Outsourcing News

I’m off on December 1 to Incheon, Korea to give a keynote speech at the Design Korea conference . The speech is on “Designomics,” a wonderful phrase that expresses the tight relationship between design and economic growth (if you prefer to call it “innovation” or “creativity,” that’s OK by me). Last week I was on stage in Singapore interviewing Minister of Finance Tharman (former Minister of Education and current member of the Economic Development Board) about creativity and the future of his incredible city-state. The night before I was in the President Palace and watched Singapore President R S Nathan personally give out 11 President’s Design Awards . It wasn’t left to the President’s wife, as it is in the US. This was followed by the ICSID conference in Singapore, that followed the DesignSingapore Festival that followed a wonderful Design Thinking Symposium. Get it? Now off to Korea. While I’m there, Hong Kong has it’s Business of Design Week from November 30-December 5

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Asia Bursting With Design & Creativity Conferences.

One of Singapore’s top designers, Feng Zhu , asked a pointed question to a panel of mostly Western designers at the end of the second day of ICSID that got the mostly Asian crowd really buzzing. “How much does making money drive design and how much does saving things?” he asked. Feng Zhu was reacting to two days of presentations by mostly European and American designers that focussed on saving the planet by cutting back on consumption and the making of things.

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Western Vs. Asian Designers. Controversy Breaks Out at ICSID in Singapore

Every once in a while I come across a government bureaucrat who totally surprises me with the person’s insight and competence. Singapore Minister of Finance Tharman is one of them. We opened the ICSID World Congress Monday with a conversation onstage. Every nation has a governing elite but Singapore has an exceptionally competent one. Here are my questions to the Minister. He had a chance to see them before he went onstage. Q&A With Singapore’s Minister of Finance Bruce Nussbaum, 2009 Mr. Finance Minister, the last time I was in Singapore was in 1969. I was told I’d better cut my long hair shorter for the visit. Today, you can see that this is no longer a problem.

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A Conversation with Singapore Finance Minister Tharman

On Monday morning, I interview Singapore’s Minister of Finance to open the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) . We’ll talk about how Singapore created a modern 20th century city-state and what it must now do to become a 21st century mega-city. Think of a shift from efficiency to creativity. The big show will come from the nine incredible Design2050 studio teams put together by Arnold Wasserman that will explore some of the most important and exciting issues of the future. Feng Zhu, founder of Singapore’s Feng Zhu Design, is leading a group to talk about entertainment; Chris Bangle, former head of BMW’s design group, is leading a group on Emotional Mobility 2050. Stephano Marzano, the head of Philips Design, heads a group talking about Healthcare 2050. Arup’s Chris Luebkeman leads a group that will discuss the drivers of change for the next four decades. Ravi Naidoo, the head of South Africa’s Design Indaba, is leading a team that will present on urban agriculture. Cocktails tonight. Gotta get dressed

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ICSID World Design Congress Opens in Singapore

Sitting here in Singapore as President Obama went through China and flew home from his 8-day trip to Asia, it is perhaps easier to see the true truth of his trip–it’s deep failure. The entire neo-liberal economic model promoted by the US over the past decades is now held in such disregard in Asia that a President representing the US system must suffer from the model’s decline. Soft power, such as culture and economic models, is always a major component of projecting a nation’s power around the world. Right now Wall Street, Alan Greenspan and the Chicago-school of market mania has so undercut America’s standing in Asia by the horrible recession they caused, that even President Obama’s popularity couldn’t overcome it’s negative impact. Obama came home empty-handed.

Link:
President Obama’s Asia Failure

I attended a briefing by the DesignSingapore Council’s International Advisory Panel on Friday that discussed making healthcare an economic driver of this city-state in the future. Now think about this. As the politics of the US continues to grind on around providing all Americans with the basics of health care, the government of Singapore has put together a panel of some of the world’s top designers to reshape it’s already terrific medical system so that it attracts people from all over the world to its facilities–and makes high value medicine a 21st century industry. The International Advisory Panel consists of Chris Bangle, former Chief of Design for BMW and now head of Chris Bangle Associates; Richard Seymour and Dick Powell co-founders of Semourpowell, the renown British design and innovation consultancy; Steve Hayden, Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy New York and Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide; Toyo Ito, founder of Toyo Ito & Ass. architects; and many other smart folks. The IAP said that Singapore’s medical system had a great foundation of combining both Western medicine with Eastern traditional practices. It called the remix “harmonic.” And the panel suggested taking the next step beyond implementing efficient process planning and providing excellent facilities to innovate better experiences for patients and doctors and nurses in the practice of medicine. Better experiences lead to better health outcomes, better efficiences and lower costs. This is similar to the work being done at the Mayo Clinic, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, Kaiser Permanente and other medical centers in the US

