brand driven innovation

The Creative Company Conference is an event that has the potential to become one of the leading gatherings of creative minds in Europe, if it will have the courage to harness the energy and creativity of its attendees.

Yesterday I attended the second edition of the Creative Company Conference in Amsterdam. Those who know me know that my cup is always half full. From that perspective I had a great inspiring day, with opportunities to meet and listen to some very creative and inspiring people, at a wonderful venue. The half empty bit will come later, let’s start with what was shared during the conference:

Harry Starre of the Baak opened the conference with asking the audience if they would also visit Picnic, Ted and Pinc. The ambition for CCC apparently is to be in this league. A healthy ambition, with quite a way to go still.

Michael Janssen of Nothing kicked off the series of small creative interruptions, meant to demonstrate to the audience how young entrepreneurs are putting creativity and innovation into practice. Michiel presented one2ten, a project my Designest compadre Roy Gilsing had been sweating over during the weekend to get the prototype ready.

Amnon Levav presented some of his thoughts on Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It’s interesting for me to reflect on how my opinion on SIT changed over the years. I used to consider it creativity for non-creatives: it took away the magic, forced it into rules. Now (also thanks to Amnon’s very clear presentation) I’ve learned to welcome it as a way to open the magic black box of creativity to a wider audience: in this 2.0 world, scarcity no longer equals value. The more people have access to creativity, the more valuable it becomes. If you’re interested in the application of SIT in the Netherlands you may want to get your hands on this book by my colleagues from Limetree.

Then Ji Lee, creative director at Google creative lab took the stage. A very inspiring presentation of how Ji combines private creative projects with professional creative work. I always love to see the stuff creative people do in their free time, but Ji’s bubble project tops the bill: a completely unintentional success story of a guy in New York creating a platform for commenting on billboards. His Google Chrome research video on what people think a browser is is also a must see. This is his personal page.

Next up: Maxime Schram of Redesign me, another ‘creative interruption’. Maxime points us to the coming co-creation event.

Timothy Childs of Tcho chocolate was the opposite of Ji Lee in a sense. His succes story appears to be completely intentional: Tim took us through his rules of disruption and demonstrated with admirable clarity how he applied these rules in his chocolate company Tcho. His example on how to gain access to raw materials without any real buying power was simply brilliant: by giving back expertise to the raw material suppliers on how to recognise and improve quality, Tcho has been able to build solid relationships with suppliers.

Erik Spiekerman of Edenspiekerman did the corporate identity for Tcho. He deserves to be quoted on the comment he had on Tim’s presentation: “Americans first tell you what they’re gonna tell you, then they tell you and then they tell you what they’ve told you”. Another quote I liked from him was “we had all these really fancy positioning models for the brand but we tossed them out and went by the seat of our pants”. The designs for the chocolate brand are, well, sweet!

Then Douglas Young of Goods Of Desire (GOD) was up. Although Douglas is an inpiring enough guy, and he’s a great entrepreneur, this to me was one of the least interesting presentations. What is needed of a good presenter is the ability to reflect upon one’s work and this requires much more than a portfolio presentation. Thumbs up to his work though.

Time for another creative interruption by Onno –spread the love man- Lixenberg of Gummo. On the succes story of Gookie.

And then it was time for the man we’d all been waiting for: Sir Ken Robinson. Since everyone in the audience knew his TED presentation, the expectations were high. But sir Ken didn’t let us down. What a great presenter (with completely crappy powerpoint slides, all 4 of them, a clear proof ppt is overrated) and what a storyteller. Sir Ken stands completely still on the stage, has you rolling on the floor with laughter, seems to get completely sidetracked in his story but manages to drive a point home that you won’t easily forget: Imagination is a human resource that behaves like a natural resource:
1 it lies deep, it needs work to get to
2 it’s taken for granted and so it gets wasted easily
3 it’s hard to predict, frame and control, it’s an organic quality.
We aren’t too good at dealing with our natural resources, and the same is true for our human resources. We need to guard imagination from being suppressed and wasted and that should start with our children. Anyway, check out the video:

KBIRI.NL - Sir Ken Robinson @ Creative Company Conference from KBIRI on Vimeo.

