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Entrepreneurial design – and the design thinking context
The focus of the entrepreneurship summit 2010 has been entrepreneurial design and I think the concept is convincing. Concept? Maybe there are more than one concept around under this name. Just found it linked to design thinking in a certain manner, as you can see on this page and nice video from Stanford Graduate School of Business Extreme Affordability Journal. Affordability is a central term here – since the process seems to target the “bottom of the pyramid“.
Since I was in touch with design thinking (DT) I am totally fascinated with the method. In this year I met the practitioners and “activists” at different places e.g. Potsdam HPI or the IA-Konferenz 2010, Köln (see post: “Are we Innovation Architects? Service.Design.Thinking, #IAK10“). Hey, I just realized my (subjective) “trend feeling” about DT and found evidence at Google trends:
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Prof. Faltin’s stance
I found the interpretation of the term “entrepreneurial design” in the context of market dynamics quite plausible. In his keynote Prof. Faltin talked about the difference of a (complete functional) automobile and the Otto engine (as an essential technical component of a car). In this perspective the automobile is the entrepreneurial design, which enables the Otto engine to be sold. One could say it this way: Only with the automobile structure build around the Otto engine the engine is “networked” with the needs of the people. Making the explosion engine beneficial for the need of mobility. This at the same time transforms people to (automobile) customers, i.e. a new market emerges.
Maybe, that there is a whole concept cloud around “entrepreneurial design”, or that this all is just one design thinking cloud – I for my part find the Otto engine example of Prof. Faltin graphic, maybe paradigmatic.
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Insight: The “Apple success” is based simply on … entrepreneurial design
Now think about the Apple success story. The competitors are shocked again and again to see that Apple wins the market with devices, that are build on components some not being state of the art. The success is based on entrepreneurial design, i.e. networking the companies ressources with the users needs, making the device a “node in the behavioral network” of the customer.
I am not a techie.
I am not a techprogressive.
But I bet on Augmented Reality to be a decisive component of the fine-granular information ubiquity environment, which is emerging in this decade 2010-2020.
The reality is becoming a web
The web has become a reality in the last 20 years – and now we witness that the reality is becoming a web. It is transforming into a weblike matrix of “activated space”. The space of today may be called “mute space” and “blind space” in the future – if it is not
enriched with information, not “talking”, not “hearing”, not reacting to the people around. The analyst predicts this. (My personal opinion is that we still should strive for silence and contemplation in the future.) See the merging of AR principle and powerful recognition technology in the video – to allow/limit this kind of (intrusive?) social transparency is a political issue in this decade.
AR to counterbalance the technological intelligence around us (Subjectoid)
Remind the lesson of evolution biology: A population is shaped by the environment, but at the same time it is shaping the environment. With Augmented Reality on the one end and Sensor Web on the other we envision the Mixed Reality and Ambient Spaces reacting
Augmented Citizen – a concept for the time to come
The times are changing – and the semantics of our expressions too.
When I brought the concept of the “Augmented Citizen” into being it was rather narrow, thanks to the context of Government 2.0 Camp in August 2009 (see slideshare.net). Then in December I realized the full potential and future usage patterns of (Social) Mobile Augmented Reality at the AR meeting in Rotterdam (NL). In the keynote I even encouraged the folks to think beyond the interaction concepts and sensory channels of today, when thinking about augmentation. E.g. we can have augmentation and overlays of other perceptive fields than the visual – and with al kinds of immersion in a social-networked surroundings (for Rotterdam AR meeting see blogpost: Augmented Citizen – next: augmented reality ecosystem).
Later mobile business visionary and social technology architect Dan Romescu and I had some fruitful dialogues concerning the evolution scnarios of mobile AR. Actually he seriously caught fire and went to Mobile World Congress as an “Augmented Citizen Advocate”, blogging at http://www.augmentedcitizen.org So I am proud to present our slides from the Mobile AR Summit at MWC.
Are you a skeptic and have read up to here? Then remind that Juniper talks about a market size of USD 732 million for 2014. Or just think about slide 8:
Q: Isn‘t AR just a new mode how to display information?
A: Yes, but this in fact means to change the
mode of interaction with the world,
your physical and social reality.
16 business models for Augmented Reality (remind the hype curve)
Just as an addon to the previous post talking about mysterious “augmented participation” as a possible growth field here is the colorful Gary Hayes list:
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models | PERSONALIZE MEDIA
With some well known examples as seen on youtube (2009!). The collection and systematic has not been evaluated by me, just want to kick it in here as a starter for the AR skeptics.
Auguverse?
