One of the recent project developments that helped put it in practice, this rather new way of designing, was the 24hr workshop to prototype the Business Model of The Thinking Hotel.

The starting point was to invite people from our Linkedin group to be part of the experience, not to design a product or a service – but to design the business model itself.

This is also a new experience of an innovative approach into co-design.

Why not have a look, and tell us what you think? The Thinking Hotel 24hr report

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Together with an excellent team, we created the ‘context’ (or in our words: the flow) for a diverse group of people explore the various layers and aspects of a new enterprise.

This is not a focus group, to gather opinions and insights about an idea, nor a validation of a concept. The experience became the product itself, and beyond. Participants engaged in a highly active and meaningful way, firstly due to curiosity. Check-in at The Thinking Hotel? A 24hr non-stop workshop? Prototype a Business Model? and what is a Thinking Hotel?

Besides the use of various design-led tools to develop a business model,  I’d like to highlight the importance of creating a fluid process for synergies, design-in the space to imagine, collaborate and make possible to the Guests to apply their own creativity (vs. knowledge or skills) to make something happen.

A key outcome (unexpected) is a process: The Thinking Hotel 24hr process, which we are offering to other organisations that are looking for new ways to engage their employees and clients, to increase the level of commitment, to help change management initiatives and to design-in conviviality into their brands.

This is also a new experience of an innovative approach into co-design.

Why not have a look, and tell us what you think?

warning: please note this report is about the process, not about the findings, and is a first attempt to share what we are doing - with some spelling mistakes - which may annoy or amuse you. Still - it gives a good insight to those who want to explore similar processes.

I have great news to share.

The Thinking Hotel © vision is moving forward – and hopefully, the aim to find partners interested in making this vision happen over the year 2010 is getting closer to reality!

The story so far:

In 2008 I shared the idea of creating the very best place for thinking under the concept of a Hotel, combining environments, tools, resources and services for thinking, with friends.

It did sound an interesting proposal, as everyone one’s first reaction was: WOW! or AWESOME!

Got the webdomains, registered the Ltd Company, and started defining the concept.

Shared with experts and advisors, presented to a few companies, VC investors, experts in Hotels, and so on. The positive feedback and fantastic insights helped me build confidence, and continue the journey.

Two weeks ago, I posted a comment on a TED LinkedIn group connecting someone’s post with the idea of The Thinking Hotel © - and that generated a number of positive reactions, including a suggestion to start a linkedin group: Let’s Create The Thinking Hotel, which I did, just about one week ago: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2882471&trk=anet_ug_hm

So far, this has been a brilliant experience – and you are welcome to join the group, share you views and opinions and comment on the other’s.

And here is the link to an online survey, that I’d really appreciate your feedback: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KRYCL6R

Beyond that, I had the honour to be a guest in a very special visit to a place that may have the potential to become our first Thinking Hotel! This is the Poltimore House (www.poltimore.org) which is an impressive place with great potential to a synergy with The Thinking Hotel © - if you visit the website – I suggest you have a look at their vision.

So, what’s next?

Why not… join the group, be a guest and check into this journey?

We are all thinking about thinking…and I am really thrilled with the members in this group!

Be my guest and get linkedin with this idea!

…to our economists, managers and other human executives?

If so, can you imagine Nature frenetically cutting costs everywhere possible, to solve its self-created economic crisis, determining life with less air, less light, less land, less water?

I suppose we would be receiving a Nature’s review, report and a strategic framework to tell us how to adjust to a new lifestyle - for example:

Reducing our breathing patterns (have you tried to just breath to a third of your current pattern?),
Minimise the amount of natural light received, and recycle it at the end of the day,
Cut the use of water, just squeeze fruits and collect from rain,
Reduce resources to grow food, maybe have 20% spinach reduction, or bananas without skin… and so on.

What would our life look like? and how would that work for you?

I am not sure about the consequences of such strategy, but we could do research, conduct a life-cycle analysis or efficiency audits, come up with metrics and measure impact, define performance indicators and put together the business case to inform Nature of the strategic value of cost-cutting in our world.

Luckily, Nature is the chief provider of everything we need doesn’t think like humans, doesn’t rely on our sophisticated management tools, perhaps…simply doesn’t manage.

Day after day I see Nature’s management style as one that gives, shares, creates, develops synergies, designs and invests in life.

