How Do You Innovate

Jon Kolko wrote How Do You Transform Good Research Into Great Innovations? on the fast company design blog.  I would summarize his view as design synthesis which involves:

  1. Visualize your data
  2. Search for Patterns
  3. Develop and experiment with different models (his definition of models = a visual representation of an idea, an artifact)

A good process.  This point is important:

Because these are thinking tools, tools for synthesis, there’s only one wrong way to do this: not doing it at all. Looking at the data and talking about the data doesn’t count. If it isn’t modeled, written, drawn, and otherwise solidified in an artifact, it never happened. (Emphasis added)