Todd Tillemans
General Manager, Skin, Unilever

Todd Tillemans is the General Manager for Unilever’s North American Skin Business, comprised of leading consumer brands including Dove, Caress, Lever 2000, Axe, Vaseline, Suave, Ponds, and Q-tips. Before that, he spent three years leading Unilever’s North American Deodorant business, leading a team to deliver sustained double digit growth in sales and profits by bringing disruptive product innovation, leading-edge brand activation, and innovative retail shopping solutions to market.

Chris Conley
Associate Professor, IIT Institute of Design

Chris Conley’s teaching and research at ID is focused on a creative, multi-disciplinary approach to business innovation called Integrated Definition, which integrates research and design to create meaningfully differentiated new products and services that drive business growth. He also practices what he preaches as a Director of Gravity Tank, a rapidly growing consulting firm that delivers Integrated Definition to Fortune 500 clients including Unilever, Goodyear, Samsung, Office Max, Motorola, and McDonald’s. He is the 2006 Chair of the IDSA/BusinessWeek IDEA Awards.

Chris acted as an interviewer, to have Todd discuss aspects of the collaborative relationship between Gravity Tank and Unilever.

Todd spoke about “erasing the boundary lines in the value chain.” He said that, for them, collaboration does not begin at the “brief” but at what they call “phase zero” defining what it is they are trying to accomplish.

He outlined the Unilever retail design process:

1. Address a business problem
2. Broaden your perspective
3. See it with fresh eyes
4. Work on it together
5. Prototype and pilot
6. Seek results

He spoke of the importance of category growth, no just product growth. It was sort of an Art Gensler thing–the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, to contribute to the betterment of the retail environment for all products in the Unilever lines as a way of differentiating their product!

Bruce Nussbaum
BusinessWeek

Bruce Nussbaum (on the right) is Assistant Managing Editor of Business Week. He writes frequently on design for the magazine, and analyzes the annual Industrial Designers Excellence Awards and the BusinessWeek / Architectural Record AIA Awards for the magazine. He also edits the weekly Economic Viewpoint column and writes essays and commentaries for the magazine. Nussbaum is widely credited with being the leading business writer in bringing design to the world of management. He is the editor in charge of BusinessWeek‘s new on-line publication on design and innovation. Prior to Business Week, Mr. Nussbaum was a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The American Banker.

Blaise Zerega
Managing Editor, Condé Nast Business Media

Blaise Zerega was appointed Managing Editor to Condé Nast’s new business magazine in January 2006. The new title is slated to launch in 2007. Previously he served as Managing Editor for WIRED magazine, and Editor of Red Herring magazine, where his editorial lens focused on the intersection of technology innovation, company formation, and investment opportunities. He has also worked at Forbes as News Editor for ASAP, the magazine’s technology supplement.

Some key observations from Nussbaum:

• Innovation is the new black
• Innovation yields margin
• Design has become strategy

Nussbaum is a very interesting character, and I hope you’ll look up his column regularly.

Check out the podcast of this conversation here.

Ben Tsiang

EVP Product Development, SINA.com

Ben Tsiang co-founded SINANET.com, the largest Chinese website in North America and the precursor of SINA.com. He has served as Vice President of Global Products, in charge of product integration and strategic planning with SINA’s localized web sites worldwide; General Manager of SINA Taiwan; GM of SINA East China; and GM of SINA Mobile. Mr. Tsiang was appointed to his current role of Executive Vice President of Product Development and GM of SINA Online in November 2003. He graduated from National Taiwan University and received a master’s degree from Stanford University.

Ben spoke of the Chinese market for design. He made a very interesting observation that one of the big challenges now in China is not rapid growth, but rational growth.

Social change is a big characteristic of the Internet there, since it is collapsing the gaps between Chinese regions and their distinctive and different cultures.

One of the interesting phenomenon is the “panda” culture—the fact that, since national policy limits families to one child, those children are considered very “precious” and are given everything.

Ben outlined big trends:

• From information centric to entertainment centric (technology)
• From the import killer to local content (software)
• From a geo-target to a generation-target (customer)
• From sales-driven to product-driven (marketing and innovation)
• From a single device to digital convergence
• From an international business model to a new paradigm

Ben offered some “rules of thumb” for participation in the Chinese market:

• Gear your designs toward upcoming fashions and pay attention to local context and symbols
• Catch the theme-based economy
• Develop content with locals
• Have great crisis handling talents
• Have a highly adaptive organization

Jeb Brugmann
Founding Partner, The Next Practice

For 20+ years Jeb Brugmann has been a leading practitioner in devising localised solutions, at scale, for business, government and international development agencies. Brugmann’s current work in The Next Practice focuses on supporting large corporations with consumer research, high-impact product, business model and distribution channel development, and customer relationship management approaches for very diverse local base-of-the-pyramid markets. Most recently, he led TNP’s work in India to develop rural distribution channels, marketing concepts, and partnership management frameworks.

