Prototyping snowboard goggles in an ice cream freezer

An IDEO team needed to perfect the design for snowboard goggles in summer. So they borrowed an exercise bike, a fan for wind, and borrowed the freezer of a local family-run ice cream company.

Source: The Art of Innovation book, Tom Kelley, p103

Brainstorm Tip - Number The Ideas

Numbering each idea helps keep people motivated. "Let's try to get to a hundred ideas before we leave the room."

Source: The Art of Innovation book, Tom Kelley, p58

Johari Window Exercise

Excellent exercise Dina Pinner ran at Limmud. 2007?

• Whole exercise in same pairs
• Tell each other known unknowns. 30 secs each way. 
• Debrief: Did you interrupt? Why did you giggle? 
• Share things about you it would be helpful for them to know about to be a good partner in the exercise (40s each)
• Look at each others' shoes and tell me objective facts about them. Demo then 20s each.
• Congratulate/be nice about each others' shoes. Demo then 30s each.
• Help them in their choice of shoes. 1 min each way.

Facilitation tips:

• Open session talking a bit about yourself "I am judgemental; I am tired". Sets safe space. 
• Answer questions by referring back to self, e.g. I find this helpful.
• Push for ownership of emotions (from "You feel frustrated..." push for "I feel frustrated...").

Best Buy's Twelpforce

Best Buy employees are empowered to answer consumer queries on Twitter directly. They call this their Twelpforce, and have backed it up with a national advertising campaign.

The system seems to be powered by Lithium:
https://www.lithium.com/pdfs/casestudies/Lithium-Best-Buy-Case-Study.pdf

Shopping Journey Stages

• Browse
• Select
• Commit
• Purchase

Throwable Mic

A microphone you can throw around at events:
http://www.springwise.com/life_hacks/speaking-event-mic-thrown-audience/

IKEA Xmas Tree 'Rental'

Ikea, in the US and Austria at least, are renting(ish) real Xmas trees. Buy it for 25 dollars, and get a 10 dollar voucher when you return it. 

Valve New Employee Handbook

Valve's new employee handbook is a great guide on how to run a completely flat company. Includes description of their internal appraisal process for setting salaries.

http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Q Coin Currency

"QQ Messenger is the most widely used IM system on the planet despite being predominantly Chinese." It has its own currency, Q Coin. This is becoming so popular that the Chinese government considered capital controls on Q Coin to stop them reducing the value of the RMB. But these merely created scarcity and drove up the price.

Source: Brett King, Bank 2.0, p 333. Also mentioned on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ#Q_coin

Prototyping a Phone System

Brett King points out that you can prototype and IVR using index cards to lay out the menu. Users can then try to complete a task while someone reads out the prompts.

This can be used to test the 'champion' current system against a 'challenger' new system.

Source: Bank 2.0 book, page 125