Seth Godin gave a speech on the topic of innovation strategy in low growth economy at the Dong-A Business Forum 2015. I was invited to moderate his speech in December, 2015.
Seth Godin is an Author, Entrepreneur and Most of All, A teacher. Seth is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 20 best-selling books, including The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What To Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn). His book, This is Marketing, was an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The latest book is The Practice, and creatives everywhere have made it a bestseller. Though renowned for his writing and speaking, Seth also founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne (acquired by Yahoo!). By focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership, to the spread of ideas and changing everything, Seth has been able to motivate and inspire countless people around the world.
In our conversation, he asked us to be artists and be hubris. In his words, artists are the people who challenge conventional rules with brevity, insights, and determination. Only those who fail constatntly will become artists.
He made it clear that mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing do not work any more. In the past, average products appealed. However, only ultimate products or “art” appeal in the new, connected world.
While emphasizing the value of constant failures, he separated ready from preparedness. Ready means that people are ready to embrace failure. Since many Koreans are not ready but prepared to be perfect, he suggested them to be Salto Mortale, a desperate jump translated into Italian.
Coming January 3rd to 6th of 2022, EBS Business Review will broadcast “Behavioral Economics for Dummies.”
The world-renowned bestseller book, Nudge, by Richard H. Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, is well known for its coverage of behavioral economics. The term nudge which has an idiomatic meaning of nudging with an elbow refers to guiding people’s choices through gentle intervention instead of compulsion or coercion. Different from normative economics and descriptive psychology, prescriptive behavioral economics intervenes and guides people’s choices by closing the gap between behavior and mind.
What is the hidden key of behavioral economics? You will learn its various cases which show the power that moves the world.
The secret of 99% adoption of organ donation (January 3rd)
As medical dramas suggest, hospitals need more organ doners. In order to solve the supply-demand problem of organ donation in Korea, a policy was implemented in 2007 which inserts a statement regarding donation into the driver’s license upon issuance or renewal. However, the survey result in 2018 showed that the actual number of those who wish to donate is only about 3%.
What about other countries? If we look into the organ donation rate in European countries in the early 2000s, Denmark had a rate of about 5%, Germany had a rate of about 12%. However, there are many other countries boasting a rate of 99%, such as Portugal and France. What is the secret behind these countries with a high donation rate? We will explore successful uses of behavioral economics that change people’s behavior.
Public institutions can be smarter (January 4th)
Click on image to play video
In 2020, an experiment was conducted in US to find out how to increase the vaccination rate for the flu. As a result of sending 20 messages that encouraged people to get vaccinated, the most effective one was the combination of messages sent three days before vaccination saying “a flu vaccine is available for you” and one day before vaccination saying “a flu vaccine has been reserved for your appointment.” For those who received these messages, they made a promise to themselves to get vaccinated, resulting in an increased vaccination rate of about 5%.
Since behavioral economics brings great results with little cost, it is actively applied in many public institutions. Let’s listen to other cases of public policy which solve tough social problems.
When tech giants meet behavioral economics (January 5th)
Click on image to play video
Marketing is a key area in which behavioral economics is actively applied. Various mechanisms can be used to target customers, which can lead to an increase in revenue and market share. Lyft, a ride-sharing company once conducted an experiment to encourage users to drive during peak demand times, Friday nights, instead of quiet mornings on Wednesdays.
They divided drivers into two groups randomly. One group was given information that their income would increase if they worked on Friday night. The other group was given information that their income would decrease if they did not work on Friday night. More people in the latter group chose to drive Friday night because people tended to avoid loss, helping Lyft mobilize the drivers’ behavior. What are the other special secrets of behavioral economics that change peoples’ choices and help companies increase profits?
Nudge yourself (January 6th)
Click on image to play video
Self control is a process of paying the small pain in the present to obtain a greater gain in the future. But when the pain in the present is overwhelming to bear, people lose their motivation to control themselves. To solve this problem, we have to go beyond the present bias and go back to the past self.
