In a survey of CFOs completed by Robert Half last fall, the main reasons why innovation is floundering comes down to three main points:
By this, we mean the long and convoluted process many companies use in order to process (although it sometimes feels like squash) innovative new ideas.
Just read (actually listened to) Smarter Faster Better, the latest book by Charles Duhigg, the author of the Power Of Habit (also another great book). Great book, highly recommended. In one of the chapters, he describes an interesting experiment.
Here in the San Francisco Bay area, (and likely in many other urban areas) the cost of housing has reached levels of ridiculousness never before seen. As I write this, the minimum rent – yes, the absolute minimum rent, for a tiny studio apartment (they just made it legal to make apartments as small as 250 sq ft), in likely a very bad neighborhood is $3500. That means that you need to make a minimum of $100,000 a year in order to survive with some comfort in order to live in San Francisco. Insane.
“Creative” has become a “buzzword” according to LinkedIn. Since Creativity is my area of expertise, this was of great interest to me. In response to the LinkedIn’s finding, experts say you should not use the word in your profile because the word is losing its meaning and it makes you sound like everyone else. It’s a shame that a word that represents the most significant gift of human intelligence has been trivialized by overuse.
There is a well-known principle in software development known as DRY, or Don’t Repeat Yourself. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
In software engineering, don’t repeat yourself (DRY) is a principle of software development, aimed at reducing repetition of information of all kinds, especially useful in multi-tier architectures.
How would you live differently if you knew exactly how your environment was affecting you?
Back in 2007, I wrote a set of predictive stories about what life would be like 10 years out. Really interesting to go back to that time and see how much of that is on the way to actually happen: some of it – like 3d printers, are definitely moving along at a rapid clip. Others, not so much. Here is one of those posts, reprinted from here.
You don’t need much more evidence than the last year’s numbers from Kickstarter to understand that crowdification is in full swing:
You can see: the crowd is fully engaged. We no longer want to sit back and be told what we get – we want to actively participate in the product creation process. We want to build too.
You aren’t seeing this text when you first come to this site. Even though this is a blog post and arguably the TEXT of the blog post is the most important thing you aren’t seeing it. You are probably either seeing a giant graphic, or a slider or something. You aren’t seeing the text. We are now in a below-the-fold-world – everything is SCROLL DOWN TO SEE MORE….
Been doing some research on wearable devices (see Next Hot Space: Wearables) and I’ve come to the conclusion that we will have to see a radical shift in the way interfaces operate in this new world. When I look at wearables like the Meta space glasses, which project a 3D, nearly holographic image into your field of vision, then go back to the interfaces on your typical device today, I’m struck at how flat and similar everything looks.
Seen this lately?
I’ll bet you have – and the hundreds of other variations of the ubiquitous, LOADING, PLEASE WAIT gif or whatever – you know that thing designers throw in when they realize that their page is taking too long to load?