Friday, May 2, 2008

Thinking About Design on Nantucket

Sim Simeonov from Polaris Venture Partners posts about one of the workshop sessions held at the Nantucket Conference yesterday, focused on "design thinking for entrepreneurs," which featured Devorah Klein and Eric Saperstein from the Cambridge office (though IDEO's CEO, Tim Brown, was in the back of the room, chiming in.)

    The presenters left the group with the following five suggestions:

    1. Spend time with customers. Really push yourself to think about unusual but relevant people you should talk to.
    2. Be visual and tangible. Build a prototype of something. Paper is OK.
    3. Try it yourself. This is the classing dogfooding principle.
    4. Get out of your category for inspiration. You won’t know what you don’t know until you see something that inspires you.
    5. Test-drive ideas. Do it all the time.

Sim's post includes two cool video interviews, too.

Labels: , , , ,