President + Partner, New Kind
The open source community has a phrase for the principle of rapid prototyping: “Release early, release often.” The theory is sound: Don’t wait until a project is perfect to share it. Instead, keep producing work so more people can experience it, react to it, find bugs, and improve it.
Continue reading “5 reasons why rapid prototyping works for creative projects”
Open source communities are often compared to gift economies. You participate. You solve shared problems. Others do the same.
In many ways, you give to get.
Continue reading “Participating in a gift economy: Are you giving enough?”
The world of work has changed, but in many ways the model of motivation hasn’t. Are the traditional rewards of today’s organizations up to the challenge of motivating people to complete creative, complex tasks in creative ways? And can the open source way offer inspiration?
Daniel Pink is a bestselling author and one of the country’s top business speakers. His latest book is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. You can watch him deliver an insightful and entertaining introduction to Drive at the TED Conference.
Continue reading “Upgrading the motivational operating system: A conversation with Daniel Pink”
A tide is turning for the state of business. We have come to realize the old ways of innovating and competing are no longer moving fast enough. We’re looking for new answers, and more importantly, new ways of finding them.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending the 25th annual Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh. The forum brought together business and government leaders from across the state to discuss the challenges facing our economy as we race to compete in a changing world.
Continue reading “Meeting our business challenges with creativity”
Design is too powerful to be used by designers alone. This is the essential idea behind the theory of design thinking–applying the principles and techniques of design to help organizations innovate, solve problems, and create positive change.
Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, should know. His new book, Change By Design, is about how Design Thinking works, and how design consultancy IDEO has put design thinking to work in organizations around the world. The book provides a useful, comprehensive overview on the power and value of design thinking.
Continue reading “Change By Design–How to put design thinking to work”
I’m currently reading the new book on design thinking from IDEO’s Tim Brown called Change By Design. (Full review coming soon.) The design thinking philosophy was first introduced to me, and to Red Hat throughout the company, by David Burney.
In comparing traits associated with design thinking collaboration and collaboration in the open source community, there are many parallels: open exchange, broad participation, rapid prototyping.
There’s also one really interesting contrast: The mindset you tend to see when generating and choosing ideas. But what I’ll suggest here is that when you apply the best elements of these two mindsets at just the right time in their respective processes, the results can be pretty amazing.
Continue reading “Where design thinking and open source community collaboration meet”
Jonathan Opp 