Ever since I met Erik Hersman, I have dreamed of traveling to Nairobi to work with him. So now, my dream has come true. Last week, I traveled with my daughter and mother back to the country where I was born, Kenya.
Along with a cadre of stellar design professionals, educators, communication gurus, and experts in social enterprise, Peter Durand of Alphachimp served as faculty and scribe for this amazing weeklong program.
Each year, PopTech selects 10-20 high potential change agents from around the world who are working on highly disruptive innovations in areas.
Google Goggles demo at Zeitgeist 2010 from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.
Use pictures to search the web.
http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text
An interview with Google Rep on how this new search capability works.
A man after my own heart... Ben had the gonadal circumference to name his service after a simian! We use MailChimp for our sporadic newsletters, too.
Within a year, Ben launched MailChimp, which grew alongside The Rocket Science Group.
MailChimp was a hit, and he started focusing exclusively on it in 2005. Since then, MailChimp has grown from 9,000 users to more than 400,000.
MailChimp makes it easy to design and send beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign’s performance. It takes powerful tools like segmentation, a/b testing and ROI tracking, and turns them into something anyone can use.
Ben’s interests include brand personality, monkeys and cars. His interests do not include golf.
When A.G. Lafley was named CEO of Procter & Gamble during the summer of 2000, her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G.
To remain the world's preeminent maker of useful stuff for the house, P&G needed to make a lot of changes very quickly and appointed Claudia Kotchka as the company's first-ever VP for design strategy and innovation in 2002.
Her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G!
And she did through up-endeding the status quo in P&G's product development process. She made several bold moves that any company may want to consider.
When I was a bachelor living in Chicago, my mom called one evening: "Your brother has a question for you."She put 8-year-old Josh on the phone, who was curious if I still owned that 200-foot climbing rope. "Why? What's your plan?"
He was trying to solve a unique problem: How to connect a long rope from the 75-ft pine tree in our yard to the roof of the house in order to slide down it as a zip line.
(NOTE: Josh has been to the emergency room more than anyone else in our sprawling, adventurous family!)
Point being:
Continue reading "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People." »
ABOVE: "Wacky Hybrid Appliances" from This Old House On-Line
My family used to have a gag gift that would show up every Christmas in someone's gift pile. The "Boob Bath Mat" never failed to shock and awe.
Each year, it seemed as if the victim never saw it coming.
Lots of time and energy goes into products that never see the light of a showroom floor. So, how did this monstrous mash-up product ever make it to the marketplace?
Someone--a team of someones, in fact--had to propose the idea, design it, send the specs to a factory in China, produce a catalog layout, write sales copy, coordinate the shipping, etc.
Since innovation is being touted as our only way out of the eco-financial desert of Western Civ, we had better get smart about finding, designing and deploying good ideas.
From Allison Arieff's blog By Design at New York Times on-line (thanks to @lumpysnake!):
Every worker would appreciate Steven M. Johnson's Nod Office (1984), an ingenious desk that can be transformed into a hidden sleeping chamber, perfect for late afternoon naps. Owning such a contraption remains for me a significant yet unrealized career goal.
Johnson is the author of an illustrated 1984 book: “What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Everybody Else.”
Amen, brother!
See more brilliantly perverse inventions posted in Allison's article: Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas
CNN's Becky Anderson looks at how the internet has helped shape a new way on innovative thinking and sharing. This video features our friend Garrick Jones, founder of The Ludic Group and long-time lover of art, innovation and creative business strategy.
Alphachimp LLC is a visual learning company based in Houston, Texas.
Through drawings, animations, and the design-thinking process we help people understand complex situations and make better decisions.
We provide a cluster of inter-related services in the area of visual learning, graphic facilitation, problem-solving, and innovation.
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