
This blog hasn’t gotten much of my attention lately but that doesn’t mean I have been idle. To the contrary, I’ve been extremely productive this first half of 2009. I’ve just found other ways to express myself than through this blog. One of these is twitter, where you can follow me. I’ve met some great [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.