of the times”.

More recently, the internet has created communities of people who share fringe paradigms such as a fear of vaccines or a belief that the world is flat. The term has largely fallen out of favor in most business circles as a lofty expression that demonstrates the speaker’s lack of familiarity with modern innovation concepts for generating pragmatic solutions.