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Health Care Reform: US vs Singapore

I was over at the President of Singapore’s residence last night to watch him personally give four Designer of the Year awards. Boy, are they promoting Design in Singapore! The winners of this year’s Designer of the Year are: Tham Khai Meng, the Worldwide Creative Director of Olgivy & Mather, New York Chris Lee, founder of Asylum Creative (I had lunch with him and he’s great talent. Lee also spoke in Mandarin to his dad when he accepted the award–the only person in the evening to do so) Koichiro Ikebuchi, director of Atelier Ikebuchi Look Boon Gee, managing director of LOOK Architects The US equivalent is to have the annual winners of the National Design Awards go the White House and be thanked by the President’s wife. So the message in the US is, what? Women know design and real men aren’t interested?

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President’s Design Award Winners–Singapore

I had a fascinating time at the Design Thinking Symposium in Singapore. Mark Wee, director of Studio, a collaboration of Mark’s design consultancy Union and the National Library Board, put on a workshop for a variety of Singaporean managers from education, defense and other ministries, as well as local designers. Mark told me about the work Studio was doing with the local police in improving the consumer experience. Through a range of ethnographic and other design thinking activities, his group put the police into the shoes of their “customers” and prototypes ideas of how to improve their engagement with people. It was impressive work and shifted the focus of police work from an enforcement, crime-solving model to incorporate the experience of people trying to engage the police to help them. Kim Sxe, the director of The Nueava School talked about her founding a Design Thinking grade school in Palo Alto (where else), inspired by David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO and the D-School. It was mind-blowing to see the kind of creative work kids can do when given the chance and direction

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Singapore’s Design Thinking Symposium Was Hot

I’m off this week for a swing through Asia and Singapore is my first stop. I’ll be speaking at a great D esign Thinking Symposium in Singapore on Wednesday. It’s got an interesting program and the audience promises to be a mix of government, private industry, and local creative folks. Singapore is pretty much an engineering/technology driven society and my job will be to explain how it will take more than efficiency and technology to prosper in the future. I will try and explain that it will take empathy and the ability to understand real and digital consumer cultures, tools to iterate and visualize concepts, creative methods of generating new options where none existed before and a desire to venture into the unknown rather than rummage in the declining present. Should be very interesting.

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Design Thinking Symposium In Singapore

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, Tim Brown, head of IDEO and Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation of Target gathered on Wednesday to talk about Martin’s new book, The Design of Business . There was a great audience of top managers and design educators at Thomson Reuters. I moderated the conversation, kind of. Here are my favorite quotes. If you were in the audience, post yours. Roger Martin: “The business world is full of two kinds of people–builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders.” Tim Brown: Paraphrase here–”We can use analytics to generate new questions, not just answers.

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Best Quotes From Roger Martin and Tim Brown at Thomson Reuters Talk

I’m going to be giving a keynote speech at the big Design Korea conference in early December on “Designomics.” I hadn’t heard the term before but I like it a lot, as it combines economics and design in one easy-on-the-ears word. It’s very interesting that Korea is embracing it, since the country is pouring billions into design. Check out this interview with Seoul’s Chief Design Officer, Kyung-won Chung who talks about his “Designomics” strategy for the city and South Korea. Does New York City have a Chief Design Officer? San Francisco? Chicago? LA?

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Design in Korea and the Science of Designomics

There’s a wonderful story on windpower and smart grids by John Carey just out as the Obama Administration begins to finance the creation of a smart grid system in the US. I applaud President Obama’s efforts at moving the US off carbon energy and our dependency on overseas energy sources. However, spending tens of billions to upgrade our electrical grid to move wind-generated energy from the Midwest and Texas to cities may be misguided. Joel Tower, the dean of Parsons School of Design reminded me over dinner that most cities in the US are on the coasts. The wind blows pretty steady and with force most of the time over the ocean. Put the windmills offshore, and you can power cities from green energy that is nearby. That reduces the need for smart grids that transmit wind-generated electricity over hundreds and thousands of miles (yes, Chicago is the big exception). Of course there are big issues to resolve–cost, birds, aesthetics, recreation. There was a time when the sight of a windmill in a city such as New Amsterdam or Sag Harbor was a sign of modernity. Today, when you fly into Toronto or Copenhagen, the same vision of windmills means the same thing–modernity

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Are Smart Grids Really Stupid?

Here’s an insightful conversation on innovation, design and social media between David and me, thanks mostly to the great questions Armano asks. I’m following the new Dachis Group since it is the only consulting firm I know out there that is building a practice on promoting a new business model–social business. It’s the latest iteration of service innovation. Very interesting.