Jeb spoke on strategies for understanding and serving the emerging marketplace that lies outside of the formal economy. He presented a diagram that illustrated that this market—what he called the informal of “other” economy—is twice as large as the economy we know, at about 3 billion people.

He took us through a series of perceptions (“lenses,” or biases, knowledge gaps) about the marketplace, illustrating that our paradigms of people and place could keep us from understanding and participating in the development of this next economy.

He spoke of certain characteristics of the emerging consumer:

• They compose psychodemographic clusters
• Co-creation is the order of the day
• Customer relationship management is a greater challenge with them–this is a trust-based economy
• Do not expect a “switch” to an economy that looks like our–participate in co-evolution

For example, he used illustrations from Dharavi, a Mumbai slum. In one, he showed a third world back alley that had none of the marks of commercial activity, but was the home of one of the world’s largest and most influential goatskin markets, a place where some of the world’s best designers of leather goods came to do business. In another, he illustrated how culture, tradition, and need developed very clever tools for using alternate, and alternative fuels, for cooking.

He advised us not to expect the “switch” that would turn these cultures and economies into a marketplace that looks like the one we participate in now.

Instead, he offered strategies for participation that included recognition of other market development potentials and characteristics, and alternative approaches.

Jeb is partner with C.K. Prahalad.
C.K is at the University of Michigan Business School. If you have not plugged in to Prahalad, you are missing one of the the most innovative, influential and important voices in business today. I wish we could find a way to collaborate with these guys in our own work.

(By the way, are you aware of former Genslerite, Cameron Sinclair? Cameron is a very important voice in support of emerging/challenged societies, leading Architecture for Humanity. He is profiled in the upcoming June issue of Wired magazine, as winner of one of the “2006 Rave Awards.”)

Douglas Look

Master of Design Methods student, IIT Institute of Design

Doug Look completes his Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design in 2006, where he concentrates on developing user-centered tools and methods for research and analysis. Before coming to ID, in his role as Senior Product Manager and Design Strategist at Autodesk, Inc., Doug led efforts to develop and bring to market two new Computer Aided Design software applications. As a licensed architect with over 20 years of experience, he has sought ways to implement digital technology solutions to improve work flow processes while respecting traditional methods and practices.

I liked his formulation of “Be Smart/Get Lucky,” which is provocative about the notion of chance (or maybe the elimination of chance?).

I also enjoyed his “Ways to get Smart…” by combining business and design sensibilities:

• Have big dreams.
• Include diverse disciplines.
• Consider business frameworks
• Stay naive.
• Use structured methods
• Be rigorous
• Develop repeatable processes

Doug talked about methodologies, specifically about “insight tools,” that he is developing. Key for him is the ability to isolate components of a problem, observe behaviors, develop insights, and then achieve innovation. He is building insights around support of tasks, encouragement of idea generation and building team and organizational culture.

His presentation (also look for it on the T drive) includes the history of development of Architectural Studio, as well as representations of the sophisticated tool sets he’s developing for problem research, analysis and design synthesis–tools we could test to increase the opportunity for our own innovation and creativity, and increasing the perception of the value of design for our clients.

Clement Mok

The Office of Clement Mok

Clement is a designer, digital pioneer, software publisher/developer, author, design patent holder and serial entrepreneur. A former creative director at Apple, he founded multiple successful design-related businesses–studio Archetype, CMCD and NetObjects. Most recently he was the Chief Creative Officer of Sapient, and the president of AIGA. Currently, he is Global Director of Design Planning at Sapient, CEO of CMCD Visual Symbols Library, and an independent consultant on a variety of product development projects.

What a wonderful presentation by Clement Mok.

Working now with Sapient, Clement talked about the development of a new model for an advertising agency, Agency 2.0, in the context of Web 2.0 (which, he says, significantly diminishes the power of traditional agencies to influence the market).

I’ve posted a copy of Clement’s presentation, very clever in its composition, on our T drive, and I hope you’ll find your way there.

This diagram is delicious and, I think, has implications on the way we conduct our business.

It aligns in provocative ways with our Power of Design diagram.

It makes me think about an inversion of its key words to encourage a measurable action (design ethics, design experiences, design influence, design delivery) and a search for methods to achieve a move from projects to process to “affect.”

Jeremy Alexis

Assistant Professor, IIT Institute of Design

Jeremy has spent the majority of his professional career leading interdisciplinary teams tasked with defining next generation products, services, and business models. He has worked with clients such as Unilever, Motorola, Citibank, Pfizer, American Express, Target Corporation, and Zebra Technologies. Jeremy’s research agenda involves understanding the strategic value of design and defining the role of design in business strategy. This research will develop a framework for the successful application of design methods, skills, and thinking to business problems related to competitiveness and organic growth.