And after a crisis…a natural one, I tend to see in Nature’s response the same levels, sometimes even more, of generosity and abundance – healing itself with more and better, not less and less.

Now imagine if humans knew how to mimic Nature’s strategies and management style!

MOST WANTED:

An innovative business leader with the excellence agenda at the heart of its business.

WHEN: As soon as possible.

WHAT FOR: To conduct an Excellence Audit.

I am now looking for a company who has the need and the goal to become Excellent.

If this is meaningful for you and your business…be the first to get in touch!

Even before the current global financial turmoil, it was not just Tom Peters who was calling for Business Excellence to be Re-imagined! Other heavyweight academics like Gary Hamel and Shoshana Zuboff have been publicly pursuing similar themes and thereby distancing themselves from their established business school roots! It is clear that serious change needs to get off the academic’s desk and on the management agenda, which is why Tom Peters Company developed this new Excellence Operating System!

What is the Excellence Audit?

The Tom Peters Company’s Excellence Audit™ is a unique business improvement tool based on characteristics drawn from Tom Peters’ obsession with understanding and describing contemporary business excellence.

It is designed for individual leaders and business teams, and identifies the most beneficial performance improvement opportunities for departments, divisions, or whole businesses. It exposes the degree of (dis)agreement that exists between key contributors or constituencies on the best way forward. It is a highly cost effective methodology for those who are determined to pursue excellence in tough economic times.

When is the Execellence Audit most useful?

The Excellence Audit is a powerful tool for managers to use:

• When performance improvement is an urgent priority.

• When increasing innovation is essential for an organization’s continued success.

• When a different approach to developing the business improvement strategy is required.

• When an internal professional service department faces being outsourced.

• When a commercial professional service business is looking to strengthen its client partnerships.

• When an ongoing business change initiative is producing disappointing results.

• When a forward planning forum needs to generate a greater return on investment for its sponsor.

• When an increased level of engagement is required from mission critical staff.

Examples of what the Excellence Audit explores:

Ambition

Do we have a dramatically different and energizing ambition that is shared by those we most rely on to deliver it?

Talent and Leadership

Are our leaders focused on finding, nurturing and mobilizing the talent we need to be successful?

Do our people engage personally with their work and deploy their full repertoire of talents, whatever their role?

How personally connected are our people with our Brand promises? Do people see it as their job to ‘live’ the Brand and deliver the right customer experiences?

Execution

Do we use techniques and methodologies that anticipate and facilitate WOW! outcomes from our work, for our clients, our people and the business?

What is the use of the data from an Excellence Audit:

Assesses your business against Tangible and Intangible characteristics of excellence.

Provides a Current Assessment on how you, your team, or your business measures up against the Future Shape of the Winner™ model. The data can be stratified to reflect the views of different key individuals and constituencies.

Identifies those characteristics of excellence that your key people think are essential for the Future Success of this business.

Informs a Performance Improvement Agenda for your business shaped to fit the current operating realities.

Stimulates debates and generates clarity on Action Plans across your team and your business.

Creates a Catalyst for Action!

Defines a Datum Point for tracking progress.

Research suggests to achieve the target of “waste free world”, we require a system that designs out waste and designs in value. I see this is as an opportunity for innovation investments and business leaders, however the current barrier is lack of real financial return to not produce waste, since such value is not measured, whereas waste has gain increasingly trade value leading to profits.

In our journey to identify funding for an innovation platform dedicated to develop a new generation of packaging without waste, myself and Dr. Joyce Tsoi successfuly attracted interest from potential partners accross all packaging stakeholders, however we still had to demonstrate how such investment can create value (economic and financial). As a response to this challenge we found the need  to develop a calculator (Negowaste©) that quantifies and converts the positive value of no-waste production into financial returns which would support the design of a new sharp tax system proposed by Nanako Kawauchi and myself.  

Thus the system needs to be designed to incorporate a ‘no-waste’ value into the bottom line as well as in a sharp tax system (such as the VAT) that rewards consumer and business investment in waste-free choices. The benefit of such a tool will be to provide businesses with an awareness of the cost/impact of waste produced, ensuring that waste problems do not recur or get shifted to another place (e.g. by converting waste to energy, the problem of waste is turned into challenges in pollution control to clean emissions), as well as to offer financial arguments for investment in zero-waste innovation, focusing on the top of the waste hierarchy, when the emphasis is placed on prevention rather than managing and bearing the costs of failure.