Next up: the creative Amsterdam award, won by Monobanda: a young agency creating games that hover between real and virtual worlds.

John Moravec of Leapfrog institutes and educationfutures.com made us think of the changing paradigms in education, influenced by social media (web 2.0) and societal changes (society 2.0). A PhD in the field of educational change, Moravec has some very interesting ideas on what it takes to educate a generation of the future. More often then not, that generation has a much firmer grip on what that future will bring than the educators who teach them. That’s quite a mind boggling paradox if you think about it. Best to check John’s work out on his websites.

Last but not least Nalden took the stage.
Nalden demonstrated Nalden.net, a gem of website with a great business model behind it. The chat I had with Nalden afterwards convinced me my hunch was right: here’s a very authentic little fella, practicing exactly what the whole conference had been preaching  all day, based entirely on his intuitive sense for the here and now.

And finally, some random thoughts and quotes I jotted down during the conference:

‘Metacognition’ is the thinking about one’s own thinking. (Amnon Levar)
‘The opposite of a small truth is a lie, the opposite of a big truth is another big truth’ Niels Bohr/Amnon Levar
‘The key to presenting well lies in the ability to see and hear yourself through the eyes and ears of your audience’ (me)
‘if you put the world on its side and shake, the loose bits end up in LA’. (Sir Ken)
‘Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value’ (sir Ken)
‘Our presumptions happen at the point of perception, not conception’ (sir Ken)
‘right beneath the surface is life waiting for the right conditions to prosper: what we need to do is create the right conditions for children to grow’ (sir Ken)
‘intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana (Bill Gates through John Moravec)
‘it might be time for intellectual stewardship then’ (me).

So much for the content, it was a lot better than last year, I learned a lot and I was inspired (and that’s a great combination). Now let’s look at the conference from the half empty glass perspective:

Again, like last year, the format of the conference was completely uncreative: a puppet on the stage with a power point, and us in the audience gawking at him (there were no hers). What I really really miss at these conferences is time for reflection with other participants. So many very interesting people in the room and such a great opportunity to share ideas or even work on solving problems. But there’s no time to learn from each other because the programme is packed with expensive speakers. I’m sure some people in the room want to be entertained, but I would be happier with a different format: I’m envisioning a setting where interesting people form different backgrounds get together in an inspiring setting and actually work on a project together: there’s no better way to learn from each other.

I know Arne and Ralf are in. So who’s joining us?

Some images of the conference on my flickr page.

and a live report can be found on this twitter stream.

also read this report by fons van den berg (in dutch)

and here’s visual report by my colleague Christa van Gessel.

Congratulations go out to Rudolf van Wezel, the man behind the event.

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Brands give guidance to innovation if they are rooted in a thorough understanding of the stakeholders of that brand. That’s why I’m more and more involved in researching these stakeholders in a way that leads to actionable, inspiring and authentic insights. In effect, this comes down to digging deep into the lives of both people inside the company working with the brand (designers, developers, marketeers, researchers, engineers) and people outside the company deriving value from the products and services the company/brand brings forth.

Contextmapping, as a designerly approach to research, leading to data that is richly visual and inspiring, suits our approach very well. Last week we attended the PhD defense of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, the first PhD in this field. The day after, we attended a symposium on contextmapping with speakers Liz Sanders of Maketools, Jacob Buur of Spire, Denmark, Froukje and 10 recently graduated students who apply contextmapping in practice (one of which was my colleague Christa van Gessel).

One very specific way in which we apply contextmapping is through the use of an online research environment, called 7daysinmylife.com, which we developed for this specific purpose.

The environment allows users to keep an online diary of their daily activities over the course of 7 days, evolving around themes and questions set up to suit the specific research purpose. The environment also allows the research team (often designers and marketeers) to follow the diaries and comment on images and texts. We have succesfully applied the tool in projects for Mexx, Fatboy, Nlisis and Etna. We’ve been amazed with  how inspiring and activating these diaries are.  These diaries also provide the research team with a shared and lively set of data to work with, leading to a shared vision that really triggers the team’s creativity.  They form a very solid foundation for workshops, persona development, house visits and focus groups. We are now licencing 7days out to the Australian service design firm Proto Partners. We’re open for more licencees.

