The BIG THING now is innovation and startups. It has been the case in my life for the past 5 years or so. Teaching how to create new ventures, building HSE{Inc}, being involved with BIT competition, sailing eXtrepreneurship… I’m at SKOLKOVO now, and it’s new game (BTW, it’s SKOLKOVO, the school, not the «innograd»). It used to be that in my work content came first and then, if there were some bits of resources left, came the form. Now there’s a stylish and grandiose form waiting to be filled with worthy content. A different kind of challenge.
But innovation and startups at SKOLKOVO is not an entirely new game, because its a people game. And good people are hard to find. And one has to try several times before learning to play it well. So, I expect to meet many of the same people in the SKOLKOVO innovation and startups orbit; actually, quite a few of them are already there.
Why we call it now «Innovation Design»? Because now it’s even more about people. New products and services are more and more driven by not what is technologically possible, but what is the most desirable by people. For the «golden billion» on this planet, most of the needs can be satisfied by many different ways such that the difference in functionality or usefulness of the competing products is negligible. That’s where the emotional and subjective stuff comes more and more important. So, the new products and services need to be created with a process focused on people issues, and it’s often referred to as human-centered design. Once it’s design, you go and borrow the most useful methods from the toolkit of a designer, because a designer always designs for a human, and gets rewarded largely through emotional and subjective judgment.