The Innovation Blog

Dr. David S. Ricketts

Harvard Innovation Fellow | Innovation Keynote Speaker

10 Professional Prototyping Tips from Shuya Gong of Ideo

Search YouTube for ‘Ideo shopping cart,’ and you will find a vintage 1990s ABC Nightline clip with over 1.3 million views. It doesn’t feature celebrities or world leaders, just a group of designers from the product development firm Ideo. The stars of the video are an eclectic mix of innovators, including an engineer, a linguist, a marketing expert, a psychologist, and individuals with MBA and biology degrees. They are working on a one-week assignment to
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7 Innovation Tips from the Theatre to the Executive Office Featured Image

7 Innovation Tips from the Theatre to the Executive Office

“As all good business deals happen, I was in a bar talking to another theatre professional, martinis in hand, and he said, ‘I think we should start a theatre company.’ I was like, ‘I’ve already got one—I don’t need another.’ And he looked at me so earnestly and just said ‘No, a company for us. We need to put this kind of work and our people and our faces in front of the city all
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David Graham: Pioneering Civic Innovation in San Diego, CA

“When I was a kid, my dad had a secret stash of magazines I wasn’t supposed to know about, hidden in the garage, buried in a box. But I knew where they were, so I’d sneak into the garage and leaf through the pages of those sexy Popular Science magazines because I wanted to know what the future would look like.” Flash forward and David Graham, formerly the Deputy Chief Operating Officer for Smart and
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3 Ugly Truths about Innovation, from John Warner, Head of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry

“He creeped me out,” John Warner recalled, as he recounted his first encounter with Edwin Land, the founder of the Polaroid Corporation and one of the greatest inventors in U.S. history at the time.  It was 1986 and Edwin had just phoned to request a meeting with John Warner, one of the world’s brightest medicinal chemists. “John, I’ve been following your career,” said Edwin over the phone. “I remember when you were at the National
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5 Lessons on Entrepreneurship from Victoria Montgomery Brown of Big Think

“His nickname is Roger, so I figured it must be something with Roger in it,” said Victoria Montgomery Brown, who cleverly decoded Richard Branson’s email address in order to pitch him her big idea. In the end, her hunch was correct, and Branson agreed to be one of the first interviews for Big Think, a video knowledge platform that would feature elite experts sharing their wisdom with people who would not normally have access to
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5 Lessons for Building a Profitable Tech Company from Formlabs Cofounder Maxim Lobovsky

“On the patio, Legal Sea Foods Cambridge, overheard two entrepreneurs pitching low-end 3D printing to VC,” read the tweet. It was sent out by a certain @mkapor, which happened to be Mitch Kapor, a notable angel investor and the founder of Lotus Software. Maxim Labovsky and cofounder David Cranor heard about the tweet that evening, after arriving home feeling discouraged about their 60th failed pitch attempt. Yes, Mitch Kapor was tweeting about them, and their
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