Creative Competency Portfolios – How They Define R&D Success

R&D, Design and Innovation firms are constantly evolving. But how can the right employee mix be identified and constantly motivated? Here’s How. 

  The Competency Portfolio as defined in Creative Competency Portfolios – How They Define an Entire R&D Model outlines the techniques and mechanisms for utilizing the balanced score card approach as well as the innovators dilemma model for innovation and new product development. Through these 2 and several other models defined, we see a full model of how to execute this.  

                               

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Designers Making Tools? How R&D Deals With it.

It’s often assumed that engineers are the ones that make the tools that designers use to apply art to create innovation. But what is the case when this is not the case? Here what.

The prevailing notion is that designers are those who apply art to the science of tools thus producing the value that engineers cannot normally deliver due to their distance from the emotional contortions of complex interactions. There are those that make the car run and those that drive the car to a win in LeMan. But what of the case when the designer is the engineer and the tools that are created are utilized and created in the same capacity?

In Can Experienced Designers Learn From New Tools? A Case Study OfIdea Generation In A Professional Engineering Team we see exactly the mechanisms for utilizing these capabilities and the models that can be utilized to further develop the renaissance persons capabilities thus increasing the value to the efforts put in to such endeavors/ It is these individuals and capabilities defined here that push the boundries of engineering, design and business thus allowing breakthroughs to occur. 

                               

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Design and Engineering – A 2 Minds Model for Breakthroughs

The mind(s) of the design creator are not one and contrary to the belief that they can be one is the root cause for innovation failure. But how can this be alleviated? Here’s how.

When the necessity to separate the design and engineering function is demanded from investors, labs, corporations and organizations who focus on the compartmentalization of these functions, innovation becomes limited. Time to deliver these innovations however is increased as compartmentalized function based attributes of new product development organizations is well knows. However in the small tight teams of firms such as Whatsapp (13 people in the total design and development team) the coupling of the enginnering and design fuctions can not be more easily seen. In A DescriptiveFramework Of The Design Process From A Dual Cognitive Engineering Perspective we see the basis and tools necessary to make this happen. This is one of the key components for the delivery of true innovations and ground breaking new product development efforts. 

                               

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Conceptual Blending: Cultural Referencing for Innovation

When design is left to it’s own, it’s as if leaving a musician in a sealed room. But not with mechanisms for blending external stimulus? Correct.

Design when left to its own devices has the choice to focus on the purely mechanical capabilities of function to determine it’s output or the relative nature of temporal and physical form to content with. But when the factor of archetype and cultural blending is implemented a whole other form of innovation is experienced.

In A Case Study On Design With Conceptual Blending several tools are defined and their application to allow design to take it’s place and build upon cultural references thus producing a conceptual blending output that further aligns itself with the values of users and well as those guided by the archetypes the cultural underpinnings evoke. End result: value. 

                                

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Design Repositories – Engineering Inspiration

When the mechanism for innovation is the mother of invention there are only a few ways that the purpose for this innovation takes place. Is there a way to increase that? Yes, and here’s how.

As defined in The Development Of A Repository Of InnovativeProducts For Inspiration In Engineering Design the possibilities of function subtraction and the utility of innovating functions are carefully weighed. What is found?

Both are required to continue to improve the value of products. But what happens when a toothbrush is enabled with Bluetooth and can speak to you and understand your interactions with it? Then what? This is the value of design repositories used for the engineering purpose of further enabling the inspiration cycle so necessary in the lives of engineers and designers not only for the motivation but also for the continued development of the art of their efforts. It is these tools as described above that give engineers and designers the drive to push forward. 

                               

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