IDEO has released a Human Centered Design Toolkit that is the result of  a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The BMGF brought together four organizations —IDEO, IDE, Heifer International, and ICRW—to partner in the creation of a method for guiding innovation and design for smallholder farmers.

It contains the elements to Human-Centered Design, a process used for decades to create new solutions for multi-national corporations. This toolkit has been designed to hear the needs of smallholder farmers in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

While many elements of the toolkit are specifically tailored towards the specific questions one faces when innovating with and for smallholder farmers, it is a valuable collection that makes the sometimes vague human centered design process more concrete and therefore transferable and reproducible.

What I really like about this toolkit is that it differentiates between the design team and the facilitators. I think this differentiation and the active nomination of facilitators is one of the unique aspects in design processes and the transfer of design knowledge.

I see a lot of potential to create Human Centered Design Toolkits a specific company and certain industries. It is really helpful to narrow the focus and create a human centered design toolkit for the automotive industry, telecommunications industry or financial service industry.

More information about the toolkit

[via Nick Marsh]

 

 

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Following Tom Kelley’s quote that "Innovation is not just a program, it’s a way of life" I have recently taken a closer look at the characteristics of an "innovation lifestyle", especially in organizations.

During this research I found an article titled "Fostering an innovation mindset" which defines an innovative mindset as a pervasive spirit that stimulates individuals and teams to create newness in all areas of an organization.

Here is an excerpt of the introduction:

You know a company with an innovation mindset when you see the way employees interact with one another. They treat one another with respect, admiration, and cooperation. They smile. They laugh. They express consideration and thoughtfulness. They listen. They focus on the benefits desired by consumers rather than on their own personal gain. They come to work with an optimistic enthusiasm, because they believe that what they do each day really does count. They focus on the future rather than on the past. They exude self-confidence, possess a healthy self-esteem, and believe in their own capabilities and strengths. They have faith in innovation and in one another.

Found in: "Fostering an innovation mindset" by Thomas D. Kuczmarski, based on his book "Innovation: Leadership Strategies for the Competitive Edge".

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Strada del sole, a Swiss manufacturer of sunglasses, is offering service on their website that allows you to try different models with the help of their webcam and a small program that projects the sunglasses on your face. Here is what it looks like, if you have a webcam you can check it out at their website.

While the software is not perfect (the glasses could be more realistic and resize automatically to the size of your head) this is nevertheless an interesting approach to solve the problem of allowing customers to virtually experience a real-world product.

Shoppers want to experience a product before they buy it. If we don’t have a chance to test a product before we buy it we have to trust others through recommendations and base our buying decision on these recommendations. Online retailers face the challenge that even though it is easy to order products on the Internet, the process of finding the right product is difficult for customers if they don’t have any prior experience with the product they intend to buy.

Innovative solutions are needed that allow customers to experience products in a digital environment and to form a purchase decision. Strada del sole made a first step into this direction.

Do you know any other examples of companies successfully bridging this gap? Let us know in the comments.

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Great news for Switzerland, another global leader in technology (besides Google and IBM) is opening a Research Lab: Nokia (See press release). The research lab will be located in Lausanne and the research program itself is with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH Zurich).

[The Nokia Research Lab] will focus on helping people benefit from a world where they are connected to each other, to the Internet and also to information from the surrounding physical world. Access to the “Internet of Things” from a mobile device will allow people to collect information from their physical environment, filter it based on their location or preferences and share with their friends or communities.

The initial joint research agenda will focus on pervasive communications:

• Exploring new interaction experiences and technologies utilizing all the human senses;
• Services and applications based on the user’s context, such as location, and personal preferences, e.g., information provided by sensors within a mobile device or in the surrounding world
• Internet services and technologies – enriching the Internet experience on mobile devices.

Personally, I think this is great news because it will will strengthen Switzerland’s position to become a “hotbed of innovation” (See the video from Google Earth CTO Michael Jones on this topic) and will move Switzerland one step closer to become the Silicon Valley of Europe. Discussions about that at “Will a Nokia research center suck up all the Swiss talent?” and here “Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley“.

If you want to know more about the research focus at the new Laboratory, you should watch the embedded video. EPFL has already done a research project for Nokia in 2007 (Project title: Mapping the Digital World) and Francesco Cara, a design strategist at Nokia, has presented some of the results at lift08.

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A lot is written about innovative companies and their visionary leaders yet most of these stories focus on the usual group of companies: Apple, Starbucks or Google. Telling stories of this small group of “elite innovators” is easy but to gain new insights one has to go beyond this group of companies to discover something new.

FastCompany recently published their 2008 ranking of the world’s most innovative companies and the list provides fresh insights into innovation beyond the “usual suspects”. They are of course included but most interesting are the stories about the less known innovators.

Here is a selection of a few of these companies, the full list can be found online at Fast Company “Presenting the 2008 Fast 50“:

#13 AFFYMETRIX

Imagine going for a half-hour doctor’s visit and coming out with a treatment plan tailored to your unique genetic blueprint. That’s the vision at Santa Clara, California-based Affymetrix, which makes lab tests that scan tissue samples for variations in thousands of genes. The company banked an estimated $405 million in revenue last year, a payday spurred by the Amplichip test — developed in partnership with Roche Diagnostics — which identifies people who metabolize drugs slowly and therefore are especially vulnerable to side effects. Now the race is on to develop advanced tests for genetic predisposition to heart disease and the most common types of cancer.

#30 OMNITURE (See Full Profile)

Omniture is like an intelligence upgrade for the Web. It provides thousands of clients, from Bank of America to JetBlue, with real-time information about how visitors use their Web sites; those visitors, meanwhile, find an increasingly personal experience rooted in previous behavior and interests. And the data derived from this sort of high-IQ interaction have made Omniture an essential tool for improving its return on online ad spending.Last year, it managed $500 million in keyword spending that led to $10 billion in actual commerce. “We want to change the online experience,” CEO Josh James says. “If consumers are happy, everyone is happy.” James certainly is: Omniture grew about 80% in 2007, with sales topping $140 million.

#43 AIRASIA (See Full Profile)

Seven years ago, former music exec Tony Fernandes paid 25 cents for an ailing carrier with two creaky planes and $12 million in debt. Today, AirAsia’s bottom-of-the-pyramid strategy has created one of the world’s fastest-growing, most-profitable carriers, with the lowest operating costs in the industry and fares as cheap as $3. “It’s like our bus,” says Yap Choo Ying, who runs a market stall in eastern Malaysia and now regularly jets to Kuala Lumpur to see her grandkids. In November, the Malaysian company made a risky bet by going long-haul, adding flights to Australia; this year, it will add flights to China and India, where billions of people have yet to take to the skies.

#48 AKQA (See Full Profile)

Most interactive-ad shops master either the creative or the technical; AKQA is expert at both. Whether building a Pixar-quality interactive online universe for Coke’s breathtaking “Happiness Factory” campaign (below), or masterminding a multimedia “alternate reality game” for Microsoft’s Halo 3, the digital powerhouse doesn’t just dream up mind-bending ideas, it actually writes the code that brings them to life. Which is why, after five consecutive years of profitability, AKQA is one of the most dangerous global forces in the ad industry. While ad holding companies and tech firms spent billions in 2007 to snap up digital shops, AKQA fended them off, opting instead for a $250 million investment from private-equity firm General Atlantic. In the meantime, the 700-person agency boosted revenues 39% to $100 million and added new clients such as Unilever, DoubleClick, and Cadbury Schweppes — on top of existing accounts with Nike and McDonald’s.

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