We have a brochure available for download here. It tells you about the vision behind the research tool and how we apply it. We’re still working on a demo. Drop us a line if you’re interested.

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I found last year’s Creative Company Conference in Amsterdam a very worthwhile experience. An energetic bunch of speakers, a great venue, a pleasant crowd and sufficient new ideas and insights to last me, well, a month at least ;-). So I’m looking forward to attending this year’s edition as well. It takes place on Tuesday may 26th and there’s an early bird discount price of €595,- if you register before april 15th.

The line-up for this year looks good: a hotpot of academics, entrepreneurs and consultants in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. On the one hand, this diversity is great: it helps pin point connections between the practical and the theoretical, and it inspires in its diversity. On the other hand – and this was one of my more critical thoughts on the 2008 edition – it leaves one groping for the overriding theme to it all.

This is not a bad thing if the flow of the day can be processed by the audience, and if this processing is coached by someone who is able to listen very carefully and connect the dots. I am challenging Harry Starren of the Baak to add more content to his master of ceremony function than last year.

What I am especially looking forward to is the extra bits the organization of CCC2009 added: the break out sessions, the 3 minute pitches, and special themes. These will hopefully make the event a truly creative experience, with much more to do than just listen.

Ralf Beuker and I will report live from CCC2009 on twitter, flickr and our blogs. Twitter hashtag will be #ccc2009.

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Based on a friday afternoon twitter discussion with Ralf Beuker and Patrick Lerou plus some recent experiences with clients and previous discussions with Guido Stompff and Ralf, I decided to add some depth to the model that we @Zilver have been using for a while now. The model basically depicts our way of looking at corporate brands: they represent the relationship between the organisation and the user (or customer) on the one hand, and between marketing and product development on the other. (See also our Design Management Review ’08 article)
What’s been added in the model is a set of layers (concentric ellipses, if that makes sense geometrically). These layers help us define what it is were talking about, and go from intangible and implicit (on the outside) to tangible and explicit (on the inside). The model again has four quadrants,
1. on the left, in magenta: the organisation/company/brand owner
2. on the right, in orange: the user/consumer/customer
3. On the bottom, in blue: brand reflection, meaning the brand as instrument to help generate vision, guide thought, facilitate internal discussion, and direct communication
4. On the top, in green: brand action, meaning the brand as driver for creativity, interaction, design, and innovation

Each quadrant has three layers, that are connected to the three layers of the neighbouring quadrants. Branding is about relationships, therefore it is very fruitful to look at the relationships between the quadrants on each layer. It is especially interesting to look at how the relationship between organisation and user can be established through the layers of the top and bottom quadrants.
So for example when you are talking about branding in the context of organisational culture, you will want to be connected more to the user’s values and norms than to their behaviour. The relevant question in this case is not so much what do we do, but why do we do it? And it will inspire the building of relationships, much more than the creation of artefacts.
Moving in one layer, on the organization’s side we encounter the ‘embedded brand’ (Guido Stompff, 2008). This is the brand as it is found in organisations with strong unwritten rules and a strong sense of organizational culture on the work floor. The embedded brand shapes ‘how the organization does things’, it shapes processes and methods. And relates to the end user’s attitude and opinions. This layer of branding can inspire the creation of experiences.
Moving in to the centre layer we arrive at the brand in a more explicit form, the brand promise. It drives what the company does, and thus connects to the end user’s behaviour through the creation of artefacts and tangible touch points.

The vision behind the model is not that one layer of branding is necessarily better than the other. But it does point out this: for the brand to function as the basis for building relationships it has to be rooted deep within the organization. It has to answer the question ‘why are we here as an organization?’ On the other hand, when working on a brand that drives short term new product development in a practical and tangible manner, a compelling brand promise that everyone understands, and can work with, may be perfectly suitable. A nail needs a hammer and a screw needs a screwdriver.
What the model also does is help define the topic of the discussion. And that’s always crucial when talking about branding and design.