Imagine that alarm wakes you up in the early morning. If you want to overcome the thought of having sleep for one more hour, you need to go back to the ‘me’ last night who set the alarm. To make a rational decision, you have to remember your own attitude of yesterday when getting up early eventually leads to a greater benefit than oversleep. We will introduce the secret of behavioral economics that makes a better ‘me’ based on deep understanding of human.
Jaewoo Joo is a field researcher who applies academic insights to solve real world problems. He received a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Toronto after obtaining a Bachelor degree and a Master degree from Seoul National University. Jaewoo is interested in developing customer experience by utilizing empathic design thinking and counter-intuitive behavioral economics. He is an associate professor of marketing and participating professor of experience design at Kookmin University.
References
Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives? Science, 302(5649), 1338–1339.
Milkman, K. L., Patel, M. S., Gandhi, L., Graci, H. N., Gromet, D. M., Ho, H., … Duckworth, A. L. (2021). A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor’s appointment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 118).
Scheiber, N. (2017). How Uber uses psychological tricks to push its drivers’ buttons, The New York Times, April 2, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological-tricks.html.
Soman, D., & Shi, M. (2003). Virtual progress: The effect of path characteristics on perceptions of progress and choice. Management Science, 49(9), 1229–1250.
I was invited by Contents Marketing Summit 2022 to help two professionals share their insights about marketing trends and activities in the age of customer experience. The two professionals are Hyewon Oh, Director of Brand Communication at HE Division, LG Electronics and Ginny Lee, Head of Sports Marketing and Key City Brand Activation at Adidas. They both have 20+ year work experience in the marketing field.
Customer eXperience (CX) matters significantly in Korea because product-based differentiation is challenging more than ever and people strive to experience something new. The invited two professionals introduced several interesting projects and provided participants with fresh insights.
First, LG Electronics is now running a pop-up store called “Geumseong (Goldstar) Recreational Room.” People could play video games with the high-end OLED TVs, having gaming experience. It is also collaborating with world-class artists such as Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor at the Freeze Art Fair in London and LA, Saatchi Gallery, and Venice Biennale at the same time. While introducing these activities, Director Oh highlighted that only persistent activities work out.
Second, Adidas Korea is running various activities to directly participating in numerous customers, from city tours with Son Heung-min to CSR running events all over the city. Marketer Oh emphasized that in order to engage customers, activities should be designed to give chances for customers to participate in special experience.
They both concluded that commercial impact of marketing activities in the CX era is difficult to be measured in a short run. CX marketers need to be persistent and participatory.
Professor Steve Blank gave a speech on the topic of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Dong-A Business Forum 2021. I was invited to moderate his speech in December, 2021.
Steve is a serial startup founder and entrepreneur educator. He founded 8 startups in 1980s and then developed the concept of Customer Development. In 2011, Steve designed a class of Lean LaunchPad by combining his Customer Development with Agile Engineering and Business Model Canvas. His Customer Development is known to inspire Eric Ries and the basis of Lean Startup. His curriculum has been adopted by multiple universities and NSF Innovation Corps, in particular, the departments of defense and diplomacy. Steve is currently working as a researcher and teacher at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Coumbia University.
In our conversation, he mentioned that “Don’t just come up with a business plan in your head.” Instead “go to the field, meet customers in person, and verify hypothesis quickly.” This is a so-called Lean Startup. He advised large corporations in Korea to “separate the teams who implement existing business models and the teams who are free to experiment with innovation.”
While he stressed Voice Of Customers (VOC), he highlighted pivot particularly in the post-COVID era. “If you meet a piece of information which tells you that the concept is wrong, you need to revise your business model quickly. In the 20th century, doing so was impossible. However, doing so saves money and time now. It prevents you from going to the wrong direction.”
He claimed that pivot is more than a methodology. “A culture where everyone including executives can openly communicate about what went wrong with the initial plan. No business plan can survive if it is reprimanded for pointing out something is wrong. So I think pivot is a cultural issue not a methodological one.”
