Dinner w/ Ideas #1

Great! We just had our first DWI dinner in Washington, DC. Thank you to our friends from the SF chapter for the inspiration! 

DWI- "Dinner with Ideas," or "Dinner with Impact" in essence is a good excuse to get together once a month with people that share the common interest of bridging business, design and innovation with development and to share projects, ideas, concerns, etc.

We had an awesome bunch of people to kick off the evening including: 

Francisco Noguera, Sofie Leon, Alexis Sampson, and myself- Sami Nerenberg. 

Thank you Francisco for organizing the event! And thank you Sofie for being our lovely host! 

In the posts to come, you'll find lists of some of our favorite links, companies we've discussed, blogs and books we like and stuff that we've written or read about- all more or less along the lines of social innovation. 

Stay tuned for more as we'll be meeting every month!

Enjoy and feel free to share and join in! 

Favorite Blogs Shortlist

Fellow Members, feel free to add more: 

• Nextbillion.net - of course! Managed and edited by our very own Francisco Noguera
  
• Social Entrepreneurship.Change.org 
  
• YPFP.org -young professionals in foreign policy discussion group
• Financial Crisis Blog [need link]

And some online magazines too: 

• GOOD Magazine-- an awesome magazine to make the world a better place. Got to love their videos too! Check out this one on Design that Matters' Kinkajou microfilm projector! 
  
• Fast Company--innovation moves quickly, so you better keep up. 
• Inc-- the daily resource for entrepreneurs
• Harvard Business Review- sign up for "Management Tip of the Day" 
• Stanford Social Innovation Review-- strategies, tools, and ideas

Link Roll Call!

Links to things we talked about tonight: 

• Business Fights Poverty-- international network for professionals passionate about fighting world poverty through good business.
  
• Inspiris-- UK consulting firm to use business to fight poverty. (Alexis consults for them)
• World Bank Institute-- the Bank Group’s principal provider of learning activitie (Alexis works for them!) 
• Echo Ditto-- leveraging social media and connecting technologies as a vehicle for affecting positive change around the world. (Sophie used to work for them!) 
• Frontier Strategy Group-- enhancing for-profit companies' effectiveness in emerging markets (Sopie works for them right now!) 
• NextBillion.net-- online platform to explore connections between development and enterprise. 
• Design for Social Entrepreneurship-- advanced studio at the Rhode Island School of Design exploring the role of designers in social entrepreneurship. (developed and taught by me) There's a blog here too
• IDEO- our favorite design consultancy :-) 
• Design that Matters-- (DtM) developing products addressing basic needs in developing countries. (I used to work here!) 
• Pecha Kucha- a new form of social power pointing. 
• John Griffin Consulting- the consulting group that re-strategizes organizations. (link needed) 

Book Club

Books we are currently reading: 

• How the Mighty Fall- by Jim Collins (Good to Great another fantastic one) 
  
• The Wisdom of Crowds- by James Surowiecki
  
• The Second World- by Parag Khanna
  
• Mystery of Capital- by Hernando De Soto
  
• Microfinance for Bankers & Investors- by Elizabeth Rhyne (Sofie used to work with her!)
  
• Envisioning Information- by Edward Tufte (master of all things information architecture)
• Sink or Swim- by Milo Sindell and Thuy Sindell
• World Changing- by Alex Steffen and the World Changing team (including friend Dawn Danby) 

What is Design?

If design is going to be a part of this conversation on innovation, I figured it might be helpful to outline what exactly design is.  It's too big a question to answer in a short post, but IDEO has a nice chart that sums it up quite nicely. This image was modified for my class, but still functions to describe the design process. (click to enlarge) Click here to check out IDEO's FULL HCD Toolkit. And feel free to check out my article below that elaborates on how design and the role of design is changing. 

HCD- Human Centered Design

1. Hear

Who to talk to

How to gain empathy

How to capture stories

2. Create

Making sense of data

Identifying Patterns

Defining Opportunities

Creating Solutions

3. Deliver

Identify Required Resources

Create Implementation Plan

Scope out Financial Sustainability

Changing Design/ Designing Change

An article I wrote for RISD's alumni publication discussing the shifting role of design, designers, and our potential to create planned change: 

There are many good definitions of “design,” which have been expanding, shifting, sifting and most of all changing rapidly, along with the rest of the world. But how is industrial design, in particular, changing, and what is happening both at RISD and within the design profession itself?...

Click here to read the entire article.