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Design Innovation Inspiration

Listen to Ed Catmull’s “Pixar’s Collective Genius” talk, for Harvard Business Review

Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull exemplifies the greatest form of leadership: empowering others to achieve the extraordinary. People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. Ed Catmul is an unpretentious man. He doesn’t like to talk about how he performs his job as president of Pixar and (since a 2006 merger) Disney Animation Studios. But the article and accompanying podcast shed light on his exceptional leadership qualities […]

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Design Innovation

Watch Marc Rettig’s “How to Change Complicated Stuff” talk at IxDA | Interaction ’09 Conference

In this talk Marc Rettig offers insights into the question “what is it like to actually achieve a meaningful, sustainable, positive difference in life?”, drawing lessons from a number of serious, heartfelt attempts to affect change. The work we have all done in recent decades has prepared us to take on much bigger challenges. The foundations of design remain powerfully effective. That said, there are ways in which “designing for change” requires additions to our inventory of methods, and transformations in the way we plan and conduct our work […]

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China Consumer Behavior Economics

China, Socialism & Consumer Behavior: looks to its own consumers

China is rebalancing its economy to focus more on domestic consumption than exports in order to achieve its growth target, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has said. Addressing an Asian regional forum in southern China, he announced a $10bn (over 1.5 billion US dollars) fund for infrastructure projects in south-east Asia […]

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Design

David Griffin’s “Photography connects us with the world” talk at TED

The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories […]

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Information Technology Innovation Software

Bill Joy’s “What I’m worried about, what I’m excited about” talk at TED

Technologist and futurist Bill Joy talks about several big worries for humanity — and several big hopes in the fields of health, education and future tech […]