Innovation: What’s New? [forbes.com] – A sprinkling of what’s happening in innovation practice including 5 dimensions that emerged from a recent study of 100 Chief Technology & Chief Innovation Officers. Topping that list is spending more time with customers to fuel authentic and valuable innovation.(!!)

Customer-based innovation -seen as the most important concept of all in terms of future investment priority: engaging with customers in deeper and more meaningful ways to create stronger relationships and stimulate a desire to be fully involved in the innovation process. This includes: designing-in emotion, integrating social-networking, and being more sophisticated in open innovation.

Making informed design decisions [brandpackaging.com] – Some strategies to improve communication and decision making around the often oh-so-subjective task of reviewing design concepts. Written with a he said/she said (aka designer/marketer) focus, the strategies and criteria are absolutely relevant for critical clarifying conversations with researchers, engineers, consumers, etc.

These failures have been observed at both agencies and large companies. As noted, they lead to inefficiencies and a lack of trust between the design team and the marketing team. There are, however, a small set of strategies that can help the marketing team improve overall decision quality when selecting and refining design concepts…Improved design decision-making is the result of many small strategies, not the elusive, single “big fix”. It is the result of an improved process (decision organization), leadership (transparency/solicitation and critique), and analysis (data collection and point of view).

A Few Nifty, Unpredicted Uses for Dropbox [theatlanticwire.com] – These are actually pretty nifty. Explore the value of Dropbox through the curated stories of a farmer, artist, theft victim, gamers, and family of an ill loved one. Gets me thinking in new ways how to use a service that most of the time I find cumbersome.

Fighting crime. The more tech savvy Dropbox users have come up with all kinds of hacks that enable you to do unpredictable things on Dropbox. Among them is a way not only to recover files from but track the movement of a stolen laptop.

Tracy and her younger son thinking about possibilities for books and reading devices

Our fieldwork sessions often include a piece in which we ask participants to brainstorm and fantasize about the future.

In an earlier post, we talked about the simple models we were building for the Reading Ahead interviews.

Book and device models for participatory design activity

We wanted to put something in people’s hands to help them show us what the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future” could be and do. (This fieldwork approach borrows from participatory design.)

We’ve had clients come out in the field with us and say after an interview, “That person didn’t give us any ideas,” so it’s important to clarify that we don’t expect this kind of activity to directly produce marketable ideas. Rather, it gives people another mode for expressing themselves, and it’s great for helping them communicate things which may not always be easy to verbalize, like:

• Their desires
• What they think should exist
• What problems they are trying to solve
• What seems acceptable and what seems outlandish to them
• Preferences and in what ways they would like something to be different

Chris uses the device model to help express his thoughts about navigation

Often for us, the very act of making the props for an activity suggests new ways of using them. In this case, while making a blank cover for the “future book” model, we realized that we could also make a blank inner page spread.

Holding the “book of the future” model

As it turned out, this meant that when we were done with the sessions, people had created very nice book models for us, with a cover and inner spread.

Erica’s “telescoping shopping bag” book with digital annotations, hyperlinks, and built-in dictionary

Part of the preparation for each interview session was to get the models ready with new blank paper. Here I am on the trunk of my car, prepping the models before an interview in San Francisco.

Now that the fieldwork is done, we have a great collection of models made by the people we interviewed.

Artifacts from participants’ “future book” ideation

The last section (copied below) of our Topline Summary synthesizes some of what we gleaned from this part of the fieldwork. These are just quick hits; we’ll develop any themes and recommendations that come out of these activities much further in the analysis and synthesis phase of the project.

Excerpt from Topline Summary: Participant ideation about the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future”

NOTE: The first thing a number of the participants said when asked about what the “book of the future” could be and do was that it’s pretty hard to improve on the book-it works very well the way it is. In addition to all the qualities already mentioned, books are

Instant on-off

Durable

But people did have ideas. Here are some of them:

Put yourself in the story

Leave the story for more information

Choose from alternate endings, versions

Able to morph from bigger size for reading to smaller for transporting

Book form with replaceable content: a merging of book and device, with a cover, and page-turning but content is not fixed-it can be many different books

Books that contain hyperlinks, electronic annotations, multimedia, etc.

Hide what you’re reading from others, hide annotations, hide your personal book list and lend your device to someone (with content for them)

A device that projects words that float above it, so that the reader doesn’t have to hold the device in their hands