Matt Kingdon gave a speech on the topic of design innovation at the Dong-A Business Form 2014. I was invited to moderate his speech by Jinseo Cho, a staff reporter of the Dong-A Business Review (DBR) and editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Korea (HBR korea). Matt is the founder of ?Whatif! innovation and has over 20 years of innovation consulting experience. He proposed that innovation is not the addition but the multiplication of four “i”s – identify, insight, idea, and implement. Put differently, Innovation cannot happen when any one of four “i” is missing, highlighting the equal importance of every aspect of innovation from research to ideation to execution.
He further emphasized in his speech that innovation needs simple tools and exploratory behaviors. First, he introduced tools such as “customer shoes” and “rope of scope.” Although these tools sounds simple, they enable managers to take the perspective of customers (customer shoes) and to prioritize needs and ideas instantly (rope of scope or simply placing needs/ideas inside or out of the rope). Managers use these tools not only to identify customers’ deeply rooted needs and address them effectively.
Then, he suggested that innovation needs the behaviors that promote exploration such as courageous curiosity or “Greenhousing.” Managers should be brave enough to pursue their curiosity and, more importantly, they should nurture immature ideas into commercially appealing innovative solutions.
His speech reminded me of David Kelley’s conversation with Roger Martin. Last year, David said, in order to generate wild ideas, people should have confidence about their own creativity (creative confidence) and then need a series of safe, small successes (guided mastery). Similarly, Matt highlighted courageous curiosity and greenhousing. To me, the most powerful insight from his speech is that innovation needs simple tools rather than a rigid process; innovators need rooms to improvise.
Speech at Seoul by Jan Chipchase (Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog, Author of Hidden in Plain Sight)
Title: “Leap of Faith”
Synopsis: “Drawing on over a decade working for Fortune 500 and Korean clients Jan’s talk will explore the use of real-world insights to inform and inspire design, strategy, challenge minds and flutter hearts. The talk will cover a sample project all the way through to cutting edge techniques in obtaining insight and discuss why sometimes, against the better judgement of the organization it requires a leap of faith.”
Time: October 28, 2013 (Mon) 4-6PM
Place: Conference Hall, Administration Building, Kookmin University
시놉시스: 얀 칩체이스는 지난 10년동안 포춘 500대 기업과 한국 기업들을 대상으로 프로젝트를 수행하면서, 현실 세계에서 발굴한 인사이트가 디자인과 전략을 개선하고, 틀에 갇힌 사람들의 생각에 도전하며, 심지어는 사람의 마음을 움직일 수도 있다는 점을 보여주었습니다. 본 강연에서는, 기존에 수행한 프로젝트 뿐만 아니라 인사이트 발굴에 사용되는 기법들도 함께 선보일 예정이며, 다양한 사례와 기법들을 통하여 언제, 왜 데이터에 기반한 판단보다 믿음이 조직의 발전에 도움이 되는지 논의하려고 합니다.
Welcome Jan! On Oct 28, 2013, he gave a speech at Kookmin University, Seoul. He shared with the attendants his unique perspective and rich insights as an Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog and author of Hidden in Plain Sight. In total, 280 people showed up. This event was run by Ran Yoon who is working at the product development team, SK Telecom, and used to work at the marketing team, Samsung Electronics Canada. One of the attendants, Jaeyong Yi, the president of PXD, a Korean design consulting agency, wrote his review in Korean language.
The Design Society and the Organizing Committee of ICED13 invite young design researchers and designers, including design students, to participate in this discussion on the future of design and to join the networking of international young design community. Please send an email to dinstitute@skku.edu with your name, affiliation and contact information by August 16th (Friday) to join this free of charge special event. For more information, please visit ICED13 website, www.iced13.org, or send your inquires to the Creative Design Institute, dinstitute@skku.edu.
Professors David Dunne and Uli Menzefricke taught me how to lead business courses from course development and teaching methods to teaching devices, student assessment and feedback. Teaching business sounds very different from teaching design.
I served as a panelist for 2009 Business Week’s World’s Best Design Schools (see the panelists).
