Social business pinboard links for April 21st, syndicated automagically:

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems – I found the best explanation for the growing importance of design in a short, elegant article in The Economist, Design Takes Over, by Paola Antonelli, senior curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “There are still people who believe that design is just about making things, people and places pretty.  In truth, design has spread like gas to almost all facets of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking.  For a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change.” “Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life.  When the internet happened, they created interfaces with buttons and hyperlinks that enabled us all to use it.  Designers make disruptive innovations manageable and approachable, so that they can be embraced and assimilated into life.  And they never forget functionality and elegance. . . Design is moving centre-stage in the eternal human quest to make beauty out of necessity.” Design principles are particularly applicable to problems that are socio-technical in nature, that is, they involve people and technology, having to deal both with complex technical, business and societal infrastructures and human behaviors.  They are critical for dealing with the Grand Challenge problems we are facing in the 21st century, including health care, urbanization, education, energy, finance, and job creation.   What do we mean by applying design principles to complex, unpredictable, people oriented systems and problems?  Let me discuss three such principles based on my personal experiences.
• Innovating User Value – The Interrelations of Business Model Innovation, (Service) Design Thinking and the Production of Meaning | Service Design Network – Abstract
  We live in a hyper-competitive world, where whole industries either shift towards services or become obsolete due to new market entrants, technologies or even social practices. A world, where permanent interactions with customers, fast time-to-market, and the ability to innovate »right« (e.g. the right thing or value) are the key to corporate success. On that score the business sphere isn’t getting tired of emphasising the need for strategic innovation (which means »creating superior customer value«, business model innovations or even the disruption and creation of new markets). This paper uncovers some of the often overlooked links of design (design thinking, design-driven innovation and service design) to strategic innovation through the lens of »customer value«. It will do so by …   Disenchanting the big corporate rhetoric on above claims by showing that prevailing and too one-sided understandings of strategy and innovation, rather reinforce than escape old industry paradigms.   Examining designs still undervalued contributions to strategy-making by approaching business challenges with a user/value-centric and radical service logic.   Showing that every dimension of strategic innovation culminates in the concept of perceived user value and meaning, which gets reviewed in detail (dimensions, forms, properties), especially with regards to constructing value propositions.   Arguing that the current service design and business model innovation discourses cannot be negotiated separately, as they may be good methodological complements.   So when speaking about the innovation of value for the customer, the paper argues, the above stated and seemingly separated fields intersect. Therefore their most apparent systemic connections and the facilitation of value creation by design are outlined and discussed.