Walk around your house and (unless you’ve just moved into a new one) have a look at the things that sit idle. I’m not talking about the ornaments and pictures, but the fittings that used to do something, that don’t anymore.
At the weekend, we had a blitz in our place. Admittedly, it’s been a while since we got rid of anything major to release space. As the family grows up, so do the collections of ‘important’ possessions.
What we did do, though, was tear out cables. We had ISDN and phone sockets with white wires following skirting boards. There’s a TV aerial and a satellite dish. We had a collection of spaghetti behind the TV that used to feed various things. It all went.
Free-to-air has allowed us to take the aerial off the roof and ditch the recording box. Mobile phones make the extra landline sockets redundant, wifi removes the need for extension cables, and iPads take TVs out of bedrooms.
This isn’t de-stuffocation, but a by-product of looking at the way it’s always been –differently.
So, technology releases space. No surprise there, although…I also found that, for three of us we have a desk top, three laptops, four iPads, a current phone each and a collection of old phones and iPods at the back of a cupboard. Three Nanos, two Shuffles, a couple of Nintendo DS consoles and seven external hard drives. These were the layers of techno-strata that made up the last ten years of our lives. Even the hard drives ranged from the size of an encyclopaedia* to twenty B&H* (*look those up).
The infrastructure that we know is altering our relationship with hardware, software and each other. The change is subtle and unrelenting. Here are a few to look out for:
The pleasure of driving is mostly a con.
Sitting in your box to commute while glued to the steering wheel with just a radio for distraction is not pleasurable. Nipping out to collect a child from Brownies or karate is not fun. Required, responsible, essential even – but it isn’t fun. Even driving around a track at 200mph gets a bit tedious after a while. The motor manufacturers who are reshaping car cockpits to remove the steering wheel, and turn your conveyance from a forward-facing item of necessity into a place of social and commercial activity, are seeing your future. Have a look at the Audi Aicon as just one example.
Your new home is your old home.
In the UK, there’s a persistent drive to build new homes in every region. Demand is outstripping supply, and builders require materials to keep up.
Problem: the materials aren’t there – at least as we know them. You simply can’t grow hard wood that fast,and there’s a world limit on availability of sand. I wrote about this back in 2017 (Why is sand interesting to innovation? We’re running out).
Quietly, the feedstock to the new home building industry has become recycled. It’s estimated that 60% of the material used in new home construction is recycled in some way. That’s a big percentage, and the trend will continue. The processes that sit behind the supply chain in its new design go a bit beyond digging and cutting now.
Pokemon was your guide.
Who are you? Do you understand virtual reality, fail to see the relevance, or simply don’t read about it? Whatever your inclination, VR is coming to a device near you. Fight it all you want, you won’t avoid it.
Oh, hang on a minute, you already use it, so what’s the big deal? Augmented reality apps such as sat nav and shopping scanners are a step in the VR direction, and this may lead you into the mixed media world unconsciously.
You might be able to use Google Daydream or Oculus to transport you to a different place while Pokemon changes your world where you are. Enjoy what’s coming.
Seeing it differently. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
When we talk about innovation, it’s important we figure out what the word means to the different people in the room. It depends on outlook, experience and points of reference, as well as professional and personal bias. The same applies to innovation training and to how comfortable you are about wanting to learn more.
When Marketing was still developing as a role, the four Ps meant Place, People, Price and Promotion. These were the buttons to press, if you wanted to persuade a customer to buy your thing. Marketers also developed an understanding of segmentation, and the realisation that marketing couldn’t talk to everybody at once – if you’re in the market for pants, for example, words that describe a car probably won’t do it for you.
Today, the markets you work in are different from the days of marketing pioneers like the Mad Men, and language has evolved. So has the audience.
When room44 delivers innovation training, it’s just as important for us to know who we are dealing with. Workshops and client projects always involve a lot of background research. A workshop for a team from a single company allows us to investigate the specific issues they face. In contrast, an open training workshop might see confectionery brand owners sitting between a firm of solicitors and senior plastics packaging managers.
We adapt the day, so that everybody can learn the process of innovation. This is where delegates bring their own perspective. Their own experience and business conditions add context so, for them, the workshop is personalised.
Revealing how to introduce innovation to a business is why we’re there. Experience, hurdles and organisational issues stay with the individual, unless they see benefit in sharing with the room. Often, challenges are common across industry sectors and conversations spark a moment of realisation. Alliances are born right there.
But there are times when people just want to work alone, quietly and thoughtfully. So, we’ve developed an email-based innovation course. It’s a once-a-day series of 30 emails that provide you with some direction, insight and a daily task. You apply your own context and timeline, we send the material for you to work through.
Emails arrive in your inbox overnight, so when you get up there’s a new piece of insight waiting. Each one takes about 10 minutes to read, and you can consider the exercise in your head all day long, or knock out an answer in 20 minutes. It’s up to you.
You can work on the tasks at your own pace and even set the regularity. Want an email a day for 30 days? No problem. Want an email just on week days? It’s done. Got a holiday coming up? Just put the course on hold and come back to it.
There are three modules that follow the structure of our open training workshops:
- Spotting trends and signals: seeing things differently
- Design Thinking – focus on transformation
- Making innovation stick: a culture of change
At the end of each module, we’ll invite you to a call so we can chat through your work to date. If you’ve stretched a module from 10 days to 30, it doesn’t matter, we’ll arrange a day and a time to suit.
The idea came from listening to people tell us they are time-poor. They can’t get away from the office, but innovation is still important to them. Here’s their solution. And yours. You bring the personal and the business needs. We bring the method. We work it out together.
Click here for more information.
Seeing it differently. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
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