Glossary and Resources

Brainstorming is an activity in which multiple ideas are generated about a given topic, by freely sharing initial, undeveloped ideas. Typically, a constraint such as time or a word restriction helps to galvanize more creative ideas. Quantity of ideas is the goal. This activity should ideally be followed up with an action plan of how to apply the ideas that have been netted.

Brand equity describes the value of having a well-known brand name. The owner of a well-known brand name can generate more money from products with that brand name than from products with a less-well-known name. Some marketing researchers have concluded that brands are one of the most valuable assets a company has, because brand equity can increase the financial value of a brand to the brand owner.

Brand loyalty refers to a consumer’s commitment to repurchase a brand’s product or otherwise continue to support a brand with positive behaviors such as word-of-mouth advocacy.

Breakup Letters is a tool used by Smart Design to elicit customers’ true feelings about products, services, and businesses. Smart asks customers to imagine its product, service, or business as a past relationship and to write a breakup letter detailing what first attracted them, why they are leaving, and who took their place. Some interesting examples can be found in this video link: http://vimeo.com/11854531.

Broad Thinking refers to strategies and tools to understand women and to analyze their needs. The end goal is to design products and services that women appreciate. See Femme Den in the “Resources” section.

Charrette is a structured brainstorming process historically used in the architecture and design professions that brings together diverse stakeholders working toward consensus on a complex challenge.

Clanning refers to the perspective of a group of people of a common connection that can be race, religion, profession, or another means of establishing a shared culture. The term clanning was made popular by the futurist Faith Popcorn.

Comorbidity is the presence of one or more disorders or diseases beyond the primary disorder or disease.

Connect + Develop is the name for Procter & Gamble’s open innovation model, founded under CEO A.G. Lafley in 2001. It was built on the belief that “sustaining solutions would be found in collaboration, not isolation,” and that 50% of new ideas would come from outside of the company: www.pgconnectdevelop.com.

Convergence-divergence refers to the process of expanding and contracting focus in brainstorming. Divergence is any process in which there is multiple idea generation and diffusion of ideas often deviating from the main focus. Convergence is the sorting and sifting of ideas to narrow the scope back to the focus. The convergence-divergence process is dynamic and ebbs and flows during the process of creating, iterating, and developing a project.

Creative abrasion is a type of cognitive dissonance typically found in teams in which the friction caused by differences in approaches is valued and leveraged to develop more innovative outcomes.

Customer Development Model is a concept for start-ups advanced by Steve Blank and consisting of four stages: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building.

Customer Journey Mapping is a tool to visually chart the physical and emotional touch points a customer experiences when interacting with a service or product; includes pre- and post-interactions.

Customer Validation is the second stage within the Customer Development Model proposed by Steve Blank. It is a business process aiming at building a repeatable sales road map that can be scaled up by sales and marketing teams hired later.

DELI, or Deeply Embedded Life Interests, is a concept that refers to a series of long-held, emotionally driven passions, intricately entwined with personality—a blend of nature and nurture. Identified in the work “Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People,” Harvard Business Review, there are eight DELIs, and tapping into your team’s DELIs is a way to cement their engagement to the project or the firm.

Doblin Ten Types of Innovation is a framework first proposed in 1998 that expanded innovation beyond the traditional product innovation and showed that companies that combine multiple types of innovation are more successful than those that don’t: www.doblin.com/tentypes/#framework.

Ecosystem of Design refers to organic interdependencies within an organization.

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) refers to the three main areas of concern that have developed as central factors in measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a company or business. ESG is the catchall term for the criteria used in what has become known as socially responsible investing. Socially responsible investing, including ESG, is among several related concepts and approaches that influence and, in some cases, govern how asset managers invest portfolios.)

Foresight is a “systematic, participatory, future intelligence gathering and medium-to-long-term vision-building process aimed at present-day decisions and mobilizing joint actions.” Contrary to forecasting, foresight provides projections of multiple plausible futures that form the basis for scenario planning: www.millennium-project.org/.

Gearing Up Framework is a framework proposed by Avastone Consulting that includes five interconnected gears: (1) Comply, (2) Volunteer, (3) Partner, (4) Integrate, and (5) Redesign: www.avastoneconsulting.com/MindsetsInAction.pdf.

