I drew the following diagram from a description in Marty Neumeier’s book The Designful Company:

In any given endeavour, a business can choose the following approaches:

Good and different.
Different but not good.
Not good and not different.
Good but not different.

Neumeier contends that many businesses tend to choose the same over the different – in other words, 3 and 4 from the list and diagram above. They …

(I just found this note on my mobile phone. I wrote this about two years ago. Yes one of my phones is actually >2 years old.)

Here are three prods to kick start your business innovation:

What if you had to give away your product for free – and you had to find alternative ways to make a living from your business?

What if your customers disappeared overnight – and …

This is a follow-up to my recent post about The challenge of selling brainspace, and the general unwillingness for people to pay for the intangibles of ideas, insights, designs planning and perspective.

Here is a very real example, familiar to many of us who have written or responded to a tender (or Request for Proposal/Pitch RFP to Invitation to Quote ITQ)*.

A typical IT project tender is a …

The McNuggetini is … “A McDonald’s chocolate milkshake with vanilla vodka, rimmed with BBQ sauce and garnished with a chicken McNugget.” (From This Is Why You Are Fat.)

This reminded me of several conversations I have had recently re building something from existing stuff. Several friends have coincidentally came up with ideas for using the internet to publicise/galvanise action around causes. They …

“Passwords that show no imagination or distinctiveness are easy prey for information pirates, a new US study says.”

“people often do the easy thing” like:

Their first name (or their children’s)
“1234” or “123456”
“qwerty” (or “azerty” in Europe)
Names of TV/film stars and characters
“password” or “password1”
“I don’t care” “whatever” “yes” “no”
“iloveyou” “ihateyou”

Choosing an irresponsible password must be, in this day and age, akin to hiding the front door key under the mat, …

Here’re some tips that caught my attention while reading The Ten Faces of Innovation – Strategies for heightening creativity by Tom Ford with Jonathan Littman, ISBN978-1-84668-031-1.

When fact finding, don’t ask people to generalise or stereotype a situation. They will idealise the situation or behaviour rather than tell you what really happens. There is no such thing as “typical”.
To improve something, watch people struggle and …

Nice tagline – inexcusably crappy execution. Like this recent cockup by the Max Planck Institute.

The obvious fail aside, there are other wonderful lessons nicely demonstrated by this one sign.

No hierarchy of reading – the actual information on this sign (the text and logo) more or less have the same visual weight. They are all jammed in to the top edge of the …

Wikis are great for creating ad-hoc collaborative and infinitely extensible stores of information and knowledge. Especially when such information is so easily transmitted AND so easily lost in email black holes as pointed out by Robert Rath on his post Wikis Bring Light To The Black Hole of EMail.

Emails are easy to use and conceptually comfortable. I simply type and send. Unfortunately they are also notoriously …

Sometimes, the simplest technique still works the best. Here is a shop window display that used nothing more than a cardboard cut-out.

The lighting (more subtle than what my photography show) is right, the full wall-height graphics forming the background is big enough and all encompassing enough to draw the eye in. The cut-out of the golfer uses perspective provides “movement” – as you walked across …

Everyone would have heard of the MacBook Air by now right? It is a stunning piece of product design. There’ve been loads of “oohs” and “aahs” over how thin it is.

The designers have used a proven technique to make the unit look thinner than what is actually possible with engineering alone.

In everyday circumstances, we almost never perceive a product from an orthogonal viewpoint – ie perfectly …