Google “auguverse” and you will find virtually nothing – however we will call it, the “mixed / augmented reality universe” might be a 1.000 times bigger in 2020 as a information space, than the web of today (measured in counted information objects, not the exabyte volume). Hey, I am a futurist and it is Friday, I can talk like this – with IPv6, sensor web, social ubiquity and internet of things in mind.
Straigt to flickr image in a readable form.

Some weeks ago I reached some conclusions about the demographic/technographic wave of the Digital Natives. I foresee deep impact, if not cultural clash. For a CEO or manager there are narrow options for sustainable strategic response to this challenge.
So my pro-active imperative was: Time to transform your company into an academy
Today some other fruit of analyzing the wave and emerging power of Digital Natives / Millenials dropped. Manager Magazin online published the article about the emerging issue:
“Digital Natives”: Die Revolution der Web-Eingeborenen – manager-magazin.de
(Andreas Neef, Willi Schroll, Björn Theis)
G20 summit under immense pressure
Radical measures must be decided at the G20 summit or it could become the “fateful moment” when the global recession lurches into an outright slump, Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said today. (guardian.co.uk, 2009-03-30)
The crisis and the consequences for business and politics are still in the focus of mass media and the blogosphere. When I check the stats of future facts blog I find a lot of phrases containing “financial crisis” still on the top of the most used search terms. Surprisingly most of the visitors checked in here on the post of Oct. 2008 Global financial crisis may end 2009 – which is not really a typical post in a blog concerned with long-term trends. The news seemed significant at that time because
- it had been expressed by an insider, Michel Camdessus, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
- it was extraordinarily optmistic.
Let us contrast this sunny quote of last year with doomsday news like this of March 25th 2009: “Russia Expects New Financial System Crisis Outburst”. Russia’s Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin said:
“We were standing on the brink of the financial collapse, but we prevented it, and I must here thank the Central Bank and the State Duma for giving us an opportunity to take decisions quickly,” (my emphasis, www.marketoracle.co.uk)
The coincidence of some news urges me to come back to the issue of the spreading crisis. In these days we read Read the rest of this entry »
To be green or not to be
First part of my coverage of the Utopia conference was about necessity and possibility of the coming transformation. This global transformation is politically, economically and technologically. How we shape things, connect material flows, structure systems, control communication, this is all about technology and design. Prof. Braungart reminded us about the “next industrial revolution”, he and William McDonough really did this for quite a while (The Atlantic 1998) and successfully.
Efficiency potentials and radical new mobility concepts
As I said before there is no consensus about goals and means. One good example is the seemingly polarity of Braungart’s paradigmatic radicality on he one hand and the optimization strategy of Dr. Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) on the other. Both approaches will coexist even when a holistic approach and some disruptive innovation is always more impressive than the “optimization of the old” (see also my post “Dont’ worry …“). But sometimes the sum of many tiny steps could mean revolutionary consequences, too. Take mobility based on fossil fuels. The cars of today are completely stupid in their basic design, Dr. Lovins calculated that only 0.3% of the total energy invested in driving actually moves the physical mass of the driver. Obviously there is huge potential to eco-optimize mobility systems. So maybe car driving will not be illegal in 2018, because cars have very different features then, e.g. are made of very light materials.
An other way to “save the car” was demonstrated by Rolf Schumann of Better Place, a company which could mean a new way to realize personal mobility. Think about sustainable mobility and using a smart infrastructure to cope with the problem of batteries. Better place is acting like an operator selling kilometers not cars, like a mobile carrier is selling minutes to you (Better Place how-it-works).
These are the times for visionary leadership
I want to end with another lesson. As a researcher and speaker I am frequently stressing the potential of the social web, participation, collaboration and “collective intelligence”. This “social thing” always has to be balanced with the respect of individual genius and leadership. I suppose Claudia Langer as the initiating founder of Utopia shows the decisive role of personality.
500 changemakers meeting
Yesterday Utopia, the biggest online community for strategic consumption in Germany, celebrated the first birthday, holding a conference in Berlin. At first sight the issues were quite clear:
- sustainability, eco efficiency, green investment, new products, processes, innovative materials …
- the role/responsibility of the political system
- the role/responsibility of big economical players, last but not least
- the role/responsibility of “we, the people”, you and me, for the necessary transformation.
But transformation from here to where? What are the goals and by which means should we try to reach them? Are there different goals and means for different world regions, even countries? The speakers would not be in consent about answers to that questions. But debate and inspiration, yes irritation, is it, why we meet at conferences like this one. Take the example of Prof. Michael Braungart (Cradle to Cradle, you should know). His points sometimes sounded really polemical in a good sense, e.g. attacking (for some years) the core concepts of “efficiency” or “sustainability”, so whitespread in the green discourse. Read the rest of this entry »