Improvisation is the practice of acting, dancing, singing, creating artworks, problem solving, or reacting in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment and inner feelings. Improvisation has been proven helpful in building collaborative teams and sparking innovation because it stresses listening, agreement, an open stance, and building on what has come before.

Integrative thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.¹ Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, made this concept popular.

Interdisciplinarity is a problem-solving perspective that integrates the knowledge and insights from many disciplines working together to achieve creative solutions far greater than that which can be crafted from any single domain or coordinated domain perspective. Also referred to as transdisciplinary.

IOM is an acronym for the Institute of Medicine.

Kanbar, Maurice (born 1930) is an American entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist who is particularly well known for his creation of Skyy Vodka and 36 patents and is credited with inventing the multiplex movie theater in NYC. Kanbar is a graduate of Philadelphia University.

Latent ROI (Return on Investment) refers to budgeting money in project management to allow for lag time, mistakes, and testing out ideas in iterative ways.

Learning launch is the process of generating increased revenues through conducting small experiments in the marketplace that provide knowledge for testing and improving (or abandoning) a new business idea quickly and inexpensively.² The term has been made popular by the work of Dr. Jeanne Liedtka.

Long Tail pattern is a business model pattern characterized by selling smaller quantities of niche offerings instead of focusing on selling high quantities of a few bestsellers. The aggregation of sales to all the niche markets can be as lucrative as the revenues from a best-selling product. Amazon.com is a good example of a long-tail business model pattern.

Low-fidelity prototype is a prototype that is a quick and crude example of a product, an idea, or a service. It is not meant to exactly replicate reality, but rather serve as a proxy to give a sense of what could be and help identify stumbling blocks early on during the ideation and development process. The benefits of a low-fidelity prototype are that it is quick to make, cheap to produce, and accessible.

Market segmentation is a strategic marketing approach that involves dividing a broad group of targeted consumers into subsets of users who share common needs and interests. Marketers then design and implement strategies to target those needs using media channels and retail touch points. (See also target market.)

Marketing strategy is a guide, constructed by an entity, to concentrate its resources on its optimal market opportunities. The goal of a marketing strategy is to increase sales and achieve a sustainable and long-term competitive advantage. A marketing strategy includes all process activities, including analysis of the company, and the formulation, evaluation, and selection of the strategic tools that will contribute to the marketing objectives of the company.

Mass affluent is a marketing term used to refer to the wealthiest population demographic. Mass affluent is used by marketers of consumer products to refer to consumers with an annual household income of about US$75,000 and up; in the financial services industry, mass affluent commonly refers to individuals with US$50,000 to $250,000 or US$100,000 to US$1,000,000 of liquid financial assets. Investable assets include investments in retirement plans, college savings plans, individual stocks and bonds, mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), annuities, money market accounts, savings in cash, and other assets. The value of real estate owned is typically not included in liquid investments.

Mass merchandiser or mass merchant is a large retail store that offers a wide range of products and seeks to sell large quantities of goods quickly through such means as discounting and customer self-service. Examples of mass merchandisers include discount retailers such as Walmart, Kmart, and Target.

Medical home is a team-based primary-care health delivery model aimed at providing comprehensive and continuous medical care and maximizing health outcomes.

Mind map is a visual outline of information. A mind map is often created around a single word or text, placed in the center, to which associated ideas, words, and concepts are added. Major categories radiate from a central node, and lesser categories are subbranches of larger branches.

Mixed market economy is an economy in which the government has a role to ensure that equity/fairness takes place and that everything runs smoothly. Also, the government plays the role of a market/economy watcher, sitting back and intervening only when needed between producers and consumers.

Motivational drivers, as described In the article “Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model” (Nohria, Groysberg, and Lee, 2008) from Harvard Business Review, proposes that individuals are driven by four main motivators: to acquire, defend, comprehend, and bond.

Multi-Sided Platform pattern is a business model pattern that brings together two or more distinct but interdependent groups of customers. The business model is of value to one group of customers only if the other groups are also present. The credit card provides a good example of a multisided platform: It brings together consumers and vendors. Only if there are many consumers participating is it of value to vendors, and only if vendors are participating is it of value to consumers.

NAE is an acronym for National Academy of Engineering.

Nordic Innovation is a Nordic institution promoting cross-border trade and innovation. Home to the Green Business Model Innovation project: www.nordicinnovation.org/.

Open Innovation is a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, a professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, in his book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”³ Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop is a very successful example of open innovation.

