In one of my last posts “take your time to innovate” I referred to Scott Berkun, author of the book “The Myths of Innovation”, and his definition of “innovation”:
“significant positive change”.

During Palomar5 and now with ‘until we see new land‘ we use the terms “positive ideas/ impact” describing the goal of every new idea we ignite and everything we design: making it a “future design”.

Also I still have a hard time myself to really embrace this concept and implement it into daily life I´m in the middle of practicing and would love to share some thoughts on that with you:

I first stumbled upon the idea in the book “Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice” (amazon.de) by Tony Fry. The basic thought behind is quite simple but describes a fundamental shift in my thinking and mindset: right now most things designed, produced and consumed by mankind “steal” our time. They are “defuturing” by destroying resources, are sold not because they add significant real value to our lives but are pushed to consumers through PR arousing “artificial” demand. Most of the stuff we buy and consume we don´t need, is sense- and meaningless.

Just take a look around you right now while reading this and you´ll probably see a lot of useless stuff right?

But on the other side we are humans. We need to build, we love to make our thoughts visible and physical. We love to use our hands to bring to life things that simply were not there before. But we lost track of the original purpose of all this building and designing: (artistic) expression or problem solving.

We have loads of problems everywhere around us that need to be tackled by someone, probably by us. And I don´t talk about making incremental improvements to products just enough to make people buy again or design the next ad campaign for xyz that makes them buy then…

We must design and build to add sense and meaning again. Value that over profit! Make products, services, processes that add realness and sustainability and help to solve existing problems. We need to stop designing for dumb consuming masses, cause this stuff is hollow, lifeless and simply not ready for 21st century. And we need to stop arguing with “the market wants it”, no it´s time to take responsibility, shape our future, fight for the bright side.

In other words: we need to bring on positive innovation that “futures” or as Umair Haque wrote in his post “How to Say “No” to an Economic Frankenfuture” at the Harvard Business Review: furiously pioneer a better tomorrow!

If you want to dig deeper into the topic you might want to start here:

• A Push for ‘Ethical Innovation’ (businessweek.com)
• The concept of “thick value” (blogs.hbr.org)

“Nothing good happens unless you do it.” Erich Kästner

(photo credits: Ennor at flickr, licensed under Creative Commons – Thank you!)

• Spaces for Ideas (designsojourn.com)
  sketchbook format for building (or buying) your physical idea space
• Be innovative, but don’t use that word (radar.oreilly.com)
  Interview with Scott Berkun, author of “The Myths of Innovation”.
• 25 Definitions for Innovation (cloudave.com)
  25 different definitions clustered in the 5 patterns “Business Model”, “Applied Invention”, “Creativity”, “Problem-Solving” and “Unmet User Needs”.
• Tacit Knowledge, Communities, & The Power of Pull (community-roundtable.com)
  How trusted communities can effectively access tacit knowledge leading to huge innovation potential
• How Limitations improve design (webdesignerdepot.com)
  … or why you need boundaries to develop anything.
• Slavoj Zizek: First Tragedy, Then Farce (fora.tv)
  or why there is nothing like “capitalism with a human face”. Very thought-provoking.
• 50 Ways to Foster a Culture of Innovation (ideachampions.com)
  Simplifying but still worth a read through.

Have a great weekend!
If you´re interested in my full link database make sure to check out my bookmarks at delicious.

Let´s start this post with an impression of my last week. Every morning around 7am we start a 1,5 hours walk with the dogs. We walk through an almost surreal nature into the morning sun. “Us” meaning me, my wife and two dogs. We almost don´t talk but just inhale the clean cold air and enjoy the beginning of a new day. Normally living in Berlin, these last days were quite extraordinary to me. Looking after the dogs and the house of a friend of mine in a rural area in the middle of Germany gives me one of these “slow” times again. Where I reflect and sort my thoughts more than I consume new information, where I get rid of things and at least try for some time to make sense of this chaotic cloud inside my head I normally hold so dear.

Don´t get me wrong, I totally love living in a vibrant city that never sleeps, full of action, creative people and in constant development.

But in my opinion and experience also having (self-)conscious “slow” times is an important part of the way towards new ideas. Besides the fancy oh so creative scene, the brainstorms, post-its all over the place sessions, endless talks and night discussions and red wine and fights and being right and and and …

… I need to focus, get to know myself, sort out what is really important to me and what is just the hype produced by everyone around but not my business, not what I am really here for, not my passion. Not me.

I couldn´t agree more with Scott Berkun, author of the must-read book “The Myths of Innovation” that “innovation” means “significant positive change”. But for being able to create this positive impact I think we need to reflect from time to time, find the off-time to listen to our “inner voice” or what ever you want to call it, sharpen our senses again, make sense out of our thoughts and past experiences, clear our mind and then bring in everything we have to solve the problem we picked.

I want to leave you with a wonderful piece I found over at the posterous of my friend Eddie, “A Manifesto for Slow“:

Wow, again it´s Friday, time flies and so do friday findings part 2. Have a great weekend!

• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? (designmind.frogdesign.com)
  Must read about a different and better way to do business from now on and in the future.
• 12 Videos That Will Help You Love the Future (singularityhub.com)
  Different visions of the future, very inspiring stuff!
• Where to Get the Best Free Education Online? (lifehacker.com)
  Great list of the best online ressources for learning
• Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work (blogs.hbr.org)
  The authors of the book “the power of pull”, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, co-chairmen of the Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, describing the biggest changes to the way we do business today
• Another augmented reality, pico-projecting lamp threatens desktops, brings tablet reinforcements (engadget.com)
• 350 graffiti art — so beautiful! (350.org)
  No time to lose! Take action.

If you´re interested in my full link database make sure to check out my bookmarks at delicious.

