After 15 years of design research as a growing and now dominating force within the business of developing products and services of real value for the consumer, the question about what’s next is beginning to rise.

As the power and methods of design research is becoming known by everybody who wants be sure to make money in a world of ‘more products faster’, it is obvious that we all need to find the next tool or weapon in the battle to develop the next big thing, before the competition.

Here’s my bet, and I’ll be blogging a bit about that for a while, because I think it is explosive… Corporate Collective Creativity. With design research as a standard process we need to look for a new creative potential to release. We believe that potential could easily be the vast research and innovation resources that exists within every company – but that usually stays largely untapped due to a variety of organisational, psychological and even physical reasons.

Most senior designers have years of experience with being two things: design developers – and facilitators of processes that synthesizes the right framework for the innovation work. Almost always painfully ignorant to the specific project designers gather information from the market and from inside the client’s organisation … where they often find many of the answers already – inside the organisation, right under the client’s nose, usually, though, well hidden or just not actively seeking to become of value. Simply because the organization does not recognize the value or is able to facilitate it.

If the corporate world can learn to activate and cultivate the vast research and innovation resources inside their organisation, the speed and precision of development can be seriously increased. We believe they can learn that from us and our colleagues in the design business.

Or you can discuss or vote others’ eco-effective ideas closer to production. Even improve them to gain co-ownership. Unlike other community-based idea sites, such as Dell’s ideastorm or Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea Quirky shares profits with you if your product vision makes it to production. 12 cents in your pocket for every dollar your product makes.

So, what are you waiting for? Experience the power of co-creation and crowd-sourcing before you try it out in your own business.

Our friends at the Acumen Fund have asked us to help spread the word about a different approach to tackling poverty and building sustainable growth at the base of the pyramid – so that’s what we do! Watch this 90-second video that tells the Acumen Fund story and their take on fighting poverty. If nothing else, you’ll love their simple, inspiring and effective communication.

No doubt, creative processes can be optimised significantly by lean-thinking. Only problem is that creative processes – to some extent – are expected to produce unexpected output aka innovations or inventions.  So if you apply e.g. Six Sigma in the design lab, in the exact same way as in the logistics department or in manufacturing – what do you think will happen?

Business Week’s 3M’s Innovation Crisis makes some real good points on the art of managing innovation and creation – without loosing it. Worth spending a couple of minutes on.

We’ve developed a few iPhone apps since the AppStore opened July 2008. Just out of curiosity and for the fun of it. Our latest app is Fit to drive? –  designed to increase awareness of drinking and driving.

We’ve had a lot of debates too – also with sceptical clients that still consider iPhone and apps a passing trend – let’s wait and see if that lasts. No reason for iPhone optimised websites either. Hey, approximately 2/3 of total mobile surfing happens on an iPhone. Go to the café next door, ask two people – one with iPhone and one without – whether they have been online with their phone. The iPhone user will say yes, the other is likely to say no.

Our feeling is that it will not only last, but skyrocket. Apple currently dominates this new market because it created it. App-thinking defines the future for a lot of services delivered on mobile platforms. More than 2 billion apps  downloaded, turnover beyond EUR 2 billion and –  60 million iPhones sold according to TechCrunch. This tells us that those who still don’t believe in apps, better start believing.

What is more, if you add the numbers of iPod Touch sold, it becomes the fastest growing  hardware platform in consumer tech history. The iPhone, the apps and the unbeaten user experience of the iPhone have created a new opportunity space. Of course, leading today is not the same as leading tomorrow but it does make the other tech kings shudder.

Creating a successful app-store isn’t as easy. Google and NOKIA are trying hard. Apparently even the Danish AppStore grosses more in a single day than  Android Market in a year. What about Ovi?. Long way to go but together with Apple they’ll create a whole new category of on-line experiences.

Our point of view? iPhone or not, don’t miss the train – deliver your existing or new service via a mobile app. It’s key to your future.

At Designit, we’ve been working at a Danish hospital with service innovation for a year now. And Designit’s EPIC workshop indicated that one challenge is universal for hospitals: humanising healthcare.

Participants of the workshop – among others healthcare professionals and decision-makers from the public and private healthcare sector in the U.S. – said there was a need to: 1) improve communication between staff and patients so that that patient’s understand their situation and role, 2) make people feel welcome and safe 3) meet the needs of users as individuals.

In other words, they expressed a need for increased focus on the person. The individual. Ensuring the system fits the user – and not the other way round. Create real solutions for real people – that is also the need identified at the workshop and most certainly by our fieldwork in at Odense University Hospital in Denmark.

So how do you do this? Well, it’s important to say that this doesn’t have to cost the earth. As an innovator / design thinker, you need to show respect for the complexity of hospitals and the constraints. You must accept hospitals’ evidence-based culture – then identify what to test and create the right test change conditions. Many small, incremental innovations can, when gathered, have a big impact. It’s not about changing everything overnight, but slowly starting a new mindset and a movement.

Another crucial point is commitment. As a decision-maker at a hospital, you need to ask yourself: are you really committed to this change process? Will you support it throughout the organisation – even when you meet opposition?

Interesting to see that the need for humanisation in the healthcare sector is more widespread than we’d thought. Hospitals are most definitely not immune to change, you just need to understand the dynamics and design your innovation process accordingly.

Just some thoughts from the field…

In the US, brands have long since recognised the power of female bloggers. But only now is the rest of the world waking up to this lucrative phenomenon. And it’s rapidly changing the rules of advertising, marketing and even brand management.

Women bloggers are the new advertising heavyweights. They control a huge audience – a whopping 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week.

And a survey published by BlogHer this year revealed that around 50% of women consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information and are directly influenced by blogs in their purchase decisions.

So how are brands reacting? Businesses now send promo items to bloggers in an attempt to win their favour. Even Wal Mart publicly admits working with a team of female bloggers to promote the company.

My advice: take a more deliberate and inclusive approach to women bloggers. They can make or break your product’s success in the female consumer segment, so find out what they’re saying about you. If you decide to actively engage with them, read the blog to understand its editorial agenda before approaching the blogger.

The times are a’ changing. Women have long since established themselves as the stronger sex and influential consumers. And now they are ruling the blogosphere too. A safer option than letting us men lead the way…

My new design thrill is time. After 17 years of designing, it’s occurred to me that companies continually fail to consider one important parameter: time factor. Put simply, this is the amount of time a user is willing to spend on your product, service or communication solution before they give up and walk away.

Take this American billboard, for example. It may not be pretty, but it sure as hell works.

Why? Its design acknowledges the fact that people only have a split second to get the message. A two-word eye-catching question against a brightly coloured background attracts your attention in a flash and quickly communicates the product.

It competes hands down against the hundreds of other billboards in the city, which demand as much as 10 seconds from passers by. Just a thought … Check out Thinkaboutit for more reflections on the design time factor.