Peri-operative systems are the technological and organizational systems surrounding the three phases of care surrounding surgery: preoperative (admission, anesthesia induction), intraoperative (surgery), and postoperative (recovery).

Qualitative data refers to the research findings that are generated through the process of interviews, observation during onsite visits, and participant-observation (participating in the process you have observed).

Quantitative data refers to research findings that are generated through the process of surveys and statistical analysis.

Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a principles-based method for measuring extrafinancial value (that is, environmental and social value not currently reflected in conventional financial accounts) relative to resources invested. It can be used by any entity to evaluate impact on stakeholders, identify ways to improve performance, and enhance the performance of investments:⁴ www.thesroinetwork.org/ and www.sroi-canada.ca/.

Strategic intuition is the practice of tactically mining your team’s collective memory and integrating memory, observation, and raw data to build a plan of action.

Target market is a group of customers at which a business has aimed its marketing efforts. A well-defined target market is the primary element of a marketing strategy. Target markets are groups of individuals separated by distinguishing characteristics, such as geographic segmentation, demographic/socioeconomic segmentation (gender, age, income, occupation, education, household size, and stage in the family life cycle), psychographic segmentation (similar attitudes, values, and lifestyles), behavioral segmentation (occasions, degree of loyalty), or product-related segmentation (relationship to a product).

Transmedia storytelling is a concept that utilizes multiple platforms to tell a brand’s story and is annotated by the user in (for example) a movie, a novel, a graphic novel, a website, and an animated short film.

Triple bottom line is a term for measuring progress that considers equally the “people, planet, and profit.” “People” pertains to fair and beneficial business practices toward labor and the community in which a corporation conducts its business. A triple-bottom-line company conceives a reciprocal social structure in which the well-being of corporate, labor, and other stakeholder interests are interdependent. “Planet” refers to sustainable environmental practices. A triple-bottom-line company endeavors to benefit the natural order as much as possible, or at the least, minimize its environmental impact. Within a sustainability framework, the “profit” aspect is characterized as the real economic benefit enjoyed by the host society, or the real economic impact the organization has on its economic environment.

T-Shaped Thinkers is a concept popularized by IDEO CEO Tim Brown to describe individuals who have both great depth of expertise and great breadth and ability to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than their own.

Types of capital is a concept that acknowledges three asset classes—not just financial. The sustainable development debate is based on the assumption that societies need to manage three types of capital (natural, social, and economic), which can be nonsubstitutable and whose consumption might be irreversible.

Natural capital is the extension of the economic notion of capital (manufactured means of production) to goods and services relating to the natural environment. Natural capital is thus the stock of natural ecosystems that yields a flow of valuable ecosystem goods or services into the future.⁵

Social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a university education (cultural capital or human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.⁶

Financial or economic capital comprises physical goods that assist in the production of other goods and services—for example, shovels for gravediggers, sewing machines for tailors, or machinery and tooling for factories.⁷

Value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered to a consumer and that consumer’s belief that he will experience that value. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, to parts thereof, to customer accounts, or to products or services. Offering a value proposition is critical to a successful business strategy. Kaplan and Norton say, “Strategy is based on a differentiated customer value proposition. Satisfying customers is the source of sustainable value creation.”

VUCA, or Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, is a term that began in the late 1990s and derives from military vocabulary. It has subsequently become popular in strategic leadership in a wide range of organizations, including everything from for-profit corporations to education.

White space exploration (sometimes just referred to as white space) is a term for undiscovered areas of opportunity that might be outside the business current offerings, part of an immature market, dependent on emerging technologies, reliant on shifting cultural norms, or a combination of these factors. The term white space in innovation became popular with the seminal book Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, by A. G. Lafley and Mark W. Johnson.

www.avastoneconsulting.com/

Bob Willard is a leading expert on quantifying and selling the business value of corporate sustainability strategies. Bob used his 34-year career at IBM Canada to engage the business community in proactively avoiding risks and capturing opportunities by using smart environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies. Notable offerings include the Sustainability Advantage, www.sustainabilityadvantage.com/, and Business Case Simulators, www.sustainabilityadvantage.com/products/index.html.

Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is a platform for transforming our most intractable systems, like healthcare, education, entrepreneurship, and energy, where players—both private and public—can design and test new solutions in a real-world environment.⁹ BIF holds an annual, always-sold-out conference that highlights innovators from around the globe. BIF Labs tackle complex challenges such as aging, healthcare, and entrepreneurship: www.businessinnovationfactory.com.

