Tailoring Design Methods to Incremental and Breakthrough Innovations

By Guest Author Soren Petersen It is increasingly hard to find something genuinely novel that one actually needs or even wants. Most new products are just slight facelifts of last year’s version that we can all easily live without.

When Will the Design Innovation Bubble Burst?

By Guest Author Soren Petersen Return on investment is diminishing for all businesses and investors are rushing to Silicon Valley startups to improve their portfolios’ performance in the hunt for profit. High profile successful startups, such as AirBnB, Uber, and Tesla may mistakenly lead investors into believing that by applying design, innovative startups can dramatically

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Betting Strategies for Breakthrough Innovation Contests

By Guest Author Soren Petersen Guiding design teams through the design innovation process is one of the biggest challenges in new product development (NPD). The path is strewn with ambiguity and uncertainty. Any advice that the project manager can offer rests on their previous experience, which may be highly context dependent and not directly translatable

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Gamification-Based Decision-Making in Breakthrough Innovation

By Guest Author Soren Petersen Quickly separating promising design concepts from the mediocre saves time and money and mediates destructive political gamesmanship. However, the challenge is how to recognize lucrative breakthrough innovations in their infancy, when knowledge and understanding is limited. Prediction-markets and gamification provide a novel solution for this dilemma.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 6)

Naveen Sharma: Many of our current service offerings started off as XTIN projects. Take for example our Ignite offering, which was the result of  a bunch of researchers who had young children who were interested in how to use technology to personalize education. They went to K to 5 classrooms and observed how the teacher

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a bit and ask you to put on your Chief Innovation Officer hat on. Let me give you a bit of context about why I want to go in this direction. In our incubator program, one of the areas we’re doing a lot of work on right now

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These are  good examples of taking data and doing something interesting with it to produce actionable business value but it didn’t really cover multi-modal data. You say it was one of the issues that you’re trying to illustrate. Can we take a use case where there is actually multi-modal data involved? Naveen Sharma: 

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 3)

Naveen Sharma: Our challenge is not the question of volume, it’s more of  variety because if you look at our call center data for example, that’s primarily an audio-based database. If you look at transportation services, that’s primarily video-based data. If you look at our call centers, they’re also looking at social media data, which is

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