Practical Innovation: Making Products that Build Businesses

Speaker
Karen Holtzblatt
CEO and Co-founder of InContext and Contextual Design

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

It seems like everyone wants to be innovative. Everyone wants to ship the next iPhone. We read books, attend talks, and encourage our employees to innovate. But what does that really mean? What does it take to become the creator of the next game-changing product or service?

The answer might surprise you. First, because there is an answer—creating innovative products can be analyzed and understood. It’s not the result of some magic only available to a few special people. Second, because business mission and business readiness are as much a factor in successful innovation as creative ideas.

In this talk, Karen Holtzblatt unpacks the history of Avatar and the iPhone to reveal what it takes to create a game-changing product or experience. She uses these examples to reveal the core drivers of practical innovation—the kind of innovation that both transforms a market and produces highly successful offerings. Karen discusses the central role of a company’s business mission and the depth of their understanding of their customer for ensuring real success. By identifying common conditions for success, Karen brings clarity to any discussion of how to bring innovation into a company or organization.

Karen covers the key aspects of innovation that matter for delivering products:

What it takes: stories from the market
The essential drivers: What a successful company manages
Are you ready for innovation? Realities of your business mission and business focus
Do you have a rich understanding of your customer? The role of field data in innovation
Innovation for you: Why true innovation will be unique to any company

Within the talk Karen discusses the role of Contextual Design in innovation drawing from InContext’s experience with companies they have worked with. She answers questions about using Contextual Design in practical life contexts.

Speaker's Bio

Karen is the visionary behind InContext’s unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen’s combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving the development, innovative designs, and design processes.

Recognized as a leader in requirements and design, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. Karen introduced Contextual Inquiry, now the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext’s full customer-centered design process.

Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy (awarded to significant contributors in the Computer Human Interaction Association) and this year received the first Life Time Award for Practice at CHI2010 for her contributions to the field. Karen’s extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext’s teams.

Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.

Speaker's Website
InContext

Host
Jenna Date