Well, after a series of del.icio.us postings with reduced analysis I feel tempted to write a ‘normal’ posting again ;-) My original approach to go back to normal blogging has been to chronologically post about my recent endeavours from the end of September until today.
However a couple of minutes ago Alex Osterwalder (whom I’ve met in Geneva last Friday and we’ve postponed our podcast to January ;-) from “Business Model Design and Innovation Blog” has sent me a great pointer to a recent short video podcast he did with Jeffrey Huang on ‘Design Thinking’ on his blog. Jeffrey has taught and worked at Harvard, Stanford’s d.school and at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab among others.
Having conducted a workshop myself on ‘Design Thinking’ recently (but more from a business side perspective) at the Creativity World Forum in Belgium I find Jeff’s statement highly accessible and condensed. What at first sight sounds like a commonplace about Design Thinking: “It’s mostly about an attitude to business and not so much how design can help businesses per se. I think it’s more the thinking behind it” turns out (from my perspective) to have a highly strategic dimension at second sight.
What I’ve learned over the last couple of months (and this is not limited to companies from the creative industries) is that the main problems companies have in innovating is the lack of willingness to tackle problems from a different (sometimes unknown) perspective with new approaches. I suppose in many cases it’s the fear of discovering better, but at the same time more complex approaches to problem solving. And fear is always a bad adviser …