By rethinking in this way, total costs could be minimised or eliminated.

The outcome of the tool would provide the basis for establishing a usable commercial ‘Negowaste©’ label. The tool aims to:
• Integrate the positive and negative value of waste into the tax system
• Provide businesses with a fi nancial argument to invest in zero-waste innovation
• Provide a tangible way of tracking and benchmarking sustainability in regard to the waste agenda (i.e. equivalent to carbon footprint metrics) Further details of this research proposal: negowaste-methodology-july09 or get in touch.

We are moving towards the world of People, Purpose, Planet and Profit. This, in my view, calls for a new set of metrics for success: BETTER. We need to define and support a new way of measure success, which I believe it will be measured in COI (consequences on investment).
But what are those metrics? And how do we apply them?

Want to know more? Why Not sign up bellow and share your ideas?
Want to discuss this idea? post your comment.maria.ana@londonynot.com

Lynda’s challenge comes from a recent debate about public procurement to purchase design, and the issue that, despite the value of design to improve communication and services, and despite the existing funding for innovation, it (design’s value) still misunderstood by governmental bodies (or is the society in general?), and therefore not correctly procured. It seems a large majority of design stakeholders - inside and outside the design industry - still don’t know much about design and even less about new disciplines and roles of design, beyond traditional areas of the design of ‘things’, ‘messages’ and ’spaces’.

Ideally, and strategically we would need to replace the idea that design is just good to make things look pretty, or the tool to manipulate ‘perceived value’ of products and brands for a profit-driven aim.

My thinking: why not…Establish a VAD © stamp!  (Value Added Design)

The problem: How can design best help to increase awareness of its value?
The big idea: a national VAD* © stamp! (Value Added Design) 

Step 1: Design Audits: why not train 100 (unemployed ?) designers to become design auditors, and conduct national design audits in main public services?

The main task would be:
-identify key problems
-identify best practice KPIs
-link KPI’s with design disciplines
-find links between best solutions and design/ers involvement
-find missing links between inefficient/poor quality services and lack of design
-quantify value and measures of KPIs with VAD (value added design)

Audit process - 3 parallel strategies:

Mystery shopper: the auditors act as real:
      Clients (when needed - special access to info should be arranged with head of services)
      Employees (as if they were doing a temp job, or internship)

Customer Journey / ethnographic
     shadowing clients
     shadowing employees

Simply Auditors - clearly identified as such - with pre-arranged access to information

important:
Design Auditors need to be skilled observers without the designer’s urge to solve the problems.

Step 2: Repositioning design
A large majority of design stakeholders - inside and outside the design industry - still don’t know about most of the new disciplines and roles of design, beyond traditional areas of ‘design of things, of messages, and spaces’, such as design thinking, designers as problem solvers, design as research/scenario setting, the 360º approach for user-centred innovation, experience design, interactions design, and so on. It suggests we have to improve the public and business awareness of this, to replace the idea that design is good to make things look pretty, and great to manipulate the perceived value of products and brands for a profit-driven aim.

How?
-  Weekly features for the FT + other media titles targeted for business, procurement and public services
-  Introduce a Design Knowledge and Practice module in other professional HE courses
-  CPD workshops developed in coordination with other professional development areas, such as business innovation, service management, skills development, etc.
-  Publish more books on the new subjects and LOBBY BOOKSTORES to create new sections for design as most still only have product, graphic, interior, web, packaging and fashion design.
-  Create a VAD* © stamp (*value added design) for products, services and brands that have consciously made good use of design in their performance management decisions.

Step 3: Support business-mind designers:
Provide designers with a toolkit for business performance:
-  tools for language: how to understand and speak business
-  tools for power: how to understand and build personal + professional power
-  tools for measure: how to measure and provide evidence the impact of design in quality, innovation, service excellence, and impact on the triple bottom line.

Question: who would finance and be responsible for the implementation? The Design Council? The DBA? Design businesses? the Government? Or the APGDI? Or a multi-stakeholder group? 

Any (good) ideas? looking forward to hear your views!

The most important thing to understand is that the world is changing, in a very disruptive way, and that companies like Google (within only one decade) may have higher brand power at global scale than IBM, Xerox, or Tesco, which are well established businesses. Perhaps Google’s business model is an interesting case study for the task we have in hands, to help us identify the professional skills required in our new, fast-changing and ‘fluid’ marketplace.

