Blog

This is a post about strategy, written with these assumptions in mind:

Lots of marketing strategists are increasingly interested in product innovation.
More and more innovation companies will adopt Lean methodologies.
Migrating strategists will have a massive shock and appreciate some tips.

You’ll be relieved to note that this isn’t a philosophical post. It’s a practical one. Because after all, we’re interested in making things, which means less talking and more doing...

I'm really lucky to be at TED Global in Edinburgh this week. (It's a tough job, but someone had to do it...)

And I've just seen one of the scariest talks *ever*.

As part of a session of talks about drone tech, the sci-fi author Daniel Suarez spoke about lethal autonomy - or, robots that can decide to kill humans on their own, without referring to humans at all. 

A couple of weeks ago, my brain was treated to a Pint of Science in the form of a talk by Dr Eileen Gentleman on making body parts. Dr Gentleman whooshed us through a brief history of genetic engineering, including how eye injuries to World War II pilots led to the invention of contact lenses and why golden plates sealed in an ancient skull proved that not all alien materials are rejected by human tissue. And we were, inevitably, shown a photo of a mouse with an ear on its back...

On Wednesday night I was talking to someone that works in innovation for local government. I wont go into too much detail about her position or the organisation she works for. She was asking about the way we work at Made by Many and we talked about the cross-over between lean practices in manufacturing, product design, Lean startups, innovation and UX. I was fairly  surprised and dissappointed by what I heard.

I've been learning about trade-off curves recently and they seem pretty useful for learning and making decisions when designing products.

Do you make ‘things’? You probably do. So do we — things are brilliant. 

Okay, you and I are a bit more sophisticated than that; we don’t call them things - not us - we know them as services, products, systems! We get the complexities of integrating platforms and prototyping user flows. The word ‘things’ doesn’t really cut it — these products can’t be dropped into an organisation as neat, self-contained packages. They have to be wired into the existing business or service. They are not islands, they are an extension of the organisation itself...

I touched on the concept of considered laziness here and here. It's a term which I'm sure I stole from @higgis, and which has subsequently been very nicely articulated in this post.

I can't be bothered to write more about what this means to me as a technologist, so here are some graphs which may help explain why I come across as such a laggard when talking about technology.