Posts of the Week for June 7, 2011
- How to kill innovation, in five easy steps: Jason Hiner talks about five ways in which organizations “snuff out innovation. Given that I work at the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, this list seems relevant to me. Or perhaps at least the quote below exemplifies the feeling I have:
“We live in an era of innovation. If you’re standing still, you’re going backward.”
(O’Reilly’s Radar, May 27, 2011)
- Four Keys To Creating Products For The Lady Gaga Generation: Sarah Nagle writes about four characteristics of Gen Y that are important for designers to understand.
- “Gen Y is a generation of self-confident optimists.”
- “Gen Y into a generation that expects change and regards instant as not fast enough.”
- “Gen Y today is highly connected and uses peer-to-peer exchange, crowdsourcing, and collaborative filtering to shape their world. Design must take into consideration that Gen Y is more interested in use than ownership.”
- “Gen Y doesn’t want to work for the man, so by providing tools to let us co-create, customize it, make it meaningful, and see success quickly, we will love it –- and we will make it.”
(NextDigest Design, June 3, 2011)
- Getting Started With Defensive Web Design: Ian Lurie provides some great examples of defensive web design.
“A good design assumes that people make mistakes. A bad one leaves visitors stuck at a dead end because they mistyped one character. The best professionals account for this with smart, defensive design strategies.”
(NextDigest Design, June 3, 2011)
- You don’t get sh*t you don’t ask for: Jason Freedman describes how just asking, significantly helped him with his startup. He relates a story about nearly every VC they spoke with, even if they didn’t fund his startup, ended with…
“If there’s ever anything I can ever do to help, please let me know.”
And he continues with how asking for help was one of the best things he did. He also gives a few suggestions: “Ask for what you want, make your request very concrete, don’t use and abuse, (my favorite) pay it forward, and say thank you.”
(StartupDigest, June 3, 2011)
- The Truth Behind Innovation: Continuing with the topic of innovation, Paloma Vazquez summarizes a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker. She pulls out two quotes:
“Who is credited with the invention – he/they who created it, or who successfully adapted and executed it?”
-and-
“Disruptive innovation happens – and he/she that adapts an idea best to the needs of a changing market will succeed.”
(NextDigest Design, June 3, 2011)
- Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars: Trying to take back copyright for the good of the world.
“Many colleges now have the ability to digitize a wide variety of collections for broad use but frequently back away. And that reluctance harms scholarship, because researchers end up not using valuable documents if they can’t afford to fly to a distant archive to see them.”
(NextDigest EdTech, June 3, 2011)
