Steve Jobs @ Stanford

Steve Jobs, starting Apple at 20 years old in his parent's garage, never graduated from college. His biological parents wanted to give him up for adoption and wanted him to go to an educated family. He was adopted by a mother and father who were not educated. He spent his adopted parents life savings on a college that he soon dropped out of. He scavenged food and seemed more like a bum than a prestigious college student. 

He became fascinated with calligraphy and type fonts. His passion for typography bled over into the then new Macintosh computer. He stated that you cannot connect the dots going forward, but you can going backwards. This idea came as a student who had no insight about what was going to happen in his life. At the age of 30 he was asked to leave Apple as his vision was not seen equally by the Board of Directors. In his rejection he realized how much he was in love with what he did, starting Apple. Through his firing, he moved onto Pixar, which through a joint venture he teamed back up with Apple as the CEO. 

Steve's message was that you need to LOVE what you do. Don't settle at all! If you don't find it, keep looking! Steve makes a good argument that we should all be living each day as though it was our last. I believe that this vision is now realized considering his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The Dr. stated that he only had 3-6 months to live. That diagnosis changed when he was told by his doctors that his cancer was treatable.

What I have gleaned from his speech was that we should live an individual life with our own and original thoughts. Don't live someone else's dream. Live your dream to its fullest.

Knowledge Management supports design-driven innovation

How can knowledge management support design-driven innovation? 

Design-driven innovation is often-times discussed in small group or meeting sessions. The idea behind design and innovation is that marketing teams try to brainstorm around a particular group to develop or change a product to meet the groups needs or desires. This type of activity requires meetings where information is passed between the different levels (R&D, marketing, finance, etc). 

In design-thinking there are three levels that the thinking go through: People, Technical and Business. Will it attract to the people, is it technically feasible to produce or design and is it viable to the Business ideas and plans. During the many phases that this thinking will have to go through, knowledge management plays an important role in keeping the information organized and relevant. How information is passed from group to group will determine how the information is perceived. It is often said that perception is 9/10 reality. I believe that to be true. 

 In the many phases of design-driven innovation (Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation) there are knowledge transfers that take place. In those knowledge transfers, the different entities of the business design phase work together to share knowledge that they each have in their area of expertise. Without a strong knowledge management framework, the different entities can get lost in their idea. Tim stated in his speech that if a company spent 6 months and 1 million dollars on each different idea that their design team had, they would a. never get anything done and b. be broke and have to cease business. What's the point right? 

In my field, knowledge transfer is how things are organized and how different teams are brought to the same level of thinking. There are many expertise that exist and not all people are masters at everything. Typically we wear many hats and are considered specialists in the field that we choose. There has to be an equal sharing of knowledge for all groups to mesh and co-exist in the business world.