I had the great pleasure of spending a few days last week with some eminent designers and design thinkers as part of a World Economic Forum event in Dubai. We were participating as one of over 70 WEF Global Agenda Councils consisting of experts from around the world studying how to improve global in...

There is a discussion going on amongst some of my colleagues about the merits of minimalism versus simplicity. My own view is that minimalism has come to represent a style and as such is limited in its usefulness. It represents a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding ...

One of the most important ideas about design thinking is that it creates new ideas that provide new choices for business and society. As we move toward December and the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen I worry that we have far too few ideas to talk about. It is all too easy to argue over wh...

Apologies for the unabashed self promotion but for a first time author, today is a big day. Change By Design has finally hit the stores. Again thanks to many of you who have contributed to the dialog over the last year as well as to those who have helped me with the book itself. I fully intend to k...

I spent last week at the Mayo Clinic symposium on health care innovation called Transform. It was excellent. A great group of speakers and an audience populated by some of the most important players in health care innovation. You can check out the videos from many of the speakers at the Mayo Transf...

Sara Beckman of the Haas Business School has written a great article in the New York Times about Six Sigma and design thinking called Welcoming the New, Improving the Old. She talks with Chuck Jones of Whirlpool who gives a lovely analogy of design thinkers as quantum physicists and everyone else (i...

I posted about the Human Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit back in December. Since then it has been downloaded over 6200 times. It is now available in its second edition. You can find out more about it on IDEO's website (and download it for free) here and, if you don't want to go through the hassle of p...

Dan Pink's talk is now up on TED.com. Here is what I said about it in my post about TED Global: The last design thinking related talk of the conference was by Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation. Dan is writing a new book on the scientifically proven point that intrinsic rewa...

Lego reported a 23% rise in revenues and a 60% rise in profits for the first six months of 2009. What is the secret that causes a company that sells toys to buck the economic tsunami that has afflicted everyone else? One clue is that in particular parents have apparently turned to Lego's classic pro...

On my way from Chicago O'Hare airport to our office in Evanston today I saw powerful evidence of the state of the auto industry in this part of the world. As we drove along Dempster Street we passed a large auto dealer for Chevrolet and Toyota. The forecourt looked pretty deserted and there were rel...