NussbaumOnDesign - BusinessWeek

Warren Buffett's Bet Against Innovation

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:32:40 +0000

The U.S. is in deeper trouble than I thought, if Warren Buffett is right. In proclaiming an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States, Buffett just paid $44 billion for a 19th century technology platform, a railroad, that carries 20th century goods--coal, agriculture, imports from Asia, petroleum. This is a vision of an America mired in the past and in economic and political decline.

And Buffett just might be right. He has a great track record betting against innovation. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for investing in insurance companies and utilities, and avoiding high tech and innovative corporations. Its stock is up 84% over the past decade, while the S&P 500 is down by 18%.

I'm hoping that Buffett's vision of the future is wrong. I'm hoping that a US economy based on making, not consuming, green, not carbon-centric, based on digital not metal network platforms, will drive economic growth and prosperity. I'm betting on innovation.

The purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad may have one benefit lost on Buffett. A 19th century network platform that is a railroad may have new life in an energy-conscious 21st century economy. Railroads, as we all know, are among the most energy-efficient modes of mass transportation for goods and people. Updating that platform, making it even faster and cheaper, could help propel the U.S. into a very different kind of future than the one envisioned by Buffett. That would be a future where railroads shipped exports of innovation new products and capital goods that reduced carbon energy.

Tim Brown And Roger Martin Together Talking Design Thinking

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:15:44 +0000

IDEO's Tim Brown has a new book out--Change by Design--and Rotman School of Management' Roger Martin has a new book out--The Design of Business. On November 11, I will moderate a conversation with Tim and Roger, together with Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target and it should be lots of fun. Come. As the global economy begins to grow again, everyone is trying to strategize the future. What's the New Normal? What are the new value propositions in the new world? What new social-media based business models are emerging? How do you innovate in this environment?

And, of course, what role will Design Thinking play in navigating this uncertainty, revealing cultural needs and iterating new options for products and services?

Here is the press release for the event. If you miss it, go to Parsons the next night, November 12, at six to see Roger Martin sign books and yak with me on stage about business, innovation, design and life.

Here's the release:

"You and your guests are invited to register for this next session in our ongoing Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts Speaker Series.

Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Timing: 3:00 to 3:55 check in; 4:00 sharp to 6:00pm discussion; 6:00 to 7:00pm reception

Place: 30th Floor Auditorium, Thomson Reuters Building, 3 Times Square, New York

Topic: “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”

Expert Moderator: Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design, Parsons New School of Design and Contributing Editor, BusinessWeek

Three Expert Panelists:
Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO; Author, “Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (Harper Business, Sep. 09)

Roger Martin,Dean, Rotman School; Author. “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage” (Harvard Business, Oct. 09)

Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target

Their biographies are below.

Fees: per person (include “Change by Design”, “The Design of Business”, the discussion, cocktails):
US $300
US $225 for Rotman or UofToronto Alumni and “Rotman Magazine” Subscribers
US $150 for individuals who work for non-profits and governments

To Register:
If you have not already registered, please do so by noon on November 11. Register on-line here or visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/events. Questions can be directed to events@rotman.utoronto.ca or call us at 416-946-7462.

If you are unable to attend but wish to purchase Tim and Roger’s new books they are available from leading book retailers.

We hope to see you on November 11th."

That's it for the PR release.

Who is Henrik Fisker? He Just Got a Half Billion Dollar Loan From Washington to Build Plug-Ins

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:49:34 +0000

Fisker just got a big loan from Washington to buy an old GM plant to assemble plug-in hybrid cars. But who the heck is Fisker?

Then I remembered this piece on Fiskerin IN:Inside Innovation that I launched with Reena Jana, Matt Vella and Jessie Scanlon. It was reported and written by Matt, the brilliant auto maven.

21 Young Design Thinkers Making A Difference

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:31:14 +0000

Check out these people--their schools, degrees and employers. This is the heart of design these days.

Hey Venessa, you are doing an incredible job covering Design!

Design in Korea and the Science of Designomics

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:07:29 +0000

I'm going to be giving a keynote speech at the big Design Korea conference in early December on "Designomics." I hadn't heard the term before but I like it a lot, as it combines economics and design in one easy-on-the-ears word. It's very interesting that Korea is embracing it, since the country is pouring billions into design.

Check out this interview with Seoul's Chief Design Officer, Kyung-won Chung who talks about his "Designomics" strategy for the city and South Korea.

