Will General Motors Pick Up Chrysler On The Cheap?

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on June 27

My forecast that the cost-cutting strategy of the private equity Cerberus guys who bought Chrysler from Daimler Benz would fail is, unfortunately, turning out to be true. By hiring ex-Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli, who's speciality is efficiency, they embarked on a traditional business strategy of squeezing more out of existing operations at a time when soaring oil prices were undermining the sales of their gas-guzzling product. What was needed was an innovation strategy of growth that quickly generated electric, hybrid, flex-fuel and other models that better fit into a fast-changing market place.

Supplying these cars from China or anywhere around the world quickly and then investing in new models to capture market share might have saved Chrysler. But squeezing pennies out of a shrinking operations base cannot.

My guess is that GM will pick up Jeep and a couple of Chrysler lines--and that will be the end of that. Business model innovation is often the most powerful kind of innovation. It requires imagination and guts. Implementing old, tried and true, strategies in a time of dramatic change rarely work.

The 10 Commandments of Web Design.

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on June 27

Matt Vella over at the Innovation & Design site interviewed RISD's John Meada, Don Norman, NYTimes.com's Khoi Vinh and other smart folks on web usability and came up with The 10 Commandments of Web Design. See if you agree with the list and what you would add--or subtract. With the spread of the iPhone and the mobile web, web design is super hot once again.

Here is Matt's list:
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash. Don't overwhelm the viewer.
2. Thou shalt not hide content. With advertising.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections. Apple.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels. Meebo?
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography. Check out Daring Fireball.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences. Perhaps the most important.
8. Thou shalt be social. Hmmm. Maybe this is the most important.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king. Content trumps pretty.

What else are we missing? How would you prioritize the list?

Life On And Off The Reservation--Learning From Modern Native American Indians.

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on June 25

Check out this great website that takes you inside the real life of modern American Indians. One of my favorite sections is In The Hoop, an inside look at Washington from an Indian's perspective. Totally amazing.

You can even Twitter and get an inside look at an insiders look at what is important to millions of Americans who are usually invisible to most of society.

IDEO's Tim Brown On Innovation In The Harvard Business Review.

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on June 25

The fact that the Harvard Business Review asked IDEO's CEO Tim Brown to write about Design Thinking in the current issue is as important as what he had to say in the piece. It marks the acceptance and legitimization of design/innovation as an important business process and strategic tool for managers.

HBR was behind for a time in covering innovation and design but it is running some very interesting pieces now and Brown's article brings it up to date/a>. I think that lag reflects the reluctance of business schools to embrace design thinking and innovation process. This is now changing, but slowly. Harvard Business School is making efforts to incorporate innovation, but in the end, we are talking about a sharp paradigm change embodied in curricula and teaching, and that is happening in only one B-School that I can think of--the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto run by Dean Roger Martin.

Brown's HBR piece is an excellent primer. He begins by showing how

Continue reading "IDEO's Tim Brown On Innovation In The Harvard Business Review."

Hooray for McCain. A $300 million Contest for A Better Battery Is A Great Idea.

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on June 24

Way to go John McCain. There is nothing more imporant to the US and the world than an incentive-driven competitive innovation process to produce a better battery. A smaller, ligher, more efficient car battery is key to getting the global economy off its addiction to fossil fuels. And just as the $10 million X-Prize proved to be a powerful incentive for the creation of a non-governmental space ship (and Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize for the first transatlantic airplane flight), so too could McCain's idea push the edge on battery technology.

There are many ways to incentivize innovation. VC money. Government money. Corporate R&D. Labs (government and private). Serious prize money and well designed contests reward both crowd-sourcing and individual genius kinds of creation.

My only problem with the McCain Contest is that $300 million is probably too much money. It implies government bigness and huge scale. The X Prize Foundation gives out ten million bucks and that seems incentive enough.

But that's a quibble. Both McCain and Obama have not talked very much about innovation to date. With this $300 million contest for a better car battery, McCain leaps ahead in the debate, even without uttering the word "innovation."

So Barack, what does innovation mean to you?

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About

Want to stop talking about innovation and learn how to make it work for you? Bruce Nussbaum takes you deep into the latest thinking about innovation and design with daily scoops, provocative perspectives and case studies. Nussbaum is at the center of a global conversation on the growing discipline of innovation and the deepening field of design thinking. Read him to discover what social networking works—and what doesn’t. Discover where service innovation is going and how experience design is shaping up. Learn which schools are graduating the most creative talent and which consulting firms are the hottest. And get his take on what the smartest companies are doing in the U.S., Asia and Europe, far ahead of the pack.

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