Cynthia Benjamin

Senior Engagement Manager, Strategic Decisions Group

Ms. Benjamin has a concentration in business growth and innovation strategy, with eight years of consulting experience in business model development and corporate strategy with industry leaders such as Procter & Gamble, Federal Express, Genentech, and Cisco Systems. Prior to joining SDG, Ms. Benjamin was a design engineer at IDEO Product Development, as well as founder and general manager of Samson-McCann, Inc., designing and manufacturing unique furniture and home furnishings.

Their information was presented as a discussion between them, centering principally around the process SDG used in advising Ford on the development and launch of the new Mustang.

It was interesting to note their formulation that “innovation is top of mind, but bottom of list” in terms of attention in corporations.

They had an interesting diagram, using a hip messenger bag and a traditional briefcase to represent constituencies similar to those referenced by Roger Martin–design and business. Their diagram was a hopeful construct, allowing a flexible set of commitments to idea generation and value creation, and each dependent on execution excellence (what we’d call excellent delivery).

They offered “Principles for a New Model” of relationships between design and business for more effective innovation:

1. Build participation from both creative and operational sides
2. Focus on solving the highest value or highest difficulty problems first
3. Align incentives to support process, not results
4. Utilize clear, effective, reliable and flexible modes
5. Identify goals and diagnose the current state

In the Mustang program, they justified corporate commitments on four axes (design approach, volume and price, capital investments, and product demand) along scales with end points of business led vs. design led values, and approaches.

A key tool for them was something they called a “tornado chart.”
This is a financial model which used influences having an effect on success, and measurables associated with the degree of uncertainty or value associated with each influence.
The object is to define net present value to shape corporate commitments to innovations and product development programs.

Natalia C. Davis
Partner, Kairos Inc.

Natalia has been consulting internationally since 1997. She is considered a business anthropologist who studies organizations and markets as networks of human interaction. Her clients include ABB, Heidelberg Press, AT&T, Applied Materials and KLA-Tencor. Under her leadership, Kairos Inc. consults one client each year. The remainder of her time is spent on investment research. She has frequently lectured at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and at the New York Society of Security Analysts.

Russell G. Redenbaugh, CFA
Partner, Kairos, Inc.

Russell was a partner in Cooke & Bieler, Inc., a Philadelphia based investment management firm from 1969 to 1999. While there he helped grow the business from $125M to over $6 billion in stock and bond assets. Along the way he served as a security analyst, portfolio manager, Chief Investment Officer and economic strategist. Mr. Redenbaugh also served as a Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for 15 years before resigning in 2005. In 2003, 2004 and 2005 he won the gold medal in the World Jujitsu Competition held in Brazil.

Natalia Davis and Russell Redenbaugh direct Kairos. They invest, and advise people on how to increase the value of their companies. They have a unique interest in designers–designers as key attributes in the valuation of companies.

I had an appointment, and did not have an opportunity to attend their presentation directly, but I tuned in when, in a later panel discussion, Patrick Whitney told them their presentation “blew me away.” Check out the transcription of their talk and their slides, and you’ll see why.

In the panel discussion I did see, I was impressed with Natalie’s challenge to the methodology presented by Cynthia Benjamin earlier in the day. Natalie seemed to confound Cynthia when she demanded an understanding of how one could “sell” an innovation–a commitment of stakeholder resources– before engaging in the innovation development process and without being able to also assert a reliable return on the innovation investment.

Natalia’s perspective, very much on the “reliability” side of the scale, demanded discipline–the responsibility that any initiative for innovation or new program presented to a CEO have a demonstrably predictable effect on the valuation of the company. The exchange ultimately was unresolved–a perfect illustration, I thought, of Roger Martin’s cultural observations.

Nonetheless, I think that Natalia’s discipline is worthy of our consideration. We have not traditionally been held to account for the return on a design investment, but we regularly assert that our designs will benefit our clients’ operations. Now, however, we are increasingly being asked to “prove” this assertion.

It is also interesting to me to consider how much more differentiated we might be if we were able to demonstrate measurable past success, and tell stories and provide illustrations that could give greater confidence in the probability of future value associated with our designs.

Some other observations:

• The importance of closing the gap between interpretation (innovation) and effective action
• Moving the dialogue about value from tangible/intangible to measurable/non-measurable
• Time, a non-renewable resource, is the only real value

In a wrap-up session, Chris Meyer summarized the sessions in terms he outlined as “context,” “merging” and “emerging.”

Context represented the present, but also with the implications of the “baggage” of the past. He spoke of our (business’s) apparent preference for a static system. But around us there is a continuing acceleration of change. He defined the role of exploration as removing constraints.

The merging condition was the development of new definitions of value—that there is no value until you experience value: The implications of customer-created value.

Finally, emerging represented the phenomenon of “bottom-up governance” and the notion of self-organizing networks.

Chris verbally described a 2×2 diagram that I hope I’ve represented appropriately here.

His point was that business and design meet best in the upper right quadrant, with the development of a new value chain.

He closed with the observation that we are now about “the design of organizations in the post-corporate economy.”

Quoting from a Tom Stopard play, Arcadia, he said, “It’s the best possible time to be alive when everything you thought you knew–is wrong.”