Link:
Crowdsourcing, Social Business Models, Innovation–Bruce Nussbaum Talks With David Armano

GE’s Health By Design conference in NYC generated a significant number of insights into the shape of health care reform that go far beyond what is being discussed in Washington DC. It was staged by Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer of GE (and one of the chief drivers for innovation at the company) and Bob Schwartz, the general manager of Global Design for GE HealthCare and old buddy of mine from when he headed the IDSA. Here’s are notes and comments from my Muji notebook: Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, Director of the Center for Innovation & SPARC Lab, Mayo Clinic. SPARC has 8 designers embedded in the core business–the care of patients. One project is designing a new OR from scratch. Another is developing a patient-centered medical home. SPARC has 2 designers living in a community to understand what people feel about their own health and develop new models of delivery

Link:
Health By Design–Notes From the GE HealthCare Conference

I’m working with Parson’s grad Kelsey Meuse to build out a Gen Y Research Collaborative and she pointed me to Lookbook.nu. It’s a simple digg-type platform where Gen Yers around the world are posting their fashion creations and getting rated by their peers. It’s simple, beautiful and wonderfully innovative in a quietly disruptive way. What is most wonderful is that you don’t see anorexic models in pornographic poses manipulated by photographers and their fashion editor masters

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Who Needs Conde Nast? Gen Y Builds It’s Own Fashion Platforms

I went out drinking with Bill Buxton in Providence, RI, at the recent BIF5 conference and we talked about how he was building three canoes based on three Canadian Native People’s styles. The Cree canoe was finished and Buxton did it without any power-tools. Now this is important (I’m connecting dots here so bear with me), because last night at the National Design Awards presentation, the winner of the Interaction Design award, Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel, ran a little movie showing his inspiration for the big touch screen technology we’re seeing on TV and Tom Cruise movies (moving stuff around on a big screen with hands). The movie showed Buxton, about 20 years ago, sketching out a touch-screen format on a sheet of paper and asking why do we need a mouse to intermediate between us and a computer? Great question. That question inspired Han who went on to develop his interactive technology and debut it at TED in 2006.

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Bill Buxton–The Man Who Invented Touch Screen Touch

GE’s extraordinary CMO Beth Comstsock and GE HealthCare’s design guru Bob Schwartz put on Health By Design, a really important little conference on Thursday. I was lucky to be part of a panel that included Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, director for Innovation & SPARC Lab at the May ClinicDr. Gary Kalkut the Chief Medical Officer of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, and Paola Antonelli, the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design at MOMA. Sam Lucente, the head design guy at HP wss in the audience, as was Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of Peer Insight consulting and Irish Maliq, part of the innovation team at MSK–Memorial Sloan Kettering. I’m going to post two blog items: my comments and thinking on heathcare, followed by a run-down of insights from the great speakers and audience. Here’s my talk:GE Healthcare Conference. 10/22/09. “Thanks Bob

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GE HealthCare Conference–Insights and Lessons

Amazon just announced that people are reading more and more books on the Kindle days after Appple announced that people are downloading more and more applications on the iPhone. And profits rose 47%. It’s no secret that these two companies are among the handful that have kept up revenues and profits throughout the worst recession since the Depression and are poised to do even better as the economy begins to growth again. The reason is simple–but not simple enough apparently for most managers in most global companies to comprehend. Apple and Amazon have created disruptive platform innovations that change the game for consumers. And they have done it within a price range ($300 to $400) that reduces the cost and risks to people even in a recession. Let’s take this strategy apart. First, a game-changing BIG innovation–a platform innovation

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Apple and Amazon Do Platform Innovation–And Succeed in a Recession

Looking for innovative thinkers? Check out the 2009 list of the Best Design Programs in the World by Business Week. It has both business-based and design-based programs that integrate the best of both methodologies and cultures–39 masters and MBA programs that significantly integrate Design Thinking and Business. The list includes two schools in China, and one each in Taiwan, South Korea and India. When I first started this list several years ago, the choices were very limited.

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The World’s Best Design Thinking Programs

A new study out by the Center for An Urban Future shows that New York City has great research centers but is terrible turning scientific advances into start-up businesses and economic growth . I am not surprised. My own personal experiences in working with NYC officials to introduce an Exec Ed program run by Parsons School of Design and the Rotman School of Management to retrain ex-Wall Street bankers to be innovative entrepreneurs was a dismal failure. The Economic Development Corporation in charge of city economic strategy is full of lawyers and one-time business consultants from McKinsey who didn’t understand innovation. They weren’t aware of the conversation surrounding Design and Design Thinking or the experience of P&G and other corporations in transforming their business models and cultures. The EDC has two plans up and running–one, JumpStart, apprentices 50 ex-bankers in innovative NYC companies, hoping they will “catch” the entrepreneurship bug. There was no scale to it–no way for it to have an actual impact on the New York economy.

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New York City Is Bad At Building An Innovation Economy–Listen Up Mayor Bloomberg