Don´t you think? I mean communicating with people about common goals and making plans to achieve them collaboratively is fun. So how comes, that I find myself quite often in the middle of a meeting making plans for dinner, counting birds outside and breaking off a pen clip at least once a week?

Because for some reason a lot of people (including me from time to time) just forget about the basics:

1. Prepare it!
   Get some water. If you mastered that regularly you can slowly try to draw near the supreme discipline ‘coffee‘.
   Make sure the number of invited people will fit in the room and that there is a chair for everyone.
   Give orientation timing- and topicwise by proposing an agenda, so everybody know what´s coming their way. In more enhanced teams you can create your agenda collaboratively using one of the awesome, free, EtherPad-like, real-time writing services. Now that Etherpad became part of Google you can either use Google Docs or Piratepad or Typewith.me. All do the job. But make sure to fix your agenda upfront!
   Have a moderator that guides through the meeting and please let him or her know a little bit upfront… these ad hoc moderators never work.
   Stuff: you don´t need one of these fancy “facilitator´s toolcases” but paper, markers and, if you want to be cool, post-its are must-haves.
2. Do it!
   No hidden agenda: stop doing meetings where you want a specific result and use the meeting as a tool to force people into that direction. If you ask them, listen to them.
   Focus: close/ switch off all your gadgets and do some real-world communication. Appreciate that the others spend their time in this meeting.
   Start in time, end in time. If not everybody is there in the beginning, start anyways. Don´t let the people who are there in time be the fools.
   If you don´t want to meet, don´t meet.
   Focus on outcome, not on time.
3. Document it!
   Documentation is an absolute must except you like to talk about the same things all 4 weeks again and again.
   Because noone, also not your intern, likes recording, it might be a good idea to use again one of the mentioned tools like Google Docs or Piratepad or Typewith.me and do a “live-recording”. Having that projected to a wall makes notes, progress, next steps transparent to everybody in the room and when you´re finished with your meeting you´re finished with the documentation of your meeting.

Two other reads I enjoyed concerning (not) working meetings:

• ‘The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings‘ (fast company blog)
• And even the psychologists have their take in ‘Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain‘ (scientific american blog)

I want to leave you with one of my all-time favorites from Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 signals: ‘Why You Can’t Work at Work‘. Enjoy!

Update 1:
I just found this picture showing exactly the everyday situation why I wrote this post.
(thx Nouvé Interplay)

So much happens at twitter everyday, every hour, every second (~600 tweets) and so I find a lot of helpful and valuable links every day. Every friday I plan to share these links, the ones I found most interesting, thought provoking or maybe even shocking during the week.

So here we go with my first friday findings:

• Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey (wired.com)
  best analysis I came across so far concerning the deal between Google and Verizon setting the frame for killing net neutrality.
• Active sense-making (jarche.com)
  Why blogging is so important for your own sense-making and understanding
• Cultivating open innovation: Seeding, feeding and weeding (views.washingtonpost.com)
  Open innovation and its potential in the business context
• Tan Le Demos Headset That Reads Brainwaves (singularityhub.com)
  A video demonstration of controlling virtual objects only with your brain
• The super-incredible activity book for Creatives (veer.com)
  Print, download or enjoy online your extra dose of inspiration
• Chasing the buffalo (vimeo.com)
  Awesome “must-see” film of my friends Gabriel and Patricia from ks12 about the lessons open design principles hold for the future of society and sustainable production
• Microsoft Street Slide (research.microsoft.com)
  Google street view like & enhanced street visualisation from microsoft. Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas providing a visual summary of a city street combined with the full realism of immersive panoramas. Pssssst, MS comes back to cool!
• Formspring account Scott Belsky (formspring.me)
  Q&A with the founder and CEO of ‘Behance‘
• Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information (sunlightfoundation.com)
  Governments starting open data projects should be guided by the eight principles that, if implemented, would empower the public’s use of government-held data.

Have a great weekend!

After spending the weekend with design and way to much css pixel-counting it´s done: my new blog is ready to go. After some testing with posterous and tumblr I finally returned back to good ol´wordpress. I tried to keep it simple, not to much at once and easy to read.

So this is the new creative space where I´ll share my thoughts concerning innovation, creativity and everything with the potential to create positive impact on our future. Hopefully one of these positive impacters will also be my newly founded company ‘until we see new land‘ so it´s quite likely that I´ll post some stuff concerning that too from time to time.

I hope I´ll find enough time and energy within the next weeks to develop this blog project step by step into a valuable thing. For you and me.

To prepare me for that I watched this talk from Scott Belsky, founder and CEO ‘Behance‘: “How To Avoid The Idea Generation Trap”. He actually presents a guiding framework for making ideas happen. To survive the project plateau, the not that creative 99% of work where you need discipline and a good team to not just jump forward to the next oh so fancy next idea but really fight your way through phases of low energy to finally reach the realisation of your idea.

In short what I need to do with my blog project and we all need to do with our design and innovation projects is “having an idea and try to find a way to survive the project plateau.”

Scott says it works like this:

• Value the restrains and if there are none, go and seek them!
• Break down your projects into increments -> into milestones -> into actionable tasks.
• Find incremental rewards that keep you and your team engaged during the dry and not so funny project plateau, where a lot of stuff just needs to be done.
• Foster your team´s immune system: keep the skeptics out of the idea brainstorms but embrace their role in keeping us on track during the project plateau.
• Seek competition to stay engaged in longterm projects.
• Foster accountability by sharing also your rough ideas. Bring them out to the world, share them and take responsibility for your thoughts and words.

To me this sounds quite serious and probably sometimes work just needs to be “serious”. But still I´m missing a lot of other things like fun, passion for the core of your project and the bravery to reject project offers that don´t fit aso.

But I´m sure I need to learn some more in this “serious” field so I´ll try.