Innovation Through Design Thinking

Design thinking can be used to enter new markets or crate new brands. Apple uses design thinking for new products like iPad and iPod.  In creating a new design there are three overlapping spaces: inspiration, ideation and emplementation. Innovation through design thinking is a very important and is key success in many organizations this video was very informative about this process and the Q&A session really brought out all of those different components that were important. Apple is a huge company that relies heavily on these items for their success.  

Democratizing Innovation

The video is how the users are actually the one that innovates and develops the products.  He explains how important really your end users are in the development of your product.  We have been consistently told that the manufacture is key in the innovation but if you think about it products are consistently improved by the users.  Ultimately keeping the users at the top of the totem poll.  As your company grows you begin to build a support group of your end users that are ultimately building the next product.  Its a very interesting way of thinking and totally makes sense.

Collaboration in the real world for higher education

The video was about how collaboration is a unnatural topic and it really needs to be applied to get done. The speaker also discussed how its hard to depend on people and you must really make an effort to get people involved and collaborating. The speaker also discussed the notion of coordinating business objectives and leveraging resources with other institutions.  They also discussed how collaboration can be done through various open source software packages. Since the software is open source it makes it a very viable resource to utilize and channel collaboration through.

Neural Networks in Information Systems

Neural Networks are a intelligent way of processing data.  It is a structure that is made so a computer can make decisions based on its own. A application for Neural Networks in Information Systems would be data processing which is basically going through a large amount of data and processing it. This would include filtering, clustering, blind source separation and compression. Neural networks are forms of expert system but much more intelligent. They provide many features and decision making process that the expert systems just can't provide. Allowing the user to more accurate and user specific data. 

Creating Inspired Collective Intelligence

This was a very interesting video on collective intelligence really bringing together whats important these days and in order for an organization to be successful you must be a "inspired organization" To reach this you must know how to reach past the "good enough" stage and we can gauge this by the Margin of Difference. Ideas and products of the mind are very important factors of the organization and are key to the margin of difference. There are five main keys to the margin of difference and that is the social networks, social capital, conversation, engagement process, and individual thinking. These factors are what really take it from being good enough to inspiration. These days I think this is very important because you really have to be inspired to get any where you have to have the edge on everyone else and "reinvent the wheel" to really be a successful company. Knowledge and getting to that inspired point is the only place where you can really be successful in this world. getting past that good enough to the inspiration is one of the most important parts of being successful.

Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

This was a very intresting video on Collaboration bringing in some very intresting metaphores. First off Malone describes collective intelligence as a group of people acting together to produce intelligence that could not be produced individually. To do that they explained a few examples of how to bring this for example with kids using pokemon. Now a days we are staying connected and collarborated through facebook and other social sites. Facebook is now estimated at over 80 million users as Trebor speaks about which brings it to a very strong collaboration and collective intelligence. Cory discusses how the starwood group used second life to help make desicions on the design and building of there new hotel. Using this online community and virtual world they were able to make important changes and collaborate with thousands of people. It really got them involved it what needed to happen and what changes they needed to make in order to make the new hotel sucessful.

Tony Hsieh

This video was very intresting how such good timing and the right desicions can make you a top person.  From this video I really take how important it is to be well deversed in knowledge because it was ultimatly that, that got Hsieh where he is now. They estimate he made over 200 million from the sell of Zappos.  What stands out most to me is the fact that he took such simple concepts like realizing sucess depends on customer service. Creating a online retail giant that has amazing customer service features like 365 day returns, Full Time Call Support and other great features. Tony realized that the customer retention model was one of the best and thats what he aspired to create and did a great job. The other thing he realized was how important his employees were. He realzed that his sucess was based on their performance which came back to employee satisfaction. In keeping up these standards and really using his knowledge he has become a extremely sucessful person.