Outsourcing innovation [Business Week]
First came manufacturing. Now companies are farming out R&D to cut costs and get new products to market faster. Are they going too far? Read full story
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Apple’s blueprint for genius [Business Week]
Handling its own design work is one reason for best-sellers like the iPod and Shuffle. Steve Jobs is the other. Read full story
Italy’s new wave [Metropolis Magazine]
A cadre of young architects looks to shake up the country’s long-stagnant building culture. Read full story
Vodafone’s Future Vision
“In the Vodafone Future Vision website you can explore what we think that future might look like, experience some of the changes we believe will happen, and tell us what you think of them.” Go to website
The Brand Gap
Marty Neumeier’s new book is an insightful justification for tighter integration of design and business strategy to enable strong brands. Read more
On this Wiki, everyone’s a critic [Business Week]
Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig, whose next book will be revised by visitors to a collaborative Web site, explains “user-supplied innovation”. Read full story
Suddenly, it’s fast forward at TiVo [Business Week]
The digital video recording service’s Comcast deal delivers 21.5 million potential new users and transforms a faltering player into the industry’s star. Read full story
Mobile phone becomes train ticket [BBC]
Public transport users in Tyne and Wear may soon be able to use their mobile phone as a bus or train ticket. Read full story
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain”…
A simple Kyoto Protocol explanation
Go to website
Samsung is now what Sony once was [The New York Times]
In 1997, Sony took little notice of Samsung. Less than a decade later, Samsung has twice the market capitalisation of Sony. Read full story
Does Europe need its own technology institute? [International Herald Tribune]
A proposal to create a European technology institute modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faces serious questions about financing and academic support, lawmakers say. Read full story
MP3 developer yields royalty riche [International Herald Tribune]
German labs rely on firms and state to finance research. Read full story
The rise of the creative consumer [The Economist]
How and why smart companies are harnessing the creativity of their customers. Read full story
The device that ate everything? [The Economist]
Will snazzy mobile phones gobble up digital cameras, music players and other portable devices? Read full story
A spiritual connection [The Economist]
Around the world, mobile phones seem to have a spiritual or supernatural dimension that other forms of technology lack. Read full story
Behind the digital divide [The Economist]
Much is made of the “digital divide†between rich and poor. What do people on the ground think about it? Read full story
The future, just around the bend [The Economist]
Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, but he is best known for his wild prognostications about the future. Is he as crazy as he sounds? Read full story
Phones with eyes [The Economist]
Camera-phones are not just for taking pictures. They can be used for other things too, from shopping to treasure hunts. Read full story
The empathy economy [Business Week]
“Design thinking” can create rewarding experiences for consumers — the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can’t beat. Read full story
Wearable computers you can slip into [Business Week]
The latest generation of these ever-smarter garments look like ordinary clothes, not something only a cyborg would don. Read full story
Investment bank sees blogging as way to find ‘stars of tomorrow’ [The New York Times]
Blogging has transformed political commentary, rattled the media business and inundated the Internet. Does it have a place on Wall Street? ThinkEquity Partners, a boutique investment bank in San Francisco, was going to find out on Thursday by introducing a Web log. The firm, which…
Artful making: what managers need to know about how artists work
Artful Making offers the first proven, research-based framework for engineering ingenuity and innovation. This book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and leading theatre director and playwright Lee Devin. Together, they demonstrate striking structural similarities between theatre…
U.S. companies rethinking their marketing in Europe [The New York Times]
For years, American corporations and the European companies that do business with them have faced anti-American sentiments from Europeans. But with the war continuing in Iraq and discomfort growing over United States dominance, the companies have been forced to further adjust how they do…
Blogging at the Davos World Economic Forum
Even the Davos World Economic Forum now has its own weblog. Go to the Davos blog
Microsoft’s chief humanising officer [The Economist]
Does Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on Microsoft’s payroll, herald the death of traditional public relations? Read full story
Technology gets the creative bug [BBC]
The hi-tech and the arts worlds have for some time danced around each other and offered creative and technical help when required. Read full story
Wolves in shops’ clothing [Fortune]
“Lifestyle centres” make big-box retailers look and feel like small-town shops. How can entrepreneurs compete? Read full story
Institute without Boundaries
Change the world. Go to website
Sottsass’s ‘Architecture for People’ [Metropolis Magazine]
> Ettore Sottsass — one of the post-war architects who literally invented the idea of Italian Design — is today eighty-seven years old: a true éminence grise. Recently, I talked to the designer/writer and cultural provocateur at the Barry Friedman Gallery, which was staging his…
Social entrepreneurs and Davos [BBC]
“Davos diary: This is not about money” by Jim Fruchterman, President, The Benetech Initiative. Read full story
Eternal optimist [Metropolis Magazine]
Architect William McDonough has witnessed China’s rapid modernisation and sees hope for sustainable development. He is working to bring his cradle-to-cradle protocol to China, where old buildings are being demolished as quickly as new ones are constructed. Read full story
Experience experiment [Fast Company]
Sporting Puma sneakers and a downtown hipster haircut or two, a team from the design firm Imagination USA shuffles into a fourth-floor loft in New York’s SoHo district. They’re met by David Polinchock, who offers Blow Pops and ushers them into a big space…
The good company [The Economist]
Corporate social responsibility as the tribute that capitalism pays to virtue. Read full story
Microsoft Project Seeks ‘A PC in Every Village’ [Seattle Post – Intelligencer]
Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries. A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers and others to observe and…
E-culture advisory
“Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists, musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners work – they have created a new context”. Michiel Schwarz’s insightful Dutch policy paper on “e-culture”, that has just been published in English, says…
Creative Capital conference
Culture and creativity are the latest “buzzwords” in the debate on innovation strategies for the knowledge economy. But what is the cultural dimension of the knowledge economy? And what does this imply for the public domain? These were the central questions of the Amsterdam Creative…
Is America losing its edge [Foreign Affairs]
The long-standing pre-eminence of US technology and innovation worldwide may now face a challenge, as the changing face of the global marketplace takes its toll. As US trade and development has expanded overseas, partner nations have taken advantage of this access. Particularly in Asia,…
Corporate anthropology: dissecting consumer appetites [NPR]
NPR’s Eric Weiner reports on the emerging field of corporate anthropology, where researchers dissect consumer appetites and help engineers build user-friendly products. Listen
Museum mania in China
The Chinese government intends to build 1,000 new museums across the country by 2015. A scary piece by Elizabeth Casale in The Platform, an e-zine on cultural policy, says that China’s “place-based cultural strategy” is leading to a glut of buildings meant to symbolise cultural…