 I believe the new designer skills are far beyond knowledge and keeping up to date with emerging technologies, since in today’s world, anyone can download software and ‘become a designer of things and messages’, across boundaries, serving clients of any scale, at a reasonable level of design quality standards (one can argue this, from a professional point of view, but most people seem to be quite happy with their poorly designed materials, self-home-made or produced by a talented colleague).

 So what are the skills for design in the future?

Design evolved from the past 3 core areas of design:

• Design of things (product/industrial design)
• Design of messages (graphic design)
• Design of spaces (interior design)

which were subdivided in 2 major ‘schools of thought’: engineering and arts, one focusing on the functional side of design and the other on the ‘looks and feels’ or aesthetics aspects of design.

In any case, the core values across the 3 sectors were clear and simple: form, function and functionality, and the core skills developed were focused in knowledge for manipulation of materials, colours, shapes linked with a technological background. All other areas - exhibition, packaging, textile, furniture, light, fashion, retail and so on were sub-categories of design. 

However over the last 20 years several new areas emerged, such as:

• Service design
• Interactions design
• Web design
• Experience design
• Design research
• Design futures
• Systems design
• Design Management
• Brand(business) design

These are not subcategories of the 3 core design schools, are new areas which didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago.

Gradually Design became a problem solving activity, by nature user-centred.

 As the whole economy has also changed, and organisations are moving from well defined boundaries (i.e. I produce mobile phones, therefore I compete with other mobile phone manufacturer) to fluid and intangible brands (i.e. Nokia is ‘connecting people’, and competing with digital cameras, games, financial services, broadcast businesses) - and we can see a brand like Virgin that has no limits to it’s operation from trains to personal fitness, or Apple turning the whole industry of music upside down, or a telecom selling financial services, and Google now aiming to become a key player for the renewable energy market.

New agendas, such as sustainability, demographics, manufacturing and economic power shift towards Eastern industries, loss of local resilience, the new technologies, emerging rapid manufacturing, ‘shareability’, co-creation and innovation are having a major impact on the business and role of design for the economy.

As an example, Prof Dame Sandra Dawson presented at the Tomorrow Project Network, Sept 2008, the future business core skills:  

• 1. understand layers (human/social historical depth)
• 2. understand diversity
• 3. creating and sustaining relationships between people
• 4. understanding complexity (and the relationships between organisations, 3 sectors: private/public/charity)
• 5. co-creation
• 6. clarity on values and performance (leadership)

With this in mind, what skills are critical for the success of new designers?

This needs to be questioned together with the role of new designers in our new economies, which I am well aware of the issues and current fuzziness, far more complex than just the industry of Design, since we are going through a transition phase and this is affecting all sectors of our economy.

Do you have a view? Please share it, and send your comments.

Waste isn’t a problem, it is a consequence of human decisions.

Or a design fault.

So imagine if you were asked to opt between paying for management of your waste, or pay for not having waste, which would you chose?

How success looks like: this 10 year project outcomes will be a solution-driven toolkit combining new materials, new technologies, systems and new business models for zero-waste packaging. Imagine you will be on the business of bottled juice. Now imagine that you will continue to transport your juice, supply and support consumption, based on, for example an energy field pack, which once you have finished your juice, doesn’t exist anymore. How can this be done? well, this and many other solutions don’t have full answers, yet, but will be answered in 10 years time.

Want to know more? Why Not sign up bellow and share your ideas?
Want to discuss this idea? post your comment.maria.ana@londonynot.com

Most people buy into a loyalty card based on the idea they will be rewarded through their loyal behaviour.

But what really happens is that the loyalty card user provides detailed data about their purchase choices (or shopping behaviour), which then will classify the ‘consumer’ in one of the ‘consumer profiles’ as ‘loyal’, ‘promotional sensitive’ or ‘price driven’.
This data is carefully analysed – and often crossed with the customer’s credit cards – to give the brand/retailer indicators that will: keep highest prices to ‘loyal’ clients, design targeted promotions to the second group (which are invisible to everyone else) or very special discounts to the non-loyal costumers (price sensitive driven users).

So… is it legal to call loyalty card to a tool that penalises the loyal user? What ethical values are behind such business idea?

Want to know more? Why Not sign up bellow and share your ideas?