Claro Partners is a Barcelona-based, global innovation consulting firm that explores disruptions in society, technology, and business in three ways: They make sense of these big shifts for your company, they define your unique business opportunities, and they design services that respond to disruptions: www.claropartners.com.

Continuum is a 30-year-old global design and innovation consultancy that partners with clients to discover powerful ideas and realize them as products, services, and brand experiences. Continuum has offices in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Notable innovations born or advanced through Continuum include the Reebok Pump, the Swiffer, and One Laptop Per Child: http://continuuminnovation.com.

Femme Den is a design lab focused on the female consumer, powered by Smart Design, that integrates designers, researchers, strategists, and engineers who bridge the gap between assumptions and realities about design for women. Women buy or influence up to 85% of consumer purchases: www.femmeden.com.

Forum for the Future is a think tank that focuses on action for a sustainable world: www.forumforthefuture.org/.

Four B (4B) is named for their target audience, the four billion women in the world. 4B is a collective of researchers, designers, and engineers who improve women’s lives through design. They help companies and organizations consider gender while developing compelling and functional solutions to complex design and innovation problems: http://four-b.com.

Green Business Model Innovation is a project of the Nordic Innovation organization: www.nordicinnovation.org/Publications/green-business-model-innovation-business-case-study-compendium/.

IDEO is an international design firm and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991 through the merger of four established design firms. The company helps design products, services, environments, and digital experiences and has become increasingly involved in management consulting and organizational design. IDEO was very influential in the formation of the Stanford D School and the rise of the concept of “design thinking” in business. Notable IDEO leadership includes David Kelley (founder of IDEO and founder of the D School), Bill Moggridge (founder of IDEO, pioneer of human-centered design, former director of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), and Tim Brown (current CEO): www.ideo.com.

Innosight is a global strategy and innovation consulting firm that collaborates with senior leaders at the world’s top companies to identify and pursue new growth opportunities, build innovation capabilities, and create disruptive new products, services, and businesses. Innosight was cofounded by Dr. Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and New York Times best-selling author of Innovator’s Dilemma, Innovator’s Solution, and Disrupting Class: http://www.innosight.com.

The Martin Prosperity Institute is the world’s leading think tank on the role of subnational factors—location, place, and city-regions—in global economic prosperity. The institute takes an integrated view of prosperity, looking beyond economic measures to include the importance of quality of place and the development of people’s creative potential: http://martinprosperity.org.

The Natural Step is a “nonprofit organization with over a decade of experience helping organizations and individuals understand and make meaningful progress toward sustainability”: www.naturalstep.org/en/canada and www.naturalstep.ca/.

Rotman Design Works is the business design studio at the Rotman School of Management that teaches students how to tackle complex business challenges using Business Design, a human-centered, creative problem-solving methodology. Design Works was founded by Heather Fraser and Roger Martin. Heather is the author of the book Design Works, a guide to business design: http://fraserdesignworks.com.

Sarah Singer & Company works with teams, leaders, and educators to accelerate learning, spark insights, and maximize the ripple impact of every interaction. Steeped in the mastery of high-impact teaching and the latest data on how the brain best learns, we move people past their perceived boundaries to create transformative change. Paying close attention to dynamics in communication, natural talent, learning style, and perception, we help clients see themselves more clearly, then give them tools to increase their impact quickly. Individually, on teams, in professional or educational worlds, and in daily life, Sarah Singer & Company bridges the gap between the research and daily results in energized performance and growth. Find Sarah at [email protected], and her latest thinking and work at www.singerlearning.com.

Smart Design is an award-winning innovation consulting firm with studios in New York, San Francisco, and Barcelona offering business design, consumer insights, product design, service and experience design, and complete realization services from prototype to production. The Femme Den was founded at Smart Design: http://smartdesignworldwide.com.

Strongly Sustainable Business Models Group (SSBMG) is a multi-institution and multidisciplinary research group within sLab whose objective is to support SMEs in shifting significantly toward a strongly sustainable mode: http://slab.ocad.ca/the-strongly-sustainable-business-model-group-ssbmg.

See also the LinkedIn Group: Strongly Sustainable Business Models: www.linkedin.com/groups/Strongly-Sustainable-Business-Models-5005769/about.