So please help me refine this thing, and feel free to comment and add to the discussion, your thoughts and  contributions are more than welcome!

Next up: adding time to the equation: How can brands drive long term innovation, and what kind of brand does it take to explore long term future brand interactions?

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For my Module Coordinator job at Eurib’s design management program I invited Festo’s manager of corporate design, Markus Fischer as a guest lecturer. Markus does a nice job of managing the corporate identity of a this large (12.800 FTE) German multinational, but that’s not why I invited him. He also manages Festo’s Bionic Learning Network. And that is just the coolest thing in the world.
Festo develops, manufactures and markets solutions for production automation. Say what? They make high-tech, complex, B2B, highly functional, serious stuff. Actuators, fluidic muscles, electro-motors, pneumatic parts, the works.
The Bionic Learning Network is “part of the company’s commitment to vocational and further training. Cooperating with colleges and research companies, Festo promotes ideas and initiatives that go beyond the core business of automation and didactics, and may well give rise to promising areas of application in the future.”

Check out these two movies to see what they mean by that:

Now, I am just completely impressed by this program, from a design point of view (those jellyfish! that manta-ray with the logo on its wing! the sheer beauty of this kind of technology in motion) as well as from a brand driven innovation strategy point of view. This last view deserves some explanation:

1. the Bionic Learning Network positions and comunicates the Festo brand way more effectively than traditional brand communication would do.
2. the Bionic Learning Network demonstrates Festo’s capabilities in a very convincing way.
3. the Bionic Learning Network aligns engineers, designers, marketers and sales people: it gives them a shared understanding of what the Festo brand is about.
4. the Bionic Learning Network attracts talent to the comany: it is a recruiting magnet.
5. the Bionic Learning Network timulates young people to develop an interest in technology: it has a socio-economic function.
6. the Bionic Learning Network explores possible future directions for innovation and assesses their feasibility and potential.
7. the Bionic Learning Network helps explore new markets
8. the Bionic Learning Network helps to create and maintain value networks through cooperation with technology specialists and academics.
9. the Bionic Learning Network is a platform to introduce new products to the market in a very compelling way
10. the Bionic Learning Network helps to fill the innovation funnel with new ideas, as spin-offs from the work done within the program itself.

Jan Buijs and I have come to call this aproach to innovation ‘the concept-car strategy’, because in the car industry, this approach is common. We call the projects evolving from this strategy ‘projectas‘ because they are to ‘real’ projects what personas are to real persons. What fascinates me about the concept car approach is not only the impressive result, but also the process, the mental exercise. I belive this process is applicable to any industry. It is a very practical brand driven innovation strategy. You can turn your brand into a driver for innovation through asking yourself the questions: ‘how would we fulfil our brand’s promise if we were free to create what we we want, without restrictions? What products would really bring our vision to life? And how could we then learn from those products? How can we create spin-offs from these future concepts that will be meaningful and profitable tomorrow?’

These are questions I believe any entrepreneur should ask him/herself from time to time. It works for BMW, it works for Festo, and it might also work for you. Try it like I have for my clients. It’s extremely refreshing.

And if you’ve encountered this concept-car strategy at non-automotive companies yourself I would be very curious to hear about them.

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Just before my very well deserved 2 week christmas break I held a presentation for Trespa international’s executive board and their top 50 managers on the significance of design as a strategic resource to build brands. I’ve been involved with Trespa for the past 10 years and the way they’ve used design to boost their brand is exemplary. I was part of the team responsible for their ‘perspectives‘ program and loved every second of it. Perspectives is about exploring the architectural possibilities of what is essentially a very rational product, by pushing out the boundaries of what’s technically possible. Call it a concept car strategy. Our task was to explore the needs and desires of architects, and to translate these into Trespa concepts. We sketched, visualized, prototyped and built these explorations in a very well orchestrated team effort, boosting Trespa’s brand image and preference in a major way. See slide 55 and 56 for some examples of the crazy stuff we did.

