Interview: Tyler Brulé

It's very honourable that his favourite magazine is Japanese magazines!!

Finally succeeded in installing elgg

This morning, I struggled with installing elgg (version 1.2) again, and I finally did it!! I tried to do it on streamline.net, but it seems to me that they don’t allow their server to be contacted directly from the outside (which means without some html files like index.html), so I looked for some other free web hosting service and I finally found http://www.noadsfree.com/, and it’s worked!! It doesn’t look a decent service (sorry no offence, but to be honest…), but works properly. If you also try it a bit without any fee, you can try this service.

Hustle series 5

BBC TV series, Hustle series 5 finished.
My favourite is the first episode, because I’ve never seen it but it attracted me enough to see the whole series five. The episode about Spider’s Web is also interesting. The ending scene is funny and surprising.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007gf9k

BBC iPlayer

Now it has a function to show subtitles on streaming videos. It is amazing to study English, I suppose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Leadership with emotion

Our course is now, in a sense, in a bad mood. The reason is from our director. He works very well, but now he’s almost lost his respects from students. It’s really good lesson about leadership for me, because his explanation and responses about our questions and disbelief sounded very logical and appropriate, but the thing is that there are no satisfaction and respects for him. Of course, it might have been just because of stupidity and laziness of students, but anyway the situation taught me that for building proper leadership, logical validity is not enough. There must be some emotional factors.

Innovation Policy in Japan

ITPS, Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies
http://www.innovation.lv/ino2/publications/japan.pdf

The large apparent difference in economic performance between the USA and Japan during the last decade has been seen as evidence that the American innovation system today is more effective than the Japanese. Especially two differences have been emphasized. One is the creation of new high tech venture companies in such fields as IT and biotechnology, of which there has been very little in Japan. The other concerns the internationally leading position of American research universities and their seemingly effective system for transfer of technology and knowledge to industry. p.9

This is the concern about innovation for Japan for long time, but it might be difficult to change the situation because it would be strongly connected with conservative aspects of Japanese business culture.

Where am I and Where will I go?

Our next essay would be interesting, which is about our positioning. Actually it is not interesting, but it is quite important to decide our future career. In my opinion, it must be a bit surprising that the course work includes an essay about this kind of personal concern. It might be telling us our course still has no clear-cut directions.

My last essay discussed disruptive innovation in design process, and this essay must be related with it, but my concern is slightly different about it, so maybe I need to come up with a good idea for connecting two essays.

Firstly, I was interested in Marketing Innovation, such as viral marketing, Web 2.0 and so on, but I found it a little bit difficult to articulate it because it is a sort of cutting-edge discipline and it is difficult to find proper books about it.

Basically, my concern was to support creativity of creators like designers and artists, so now I’m interested in making network for designers, artists and customers, but actually it has little to do with innovation, so if my argument in this essay relates with this activity, I should find why it is important for innovations. In a way, I think it is very important for innovations, because driving creativity of designers could be a critical factor for innovations, and now I guess it must be possible with making network between creators, but, for that, I need to articulate what the creativity of designers is. According to the research of my last essay, it is supposed be the ability of observation to identify potential opportunities behind what customers say, and maybe I also need to show what designers need to extend their creativities.