This week, the world is noticing what happens when we ignore climate change. The alarms are (literally) ringing, and designers must answer the call. I am not arrogant enough to presume I know what to do to solve our issues of the day. But I know enough to suggest hundreds of things that can make …
One bright idea is pretty but a collection of ideas put into practice over time, sustainably, is beautiful (and real innovation). Sustainable innovation — a process, practice, and culture of design-driven creativity — might be the most valuable outcome for any organization. Real, sustained innovation is not about creating a single item — product, service, policy …
What regular practice does is reduce the cost of failure and these costs are different in times of disruption. Innovation succeeds because of regular, committed practice. It’s about consistency of effort and persistence. But what happens when we’re constantly being disrupted? The Twenty Twenties will go down as among the greatest periods of disruption of …
Creativity can come from destruction. There are ways to think about this can can turn the down into something positive.
Our consumption habits will kill our planet if we let it. Small actions, done often, can change our future course. Shopping is big business. It’s also helping our planet. Today is Black Friday, which is shaping up to be the largest shopping day of the year in the United States and Canada. In Canada, this …
Pushing change is not for the faint of heart or head. Loneliness is one of side effects that innovators must consider. A wise man once told me: No one welcomes change except wet babies Whether it’s through some form of behavioural intervention, using evaluation data to point out strengths and weaknesses in a program, or …
Developmental evaluation holds promise for product and service designers looking to understand the process, outcomes, and strategies of innovation and link them to effects. It’s the great promise of DE that is also the reason to be most wary of it and beware the traps that are set for those unaware. Developmental evaluation (DE), when …
Contests are seen by many in the social sector as a way to engage audiences and generate new thinking about important issues, yet in generating all of these contributions from the crowd are we undermining the very aims of work in social innovation when the fruits of these ideas largely remain to rot on the …
No Contest: The Cost of Crowd-based Social Innovation Read More »
For any marketing of complexity to work, the risk in creating a false guru is high, but so too is the risk of installing overly simplistic filters. In both cases we need to address complexity with a complex response and doing so with one that doesn’t exacerbate the problem by adding too much extraneous information to our media ecology, getting us back into trouble elsewhere.
Social marketing can be a problem when what we ‘sell’ has unintended consequences. These are discussed in light of certain health behaviour change concepts and theories.
