Coke's New Design Direction

Five years ago, Coca-Cola's design chief was told: "We need to do more with design. Go figure it out." Now his labors are bearing fruit

BusinessWeek, August 25, 2008 — When David Butler joined Coca-Cola (KO) almost five years ago, he was given, as he tells it, "the Post-it Note mandate: We need to do more with design. Go figure it out." Butler, who had come from a gig as director of brand strategy at the interactive marketing and consulting firm Sapient, had soon written up a 30-page manifesto laying out a design strategy for the company. But if Butler, who's now vice-president for design, has made an impact at the beverage giant, it's not because of some heady proclamation. Instead it's because he has learned the most effective way to implement design strategy at a company as large and complex as Coca-Cola: avoid the word "design" as much as possible.

Building Expertise Through Collective Innovation

The Raymond open-innovation conference gathered design managers from companies such as Heineken and Lego to share best practices and improve the bottom line

BusinessWeek, March 5, 2008 — Open innovation has been a hot management phrase for the past five years. So far, though, these collaborations have generally been focused on small-scale research and development, or technology ventures between giant global brands and smaller partners. Think Proctor & Gamble's (PG) collaborations with universities and suppliers or IBM's (IBM) embrace of an open-source software language which both saves the company money and provides it with a new revenue stream.

But what if you brought together design heads from some of the world's biggest global brands with the aim of stimulating innovation? That was the premise of the fifth annual Raymond conference on Feb. 28 and 29 in Rotterdam attended by 17 design managers from companies as diverse as Heineken,... continue reading

Herman Miller's Creative Network

CEO Brian Walker talks about tapping the furniture company's creative network for insights and breakthrough ideas

BusinessWeek, February 15, 2008 — Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker talks with Corporate Design Foundation Chairman Peter Lawrence about tapping the creative network for insights and breakthrough ideas.

Navistar to unveil luxury heavy-duty truck

Crain's Chicago Business, February 7, 2008 — Navistar International Corp. will begin offering a new heavy-duty truck aimed at the high end of the market where the company has struggled to sell trucks in the past.

The Warrenville-based company’s will unveil its new LoneStar model today at the Chicago Auto Show at McCormick Place.

The big highway tractor attempts to combine daring exterior styling and lots of interior comforts with the Navistar’s latest performance innovations, such as better fuel mileage and improved suspension.

Richard Sapper: Fifty Years at the Drawing Board

At 75, design pioneer Richard Sapper continues to push his craft in new directions

BusinessWeek, January 21, 2008 — To get to Richard Sapper's studio in central Milan, you have to take a creaking, 100-year-old elevator to the fourth floor of the apartment building where he and his wife have lived for decades. The elevator has the original dark wood paneling, and the ancient gears and pulleys hoist it upward at a glacial pace. So the feeling on approaching Sapper's lair is that you're traveling back in time. But Sapper, a pioneer of industrial design who got his start at Daimler-Benz in the mid-1950s, is not stuck in the past. Even at 75, he is still experimenting

Imagining Apple's Future

We asked design, innovation, and marketing pros what the folks who gave us the iPod should focus on now

BusinessWeek, January 17, 2008 — Business schools and design consultants have a favorite exercise they like to use when they're trying to prod students and colleagues to come up with new ways of thinking about old problems. It's called What Would Apple Do? The idea is to think of a horrendously complicated problem and imagine what Apple would do to come up with a simple, elegant, engaging solution that's delightful to the eye and easy to use.

Our designers tried to imagine what would happen if Apple took its design process and applied it beyond its usual stomping grounds. What if Steve Jobs took the stage and dramatically unveiled an Apple car? Or Apple iMoney software to manage your finances?

Mazda's Quest for Cool

Under design director Franz von Holzhausen, Mazda has unveiled a steady stream of sexy concepts. But the effort has yet to translate into any actual products

BusinessWeek, November 26, 2007 — Seven men in white lab coats are scraping the sides of a life-size car model, rapidly transforming a massive lump of clay into a sleek form with the silhouette of a sporty coupe. Thin shavings fall to the floor as the designers mold shapes to resemble those of the giant sketch of the car hanging above them on the wall. All the while, Franz von Holzhausen, Mazda's (MZDAF) tall, tow-headed director of design for North America, is watching intently.

But Holzhausen isn't supervising designers at the company's hush-hush research and development facility in Irvine, Calif. Instead, the project is unfolding publicly at a dramatic pace on the floor of the Los Angeles Auto Show—almost like a theatrical performance.

Bringing design to blue chips

Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO

FORTUNE, November 12, 2007 — Design firm IDEO may be small by Fortune 500 standards, but its impact is huge. The legendary Palo Alto consultancy has worked on thousands of projects for clients like Nokia (Charts), P&G (Charts, Fortune 500), and Whirlpool (Charts, Fortune 500); IDEO's team of MBAs, engineers, and designers has helped companies create products from the first Apple mouse to the Palm V to Crest's first standup tube of toothpaste.

Where Designers Rule

Electronics maker Bang & Olufsen doesn't ask shoppers what they want. Its faith is in its design gurus

BusinessWeek, November 5, 2007 — Torsten Valeur, one of Bang & Olufsen's top designers, sits in a windowless room in Gumi, South Korea, staring dumbfounded at a group of Samsung Electronics engineers and thinks, "Oh, s---." Valeur is designing a new high-end cell phone for B&O, the Danish company known for its cutting-edge consumer electronics, and Samsung, a partner providing mobile-phone technology. Valeur, here for a routine three-day product-update meeting, has just received terrible news. Without telling him, the Samsung engineers changed the screen on his phone from 2.1 inches to 2 in. Why? Because 2-in. screens are standard, and that's what is in stock. Worse, they've gone ahead and ordered thousands

At Frog, Being Green Isn’t Easy; It’s Essential

Committing to clean design

Fast Company, November 1, 2007 — Looking back, 2007 may well be remembered as the year green went mainstream: Al Gore got an Oscar, Wal-Mart flogged organic jammies, and bottled water went from being a symbol of purity to the beverage equivalent of a pack of Luckies.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the green ethos been embraced more fervently than in the design community, a group that, in the words of Frog Design president and COO Doreen Lorenzo, "inherently wants to do good and change the world."