I remember writing a blog post about another IDEO concept: Shimano Coasting. Their concept was supposed to make cycling attractive for the masses, but it eventually got dropped, what led my to question about the possible reasons for this failure. This post, is about a well-documented IDEO case: a shopping cart developped in 1998, that obviously didn’t make it to the stores… or did it? Actually it did, it just has been picked up more than a decade later, and it’s being rolled out here in France. Not by IDEO. Continue reading →
Category / EN : Trends
Is crowdsourcing dead? How creative crowdsourcing platforms evolve
When Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing back in 2006, he defined it as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call” (this definition is still on Wikipedia). Today, other buzzwords like co-creation and open innovation flood the marketing and innovation blogs. To know what’s happening with crowdsourcing, let’s just take a look at how the platforms based on crowdsourcing principles evolve. Let’s take a look at different types of platforms using crowdsourcing principles : virtual ad agencies, creativity platforms and (still) the crowd-sourcers. Continue reading →
Crazy presentation about augmented research !
This presentation by Face‘s Director of Research Francesco d’Orazio kicks ass ! Several things make me say that : the pitch “Plugging brands into the fabric of society” is completely in line with the concept of societing that I’ve discovered recently, which basically recommends brands to propose themselves to society instead of imposing themselves to markets. In the future, we’ll “wear data like we wear clothes“, and this massive amount of data represents a tremendous opportunity for those who will be able to harness and analyze it !
+ it’s a beautifully designed presentation and… the main example is bikes !
Don’t underestimate the gamers !
In a previous post about personal branding (in French), I mentioned the fact that some recruters leverage the gaming-platform World of Warcraft (WOW) to hunt for good managers. Think about it : multitasking, team management, organisation and communication skills… everything that we can find in job offers ! According to Jane McGonigal, we’re also more inclined to collaborate in game world than we are in real world. Knowing that collaboration and engagement seems to be the holy grail of a lot of companies out there (at least on paper), gaming might be a solution. Continue reading →
The Arduino Project democratizes electronics… and allows you to print in 3D
I just watched Arduino, The Documentary on Vimeo, and I was very impressed. If you don’t know what Arduino is: it’s an open-source electronic platform thas is very simple to use and cheap. I already heard of it reading the book Marke Eigenbau, a German book on the way DIY (do-it-yourself) will change the way we consume. Anyway, Arduino now has a community of 120,000+ people using and improving the device (like Mozilla a couple of years ago… Mozilla just overtook Internet Explorer on the internet browser market), which means it’s getting big ! Continue reading →
The Globalization of Nothing, George Ritzer, Pine Forge Press
Image via PineForge.com
George Ritzer, from the University of Maryland, is a well-known specialist of globalization and its effects on society. With The Globalization of Nothing 2 (second edition, a “shorter, tighter, and more focused [on] globalization” than the first edition), he writes one more book about globalization, which might be considered as tiresome – but he introduces new concepts like grobalization and the something–nothing continuum, and provides a discerning analysis of today’s world.
“Anything that is purely local is fast disappearing from the world scene”
Bike Expo : Designing the cycling trends of the future
I recently went to Munich to cover the Bike Expo 2010 for a specialized website. This year, the trade fair was dubbed “Cycling Trends for City and Nature”, which reveals that the emphasis was placed on both urban mobility and nature sports. But there is one point which is particularly obvious this year : huge efforts were made in design in the bicycle industry. And we’re not (only) talking about style, but about inventing new ways of commuting on wheels. Continue reading →
Yannig Roth / This is my personal blog 