October 30, 2013
Although memories of my early formal education have started to fade, I vividly recall two distinct types of learning experiences: brainwork and handwork. The vast majority of my time in school was spent listening to lectures, taking exams, writing essays, and so on. On rare occasions, we’d roll up o...
October 2, 2013
A little empathy goes a long way in an overcrowded emergency room. You don’t have to be a medical professional to know that affordable healthcare in America is complicated business. The system is so sprawling and intractable, only the biggest and boldest of innovations will make a difference, yet o...
July 30, 2013
I’m the CEO of a global company, but I don’t have an MBA. Much of what I know about business I learned from Peter Drucker. I first discovered the Austrian business theorist’s writings on innovation, entrepreneurship, and management in the late 1990s, when I was heading up IDEO’s London studio, and t...
June 13, 2013
According to a UN report on aging, the world’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. By 2050, the number of people 60 years or older will exceed the number of young people under age 15 for the first time in history. The effects of population aging are profound and impact everything from econ...
April 4, 2013
In 2011, OpenIDEO launched a social business challenge focused on improving the lives of people living in places like Caldas, Colombia, where one in four people live in extreme poverty. During the challenge, The Grameen Creative Lab provided local insights by interviewing the community on the ground...
March 22, 2013
Design is at its most powerful when it helps us take a complex, hard to imagine problem, and makes it simple. Water access in Africa is really complex, but the image of 'filling Africa up' with irrigation is very simple. KickStart is doing important work in bringing irrigation pumps to Africa but th...
March 13, 2013
My friend Delos “Toby” Cosgrove is a fellow blogger for LinkedIn. He and his wonderful organization, the Cleveland Clinic, deserve a massive shout-out for their recent video entitled “Empathy.” I challenge you to watch it without a few tears forming. Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the u...
February 5, 2013
I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The overall sentiment there was one of cautious optimism. While there is a long list of major problems to be tackled, the immediate prospects for the global economy seem reasonably good and there is a sense that most economies ...
January 15, 2013
A few months ago education expert Sandy Speicher was kind enough to share her thoughts with me on the question: What's different when you look at the world ofeducation through the lens of design? Today I’m proud to share the newly relaunched Design Thinking for Educators toolkit. This toolkit suppo...
December 20, 2012
Great designers don’t just do design, they live design. Like them, we can learn how to practice design thinking principles both at work and at home. As you start designing your life in 2013, here are five ways to begin: 1. Be optimistic, collaborative, and generative. There’s something wonderfully...