On Januari 25th, the “un-conference” Internet Discovery Day was organised by Grädde (Cream), a Stockholm based investmet company. Anyone with a business idea could take a section of brown paper and market their idea to venture capitalists, suppliers or potential partners.
It was interesting to see how the simplicity of the brown paper postings made the [...]

A few weeks ago I assisted in a workshop for the chemical company Perstorp AB, the Warrington production site. They had found that their offices and production units were too spread out and that they needed to re-arrange parts of the plant according to new needs.
As you know the world has changed and today it [...]

The video has now been published on YouTube.
To see my talk at TEDxNorrmalm, 17th of april 2010, click the image or this link.
Welcome!

It’s easy to see innovation and creativity as pleasurable things that companies may choose or not. But what is the real reason for companies to work with innovation? Why do companies need to be creative?
I would say that innovation, as it’s discussed today, is about development of (new) competitive advantages. Reasons for people to choose [...]

My talk was basically about my experiences from several creative areas, and the pattern I have seen when putting these on top of each other. Instead of a PowerPoint I used the blue and red glove so that the audience could follow the idea and make up their own minds on the pattern I am [...]

A friend of mine once said “reality can by cut in many angles”, which in its simplicity is so true!
Every object, situation and aspects can be perceived and judged in so many ways, depending on your background experience, context etc. Once I made this drawing as a metaphor for how companies work. Just as when [...]

Food is both survival and experience, depending on situation. It also reflects our attitudes in general.
The hotdog is definitely a child of its era, industrialism and modernism. Easy to grab and eat on the go, rational, practical and functional. Perfect for its context, where people would no more gather in families for the daily lunch [...]

Someone said that the success of any company, organisation or even country depends on the degree of collaboration.

I can only agree.

Holistic, integrated product development – what does that mean? Well, if you want to be successful today and tomorrow, if you want to be innovative and competitive, then it will be too slow, inefficient and irrelevant to first develop a physical functionality and then try to powder on some experience values. You will need to [...]

In the old industrial context, there was less need for collaboration. You could develop a structural platform first, than have some “creatives” powder on some elements of beauty, experience and understanding.
Today, and tomorrow, those components are hard to separate, and competencies need to work together. You can more rarely separate one dimension from the others. [...]

Design often deals with two parallel aspects: making things more obvious and making things more attractive and interesting. For a true modernist the choice is simple: always aim for maximum clarity and remove everything else. And there are so many areas which still have a long way to go before reaching basic acceptable level of [...]

This shift in focus is also compatible with the idea of our brains being split in two parts. Even though the brain physically is much more complicated than that, it’s a handy model for discussing different ways of thinking. Maybe also for discussing the competencies needed in this new context.
Again, I think it is important [...]

Here is a first rough illustration of the shift in various areas. Of course this model is very simplified and I want to point out the aspects which are increasingly in focus, not an absolute truth!

Obviously the later aspects don’t replace the earlier. But for me the change of focus is quite evident. You may [...]

Market strategy generally deals with so called differentiation. That is changing your product from being a commodity, like sugar, wheat or crude oil, to becoming a distinguished product with certain properties so that customers will prefer your product from others and thereby also pay more.

The first thing you do is to, for example, to refine [...]