The thing I conjured up for the presentation turned out quite nicely, judging from the responses I got at slideshare, where the presentation was featured on the frontpage. There’s also a nice little discussion going on at Rik Wuts’s new blog Klatergoud. So I believe I hit something of a string here. For your information, the two main slides can be downloaded at Zilver’s Flickr stream.

Here’s the presentation, with the confidential bits removed (the original presentation had market research data showing the effect of the perspectives program on brand awareness, preference and the likes…)

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Dear student,

You are lucky. You are studying design management. One of the most exciting, inspiring, relevant and rich fields of study one can imagine. You have tremendously rich resources to support you: books, blogs, conferences, teachers and practitioners. Hell, if you’re lucky, you even have a great job lined up for you in the future. But that, dear student, won’t come for free. Here are ten inspirational guidelines that might help you get there:

1. Enjoy. What you will need to do is develop a deep and authentic passion for your field. Learn to love it and be explicit about why you love it..
2. Be curious. Ask why at everything you see, read, or hear. Go out and discover. Grab every chance to meet inspiring people and learn from them.
3. Be critical. Don’t believe everything the books, or your teachers, or the succesful business cases tell you. Challenge. Be difficult. But always try to come up with better solutions or suggestions for imrovement.
4. Value design. Maybe you don’t need to be a great designer to be a great design manager. But certainly you need to understand, and I mean really dig, designand its value to organizations and society.
5. Read. Literature will give you a solid foundation to work from. Theory is the launching platform, practice is the rocket. We’re in a field where it’s fun to read!
6. Acquire experience. Try to get a job -any job- during your studies that is somewhat related to the field you’re studying and start putting things to practice. Expiriment. Try out if your ideas work. And then work on them.
7. Network. The design management community is truly international. Get to know authors, bloggers, practitioners, students and teachers and share your views. In a world as fresh and young as design management, there’s really no point in going at it alone and competing with your peers.
8. Preach. Design Management is not easy to understand. Learn to explain what you do, give lectures, gather illustrative case studies. It will help you learn to pitch projects, and it will help the profession.
9. Specialise. Design Management is a broad field. Find out what triggers you most, and look for opportunities to learn more in that area. I chose Brand Driven Innovation. But anything that makes your heart beat faster is great.
10. Respect. The companies you will work for will do many things wrong in your eyes. A critical attitude seems to be part of the DNA of design managers. But these same companies also put bread on the table of many many people. Respect them, and ask yourself what makes them do the things they do. Then help them become even better.

oh, and there’s an eleventh guideline: don’t listen to me, create your own ten rules

(this post was conceived flying from Zurich to Amsterdam after a week of teaching Design Management at HSLU Lucerne to a great bunch of 3rd year Design Management bachelors with Ralf Beuker. Boy did we have a great week )

Also see Ralf’s insightful posting on some of the stuff we did that week.

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Our client NLISIS (pronounced Analysis) has won both a Design Management Europe Award and a Dutch Design Award last week. With the DME award NLISIS was recognised for their outstanding use of design management for a start up company. Zilver had the honour to both develop the NLISIS brand and their design strategy right form the start.

With the Dutch Design Award NLISIS was honoured for their best practice in applying, outsourcing and managing design as a strategic asset to their company. The 8 person start up beat giants like TNT post and Hema, inspiring the jury to call the case a ‘best practice example for all companies, large or small’.

Here’s an article on the NLISIS case you can download. It was written by Marc Vlemmings for Capitalogue, the city of Eindhoven’s Design Magazine.

Here’s the poster entry for the Design Management Europe award we made for NLISIS. By the way, all the winners’ posters can be viewed here. A great resource on the state of the art of design management in europe!

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Christa van Gessel and I wrote an article for this fall’s Future of Design Leadership edition of the Design Management Institute’s  Design Management Review . It’s partly based on our previously published article for DMI’s Paris ‘08 Academic conference but it contains some nice new stuff as well. Download it here.

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here’s an interview I did with Rik Wuts and Andre Weenink as part of their Klatergoud project:

18 minutes Klatergoud #1 from Rik Wuts on Vimeo.

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