How to Nurture Future Leaders
By Venessa Wong on September 30, 2009
Design thinking brings creative techniques to business. The only problem? No one can agree on how to teach its methods
It’s a scary time to be a new graduate. But some seem more optimistic than others.
Around the world, graduates are emerging from interdisciplinary master’s programs that integrate design, technology, and business. These professionals are trained in “design thinking.” Sure, it’s the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges.
The only problem? There’s no consensus on how to teach it. And there’s no agreement on where these thinkers should spring from. Should design schools create more business-focused creatives, or should business schools foster creative thinking in their MBAs? For now, both approaches to innovating education are rolling out, and both types of programs appear on the 2009 BusinessWeek D-school List.
Different Programs, Different Results
As departments build on their unique strengths to formulate new programs, varied results have emerged. Some programs are co-taught by professors from design, business, and other departments, such as at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Others, such as a partnership between three schools in Helsinki, bring together students from various universities for cross-disciplinary project work. Another approach: dual degrees in business administration and design, such as the MBA and Master’s in Design program from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Despite the different approaches, the programs have a similar aim: to merge design, business, and technology. Professors urge students to value cross-disciplinary teamwork, to defy inclinations and shatter silos. The theory: Working across functions will offer fresh perspectives on perennial problems and generate more comprehensive and original results. The goal is to combine creative confidence and analytic ability, says David Kelley, founder of Stanford’s d.school and design consultancy IDEO. “The best students are competent in both.”
It’s still early days, and the chasm between business and design yawns. Closer cooperation is necessary. Designers who exhibit business acumen can be involved at a more strategic level within a corporation. Executives who learn to apply design methods such as prototyping or brainstorming have a better shot at building a corporate culture that nurtures innovation—and the business’ bottom line.
What to Expect?
According to Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the early supporters of the discipline, “Every corporation needs a design-thinking type.” That includes industries that may seem like unlikely bedfellows for design, such as banks and law firms.
Visa (V) launched the Global Innovation Strategy Group in September 2008 to align corporate strategy with consumer needs. “As great as an MBA is, we were looking for something more,” says Scott Sanchez, senior business leader for the group. Earlier in 2009, Sanchez hired Laura Jones, 27, a recent graduate from Stanford’s d.school program.
And a number of corporations such as Procter & Gamble (PG), Samsung, and Steelcase (SCS) are beginning to integrate design thinking and its proponents across operations. Harley-Davidson (HOG) has hired graduates from Northwestern University’s joint MBA and Master’s in Engineering Management program into its Leadership Development Program and gradually promoted them to all levels of management—from product development and marketing to finance and global manufacturing strategy, says Matt Levatich, president and chief operating officer.
Designer-Led Backlash
And yet, as design thinking moves to the front burner as an innovation tool of choice, questions remain about how its theories can slot into the framework of the business world. Jones is quick to detail that not all of her classmates have found jobs that call for design thinking. Not all corporations know what it is or how to apply it. “It is a work in progress,” she says.
Some designers also balk at the concept, seeing it as a dilution of an industry and discipline they themselves have studied so hard and for so long. “If you teach design thinking, you’re teaching talking: how to use words to describe design,” says Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of San Mateo (Calif.)-based design and innovation consultancy Jump Associates. Patnaik says he looks to hire designers and then trains them in business skills as necessary.
Gadi Amit, founder of San Francisco-based NewDeal Design, also has reservations. “Some people think they graduate with industrial design plus capabilities,” he says. Instead, he says, the graduates lack grounding. Nonetheless, Amit acknowledges things may yet evolve. “I am not precluding that maybe there will be a new type of designer, splitting the profession into all sorts of strands and directions, but we are not there yet.”
At this stage, the true impact of design thinking has yet to be seen in industry, as classes are small and graduates are a mere drop in the ocean of global business. But educators, executives, and public officials around the world are investing in the potential of the technique to provide new insight and enhance innovation in a time that desperately needs both. We may not truly appreciate the fruits of these educational experiments for some time, but if effective, these graduates might just redefine the way the world does business.
Click on image to play video
