My philosophy on Special Projects
For me, uniquely as an innovation approach, product invention is able to bring together design, technology, user experience and marketing, and the commercial and wider strategic imperatives.
Product invention is a shortcut to the many constraints and opportunities in innovation—and, by using prototyping, can rapidly engage diverse internal and external communities by virtue of being real and not abstract.
Background:
With the design consultancy BERG (where I was co-founder and CEO, 2009–2015) our clients included Nespresso, Intel, the BBC, Google, Twitter; and Bonnier with whom we created a vision for digital magazines (Mag+) and developed and released this platform for the launch day of Apple’s iPad tablet. The first magazine on the platform, Popular Science, was acclaimed by Steve Jobs on stage as “king of the hill.” BERG was named by Fast Company as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies (2012), made the cover story of Icon magazine (2011), and has work in the permanent collection of the New York MoMA. The studio pioneered the consumer Internet of Things with Little Printer before spinning out an IoT platform startup, Berg Cloud.
The process I now employ for invention and innovation was originated at BERG. It is outlined in a three month form in the Google case study.