Babson College is a highly selective business school that has been ranked the number one M.B.A. program in entrepreneurship for 20 consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report. Babson’s undergraduate and graduate programs offer collaboration with nearby Wellesley College and Olin College, as well as integrated product development courses with Rhode Island School of Design: www.babson.edu.

California College of the Arts, Design M.B.A. Programs were founded by academic entrepreneur Nathan Shedroff, and all offer business education rooted in design thinking and social and environmental responsibility. Each Design M.B.A. program offers the integration of learning of pragmatic skills with outside projects and working with real organizations headquartered from the San Francisco Bay Area. Programs include Design Strategy M.B.A., Public Policy M.B.A., and Strategic Foresight M.B.A.: www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/design-mba.

College for America at Southern New Hampshire University is an example of disruptive innovation in higher education as it breaks the norms of cost and credit hour and focuses on the development of competencies. From its website, CFA states, “The College for America (CFA) delivers an innovative solution to the most pressing problems of cost, access, and quality in higher education throughout the United States and around the world. CFA seeks to create a talent pipeline that addresses retention, succession, and economic prosperity.” The executive director of CFA is interviewed in Section 4 of this book: http://collegeforamerica.org.

The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Olin) is a private undergraduate engineering college located in Needham, Massachusetts, adjacent to and affiliated with Babson College. Olin College is noted in the engineering community for its integrated, project-based curriculum, and large endowment funded primarily by the F. W. Olin Foundation that enables it to offer deeply discounted tuition. Unlike many institutions, Olin College does not have separate academic departments, and faculty members hold five-year renewable contracts with no opportunity for tenure: www.olin.edu.

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (“D School” or “d.school”) is a design school based in Stanford University, in cooperation with the University of Potsdam. The school was founded by Stanford mechanical engineering professor and IDEO Founder David Kelley in 2004. Like some other design schools, it integrates business and management training into more traditional engineering and product design. Students who study at the D School must be first accepted into one of Stanford’s graduate schools: http://dschool.stanford.edu.

Ontario College of Art and Design offers a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation to create a new kind of designer: a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective and rethinks what is possible; an innovator who can imagine, plan, and develop a better world: www.ocadu.ca/graduate-studies/programs/strategic-foresight-and-innovation.

Philadelphia University (PhilaU), founded in 1884, is a private university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Academic programs are divided among the integrated colleges, including the College of Architecture and the Built Environment; the Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce; the College of Science, Health and the Liberal Arts; and the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Courses are also offered via PhilaU Online. The Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce has won multiple awards for its innovative curriculum and teaching pedagogy, notably the Strategic Design M.B.A., the M.B.A. in Innovation, and the Master’s in Industrial Design: www.philau.edu/designengineeringandcommerce/index.html#/academicPrograms.

Rotman School of Management, or just Rotman, is the University of Toronto’s graduate business school named after Joseph L. Rotman. Through the deanship of Roger Martin (1998–2013), the school rose in prominence and attention with the institutionalization of “integrated thinking,” which infused design thinking in the M.B.A. program. Designworks and Martin Prosperity Institute were both born at Rotman.

Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) is a lab at OCAD University practicing concepts of strategic foresight and innovation: http://slab.ocadu.ca or http://slab.ocad.ca.

University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Design Innovation was launched in 2013 out of the Engineering School with a $20 million gift from the Paul and Stacy Jacobs Foundation. The focus of this emerging innovation institute is to expand the role of design in engineering education, emphasizing rapid design and prototyping for manufacturability. Dr. Sarah Beckman is the Chief Learning Office of this new institute.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Design master’s program merges the disciplines of design, engineering, and business for the purpose of creating compelling new products and experiences. The program draws on three schools within the University: the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, and the School of Design:¹⁰ www.me.upenn.edu/ipd/.

2. Dr. Jeanne Liedtka, “Designing Learning Launches,” University of Virginia–Darden School of Business, April 5, 2010. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1583278.

3. Henry William Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

4. “Social return on investment” definition from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_return_on_investment.

5. “Natural Capital” definition from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital.

6. “Social Capital” definition from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital.

7. “Financial Capital” definition from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_capital.

8. Avastone Consulting Web site: www.avastoneconsulting.com.

9. Business Innovation Factory Web site: www.businessinnovationfactory.com.

10. University of Pennsylvania IPD Web site: www.me.upenn.edu/ipd/.