What if we had a new way to design products, services, and businesses that were good for people, the planet, and business? That's one of the questions we were seeking to answer when IDEO teamed up with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to launch the Circular Design Guide. Why a design thinking guide f...

This week, school principals across the globe are lacing up their sneakers and toting their brown bags to school as part of Shadow a Student Challenge, a program to help school principals better understand their students’ experiences. As of Monday, more than 1,200 school leaders have taken the chal...

If you’re reading this post on LinkedIn, then you already understand the power of communities working together to create new possibilities. But as we head into 2015, it’s worth underscoring the importance of community collaboration. When Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank, his i...

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...

Now that government data is becoming more readily available, there are lots of interesting uses. Here’s one that we worked on with the Sunlight Foundation. Sitegeist is a mobile app that helps you access US Census data and other public details about a neighborhood. This means you can check on everyt...

A recent article on the freelance workplace refers to an Intuit study that predicts 40% of the workforce will be freelance by 2020. To many, this is an exciting idea where talented and creative individuals get to leverage their skills free from the tyranny of the "boss." To others, it is a scary pro...

How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact? This is the question posed by the current Knight News Challenge, a media innovation contest open to participants anywhere in the world. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and feedback from a coll...

If courage is an accumulation of small steps, one way to nurture your design courage is to join OpenIDEO—a digital innovation community composed of 42,000+ creative thinkers around the globe engaged in solving real-world challenges for social and environmental impact. Each challenge offers a fun, co...

Some of you may remember me writing about ideas around the participation economy back in Spring 2009. One of those articles was entitled "The Post Consumption Economy" . There hasn't been a whole lot of debate in the mainstream media about whether we have been solving the wrong problem by trying to ...

The first two OpenIDEO challenges have recently been completed and now the trick is spreading the best ideas with the goal to have some be implemented. The results of the the educational tools challenge, sponsored by Grey Matters Capital, have been presented at the Enterprising Schools Symposium in ...