Does New York City have a Chief Design Officer? San Francisco? Chicago? LA? New Orleans? Toronto? New Delhi? Shanghai? Singapore? Paris? London? Berlin? Rome? Rio? Abu Dhabi? Tokyo? Beijing? Bangalore?

Building A Design Culture in China--Tim Marshall, Provost of The New School

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:40:12 +0000

Check out this great Business Week podcast on China's exploding design scene by New School Provost Tim Marshall, previously dean of Parsons School of Design.

Tim talks about the hot Shanghai design scene, design education in China, high complexity design, and sustainability and lots of other important issues.

Continuum, Frog and IDEO all have offices in Shanghai.

Are Smart Grids Really Stupid?

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:35:07 +0000

There's a wonderful story on windpower and smart grids by John Carey just out as the Obama Administration begins to finance the creation of a smart grid system in the US. I applaud President Obama's efforts at moving the US off carbon energy and our dependency on overseas energy sources. However, spending tens of billions to upgrade our electrical grid to move wind-generated energy from the Midwest and Texas to cities may be misguided.

Joel Tower, the dean of Parsons School of Design reminded me over dinner that most cities in the US are on the coasts. The wind blows pretty steady and with force most of the time over the ocean. Put the windmills offshore, and you can power cities from green energy that is nearby.

That reduces the need for smart grids that transmit wind-generated electricity over hundreds and thousands of miles (yes, Chicago is the big exception). Of course there are big issues to resolve--cost, birds, aesthetics, recreation.

There was a time when the sight of a windmill in a city such as New Amsterdam or Sag Harbor was a sign of modernity. Today, when you fly into Toronto or Copenhagen, the same vision of windmills means the same thing--modernity. We might want to try that vision once again in America. And perhaps save billions as well.

Crowdsourcing, Social Business Models, Innovation--Bruce Nussbaum Talks With David Armano

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:43:07 +0000

Here's an insightful conversation on innovation, design and social media between David and me, thanks mostly to the great questions Armano asks.

I'm following the new Dachis Group since it is the only consulting firm I know out there that is building a practice on promoting a new business model--social business. It's the latest iteration of service innovation. Very interesting.

Health By Design--Notes From the GE HealthCare Conference

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:38:35 +0000

GE's Health By Design conference in NYC generated a significant number of insights into the shape of health care reform that go far beyond what is being discussed in Washington DC. It was staged by Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer of GE (and one of the chief drivers for innovation at the company) and Bob Schwartz, the general manager of Global Design for GE HealthCare and old buddy of mine from when he headed the IDSA.

Here's are notes and comments from my Muji notebook:

Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, Director of the Center for Innovation & SPARC Lab, Mayo Clinic. SPARC has 8 designers embedded in the core business--the care of patients. One project is designing a new OR from scratch. Another is developing a patient-centered medical home. SPARC has 2 designers living in a community to understand what people feel about their own health and develop new models of delivery.

In this discussion that followed, it came out that a "Mayo consult" anywhere, anytime, is a branding/busines concept that is being developed. With new social media, medical technology and conferencing tools, it may be that you can consult with a Mayo doctor without going to Rochester Minn. Is this the beginning of a hospital consolidation in the US, with the best brands expanding nation-wide--or globally?

BTW, all doctors at Mayo are salaried. Think about that.

Dr. Gary Kalkut, Chief Medical Officer of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. It has a David Rockwell-designed children's hospital and the choice of architect is telling. Rockwell is all about the experience and building a new hospital from a child's experience point of view is wonderful. It focuses on the families of patients, with fold-out sofas and showers in the room. Doctors are taught to have a good bedside manner--so they can learn from the patient.

Montefiore has inner city issues. One quarter of its patients are undocumented. It's emergency room is the fourth largest in the country. The two are related. Think about it. And think about the current health care reform bills that refuse health care to undocumented people and what that means to your health--and wallet.

The Bronx is the poorest of the five NYC boroughs (and BTW, the only one connected to the mainland). Some 40% of Bronx teens are obese.

MOMA senior curator Paola Antonelli was on our panel and she talked about how designers were the translators of technology to larger society--perfect for a discussion about medicine. Paola had a great idea. Start a movement--Take A Designer to Work Day. Doctors, CEOs, managers, city bureaucrats, school principles, transporation execs--few have any idea of what design can do to help them reframe their problems and solve them. So, lets Take a Designer to Work folks.

Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of PeerInsight, a top service innovation consulting firm, was in the audience and we walked to Central Park afterwards, talking about the day. Jeneanne's suggestion--a Mint for medicine. She said we need a new brand that organizes our family's medical flows the way Mint organizes our financial flows. Most of the Boomers are dealing with aging parents, children and their own health, trying to keep track of medicines, appointments, doctors--and treatment options.

Hey Gen Yers out there, this is a perfect job for you. It's your platform. A Medical Mint. This would be a perfect incubator startup project for our Gen Y Research Collaborative at Parsons.

Best Article On China in Years

Bruce Nussbaum — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:04:43 +0000

Check out this balanced, insightful and cautious piece on China's economy in Bizweek. It's hard to get through the hype on China these days and this piece does just that. It's written by two of the best journalists I know--Pete Engardio and Dexter Roberts.

We really need some balance in our view of the "rise of the rest" as Fareed Zakaria puts the decline of the US. At the very least, we need to understand that there is nothing inevitable about the rise and fall of nations or empires. Just in the past half century, we've seen the rise and breakup of the Soviet communist empire and the rise and stagnation of Japan. "Europe" has risen--and stopped, poised for a possible fall. The OPEC nations of the Middle East once looked like they would dominate the globe. Now don't. Brazil is moving up fast--for the second time in a century. Ditto for Turkey.

As for the US, the first book I did was editing The Decline of US Power--in 1980-off a cover story I did with a team at Business Week in 1979. A lot happened in the following decades.

Culture, demographics, currency all play key roles that are often less understood than technology, exports, shiny architecture and infrastructure.

Inside The App Economy at Apple, Facebook and Zynga.

Bruce Nussbaum — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:47:15 +0000

Read this great story on the growing app economy at Apple, Facebook and Zynga. A new economy based on a new platform.

Do you know who Eddie Cue is?

This is true disruptive innovation.

Who Needs Conde Nast? Gen Y Builds It's Own Fashion Platforms

Bruce Nussbaum — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:39:42 +0000

I'm working with Parson's grad Kelsey Meuse to build out a Gen Y Research Collaborative and she pointed me to Lookbook.nu. It's a simple digg-type platform where Gen Yers around the world are posting their fashion creations and getting rated by their peers. It's simple, beautiful and wonderfully innovative in a quietly disruptive way.

What is most wonderful is that you don't see anorexic models in pornographic poses manipulated by photographers and their fashion editor masters. You see authentic people in their teens and twenties wearing their own incredible fashions created by themselves. And it's on their own culturally revalent media platform where they blog and comment on their work and have others post reactions and suggestions as well.

Why let arrogant boomers tell you what to wear when you can transform your generation from consumers to creators?

Bill Buxton--The Man Who Invented Touch Screen Touch

Bruce Nussbaum — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:10:09 +0000

I went out drinking with Bill Buxton in Providence, RI, at the recent BIF5 conference and we talked about how he was building three canoes based on three Canadian Native People's styles. The Cree canoe was finished and Buxton did it without any power-tools. Now this is important (I'm connecting dots here so bear with me), because last night at the National Design Awards presentation, the winner of the Interaction Design award, Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel, ran a little movie showing his inspiration for the big touch screen technology we're seeing on TV and Tom Cruise movies (moving stuff around on a big screen with hands).

The movie showed Buxton, about 20 years ago, sketching out a touch-screen format on a sheet of paper and asking why do we need a mouse to intermediate between us and a computer? Great question. That question inspired Han who went on to develop his interactive technology and debut it at TED in 2006. It showed up later in the movies with Cruise and then CNN for the Presidential election.

In Providence, I went to a talk by Buxton at Brown and he showed me the next iteration of interactive technology being developed by his scientist friend there. Awesome.

Bourbon. He likes bourbon.

GE HealthCare Conference--Insights and Lessons

Bruce Nussbaum — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:48:05 +0000

GE's extraordinary CMO Beth Comstsock and GE HealthCare's design guru Bob Schwartz put on Health By Design, a really important little conference on Thursday. I was lucky to be part of a panel that included Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, director for Innovation & SPARC Lab at the May ClinicDr. Gary Kalkut the Chief Medical Officer of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, and Paola Antonelli, the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design at MOMA. Sam Lucente, the head design guy at HP wss in the audience, as was Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of Peer Insight consulting and Irish Maliq, part of the innovation team at MSK--Memorial Sloan Kettering.

I'm going to post two blog items: my comments and thinking on heathcare, followed by a run-down of insights from the great speakers and audience. Here's my talk:GE Healthcare Conference. 10/22/09.

