Why Service Design is as important as Product Design
Continuum Redesigns Audi’s Car Dealership Experience. Appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek in February 2013.
Why invest your time in this article?
There is a growing understanding that “the design of gadgets such as cell phones is less important than the services that come with them, whether it’s going to the store for tech support or sorting through billing snafus online.”
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Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen. Appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 20, 2011.
Video of the interview with Andreessen.
Why invest your time in this article?
It’s an insightful look at the reasons that software is disrupting seemingly every industry out there, putting itself at the center of every world. Andreessen has been an Internet pioneer, first as one of the authors of the Mosaic browser, then as a founder of Netscape, then as the founder of Loudcloud and now as a high-tech investor.
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The Great Tech War Of 2012: Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy. Published in Fast Company in October 2011.
Why invest your time in this article?
The four giants of the Internet are headed on a collision course in the fight for all of our mindshare and wallets. It’s a complex battle and this article takes a fairly deep look at the field.
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The Man Who Inspired Steve Jobs (It was Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography). Appeared in The New York Times on October 7, 2011.
A related piece about Jobs and Land from Fast Company magazine on March 21, 2011.
Why invest your time in these articles?
Of all of the memorial articles about Steve Jobs, these have some of the freshest insights into the sources of his genius.
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Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity by McKinsey Consulting. Published in May 2011.
Why invest your time in this article?
Even if you only read the Executive Report (which should take you about 10-15 minutes), McKinsey provides a great framework for understanding how massive datasets have the potential to impact a range of industries including the public sector, retail and manufacturing.
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Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect and how it came to be.
Kinect for Xbox 360: The inside story of Microsoft’s secret ‘Project Natal’ by David Rowan. Published in Wired in November 2011
Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics by Jason Tanz. Published in Wired in July 2011.
Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, gave a great talk on Technology Convergence at Northwestern University in October 2011.
Why invest your time in these articles?
The Kinect has opened many minds to the near-future of interfaces between us and our computers, and how computers will adapt to our interface needs, instead of the other way around. The first article explains the product development journey for the Kinect within Microsoft. The second article explains the story of how Microsoft came to embrace the open source community that sprung up to create new applications using the Kinect.
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The Internet of Things in McKinsey Quarterly. Published in March 2010. (Free site registration required to read the full article.)
Why invest your time in this article?
“More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.” This article details how six types of applications are emerging in two broad categories: information and analysis and automation and control.
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Two great profiles of Chicago’s top technology leaders and employers were published in October 2011. And an excellent history and overview of Chicago’s Private Equity (PE) firms was published in December 2011.
Chicago’s Top 50 Digital Companies.
Tech 25 people of Chicago.
Private Equity, Chicago Style.
Why invest your time in these three sets of profiles?
Built in Chicago and Crain’s Chicago both do a good job of profiling a cross-section of Chicago’s technology innovators, showing the range of people and companies (outside Groupon!) helping make our local tech and investing scene incredibly exciting.
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Startup Nation – The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, published in 2009.
Why invest your time in this book?
A well-researched and presented profile of a country whose startup culture and high-tech successes have come to rival Silicon Valley. Anyone concerned with US economic competitiveness in the global economy will value this great read.
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Low Fidelity Prototypes (Lo-Fis) are a great technique for exploring new concepts and approaches.
- An overview of 3 different lo-fi methods in You can’t deny the lo-fi. Published by gravitytank in 2011.
- Scenario boards can be used to improve validation of early product and service concepts. Authored by Insight Product Development and published by the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) in January 2006.
- Prototype Technologies are Ruining Your Prototypes. Published by Bob Zimmerman on the Getting Predictable blog on June 7, 2011.
Why invest your time in these articles?
If you were on the team inventing the iPod or the Tivo, you couldn’t just ask potential customers for their opinions on the products, since they couldn’t even imagine them. Lo-Fis are a rapid and low-cost method for prototyping new concepts and getting rich feedback.
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Several perspectives on the shortage of highly-skilled talent in Chicago and nationwide.
- Reinventing Recruiting. Companies like Google and Facebook are downplaying résumés and identifying talent in unusual ways. An excerpt from George Anders’s book The Rare Find.
- Local companies offer incentives to attract technology talent in the Chicago Sun-Times in June 2011, profiling the Lante alumni who started kCura and Norvax.
- For Buyers of Web Start-Ups, Quest to Corral Young Talent in The New York Times in May 2011. ”Sam Lessin sold his Web start-up to Facebook for millions last year, and Facebook promptly shut it down. All Facebook wanted was Mr. Lessin.”
- The 6 Hottest New Jobs in IT in InfoWorld in June 2011.
- Can Retraining Give the Unemployed a Second Chance? Americans looking for employment often lack the skills they need. Retraining works. Sometimes. Published in Businessweek in September 2011.
- Best Practices for Recruiting and Integrating Junior Talent. Published by Geneca in April 2011.
Why invest your time in these articles?
It’s an unfortunate irony of The Great Recession that countless highly-skilled, growth-related jobs go unfilled because our country lacks the needed workforce. These articles give a variety of perspectives on the highly-skilled labor market of 2011.
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Predictive Analytics are quietly and profoundly changing the process of making decisions.
- How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters. Published in the MIT Technology Review in December 2012.
- Data Analytics: Crunching the Future. New analytics technology is predicting behavior—and building businesses. Published in Businessweek in September 2011.
- Several books (Freakonomics, Super Crunchers and Moneyball) and one major motion picture (Moneyball) tell the stories of people in medicine, education, sports, government and many fields of business who are using data to trump the traditional experts and make smarter decisions than their competitors.
- Predicting extreme weather weeks in advance. Published in Bloomberg Businessweek in September 2011.
- What Data Can’t Do by David Brooks. Published in the New York Times in February 2013.
Why invest your time in these article, books or movie recommendations?
Data-driven decision making has become far too important to ignore. Period.
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Which of the people you work with resemble which character on The Simpsons?
Why invest your time in this exercise?
It’s really fun.