"Thanks Bob. Let’s begin with the title of my 5-minute talk: how design is applied to problem-solving in healthcare. I would argue that Design and Design Thinking do more than help solve problems—they shape the problems themselves. With its user-focus and ethnographic tools and methodologies, Design is already re-shaping the healthcare problem from curing disease to maximizing well-being.

Design is re-shaping the health care problem from treating the individual patient to engaging the patient’s society—family and community.

Design is re-shaping the problem from going to a massive, centralized, distant edifice-- the hospital-- to delivering a service locally and intimately.

Design is re-shaping the entire healthcare paradigm from a focus on the dyad of deliverer and the receiver, doctor—patient, to a broader consideration of a networked system of delivery.

Allow me to zig and zag here to talk about Design and culture. We live in an era of cultural multiplicity. In our businesses, in our lives, in our healthcare, we need to deal with a huge number of cultures.

Why do we need to participate in so many cultures? First, social media and digitalization in general are creating thousands of new cultures every day. Mommies with blond twins living in Williamsburg. Korean students at Parsons in New York who like jazz. Breast cancer survivors living in Fort Lauderdale Florida who are nudists. The list is infinite. To live today is to belong to a large number of digital communities, especially if you are in the Gen Y generation. To deliver health care or cars or education or bike gear successfully, you have to participate and engage in conversations in those cultures.

Second, the decline of Western economic, political and cultural dominance and the rise of the rest, forces us to acknowledge, embrace and participate in national, regional and local cultures in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. In the past, GE HealthCare and every other global company made products and services in the US or Europe or Japan and sold them into Indian towns and villages. Today, GE HealthCare is collaborating with local Indian partners to build products that make sense in that culture. And sometimes, you can Trickle Up, as GE is doing today, by importing the locally-designed products back to the US. Simpler, cheaper, as good if not better products can be the result.

Now let’s quickly turn to Gen Y culture. The Decline of US Power globally and the Rise of Gen Y Power globally are two of the most powerful tectonic changes in our lives. Gen Yers tend to have a different, distinct culture from the Boomers. It tends to be participatory, collaborative, digital, urban, tool-using, tinkering and thing-making, green, pan-ethnic, pan-gender and trans-national. In Asia and the Middle East, Gen Yers tend have all these traits except the last three.

So it may be time for a Trickle Out strategy based on Gen Y to join Trickle Up based on bottom of the pyramid. Gen Y culture is dominated by Social Media technology platforms and Learn-Make-Share value systems. Let me repeat that. Social Media platforms and Learn-Make-Share values define the Gen Y generation. For this generation, this way of organization and this value systemmeans a de-massing and disaggregating of all service delivery, whether it is healthcare or education or shopping. It means active participation of people in their own well-being, from diagnosis to treatment. It means accessing information from multiple sources, sharing it with a community of friends who actively offer advice, and collaborating with doctors on treatment. Indeed, patients are becoming the new providers.

Design understands this transformation of culture and Design enables this transformation of culture. All cultures, including the culture of healthcare.

Thank you."

So watcha think about these thoughts?

Designer Richard Sapper's Story On The Original ThinkPad

Bruce Nussbaum — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:20:02 +0000

I talked with Richard Sapper, the amazing design genius, at Knoll on Tuesday. He's developed a beautiful arm that holds monitors in the air above your desk. You can fold it so that the monitor comes forward or backward, twists around to face away, or simple twirls. Both technological and aesthetic genius.

Sapper also has a touch-screen ThinkPad coming up as well. And here is the story-telling bit. He told me (and Reena Jana who invited me) that his original and iconic trackpoint red button in the middle of the ThinkPad was forbidden by the German government. When Sapper and IBM first unveiled the ThinkPad in Germany, the authorities said that the color red was reserved for emergencies and forbad Sapper from using it.

So Sapper changed the color to purple--and made it more red the next year. And the next year. By the third year, Sapper was back to his original red, the ThinkPad was hugely popular in Germany and the authorities stopped bugging him.

Lessons? Don't take "no" for an answer if you truly believe in your design creation. Find ways to overcome barriers, even as large as German regulators. Be persistent. Take the long view (or at least 3 years). Believe in yourself. Get a strong strategic partner (IBM then, Lenovo now).

I guess I would add that in an era of teams and collaboration, it is really great to meet an individual design and innovation genius who does it the old way--his way. Richard Sapper, an original.