Eric Kogelschatz

Smart Growth for Cities

Today, 3.6 billion people live in cities around the world. However, by 2030, 5 billion people, 60% of the world’s population will live in cities. In effort to better understand how we can improve cities, McKinsey & Company conducted an in-depth research study, interviewing 30 stakeholders, including mayors and other city government officials, in cities on four continents. Their efforts resulted in a report titled "How to Make a City Great" that reveals the best practices civic leaders must adopt in order to improve processes and services from urban planning to financial management and social housing. The best practices fall into three categories:

Achieve Smart Growth

"Cities must invest in infrastructure that reduces emissions, waste production and water use, as well as in building high-density communities."

Do More with Less

"Private–public partnerships can deliver lower-cost, higher-quality infrastructure and services."

Win Support for Change

"Successful city leaders must build a high-performing team of civil servants, creating a working environment where everyone is accountable ... They must take steps to recruit and retain top talent, emphasize collaboration, and train civil servants in the use of technology."

How to Make a City Great

Download the McKinsey & Company "How to Make a City Great" research report here.

Source: McKinsey & Company

by Eric Kogelschatz

The 10 Rules of Brainstorming

Unlock the Creative Power of Brainstorming & Ideation Sessions

Learn how to approach brainstorming by following The 10 Rules of Brainstorming, part of The Mindset Method developed by Eric Kogelschatz at shark&minnow, a strategy and design consultancy.

 

What are the rules of brainstorming?

Brainstorming is an exploratory, conceptual and collaborative ideation method for organizations to generate innovative solutions for challenges. With this insight, how do organizations effectively conduct brainstorms and what are the rules for a successful brainstorming session?

  1. Understand the challenge to be brainstormed and be prepared with insights from the Company, Customer, Competition, Climate & Culture (i.e. The Mindset Method). Foundational research and insights will guide your ideation session and serve as the catalyst for creativity
  2. Focus on the challenge to maintain scope and scale
  3. Diverge in thinking by ideating alone in solitude, enabling a different path to think about the challenge
  4. Converge in thinking by ideating as a collaborative team
  5. Assemble a multidisciplinary team to foster creative friction and make the impossible possible, and go beyond the unknown
  6. Visualize ideas to improve perception and cognition. Whether it's sketching ideas or writing notes on Post-its, document all of your thoughts
  7. Generate concepts and scenarios to inspire creative-thinking and reveal new ideas - as many as possible
  8. Filtrate: Apply strategic filters based on The Mindset Method to encourage divergent thinking within the context of the challenge (e.g. For the Company, idea based on the mission statement, or for Customers, ideate based on specific personas, etc.)
  9. Amplify voices to ensure all ideas are heard, and judgment is silenced. As the adage goes, you never know where a good idea will come from, so hold criticism and evaluations until later
  10. Build on the ideas of all participants in the session - You never know where creativity will take you

 

by Eric Kogelschatz

Making Big Data Small

Living in a digital world, we track everything. From the miles we run with MapMyRun to calories burned with Nike+ to how we sleep with Jawbone Up. But that's just the passive data generated from life, that doesn't even begin to describe the mass amounts of data that fill our everyday lives, from stock prices, product sales, climate change and beyond. Data becomes even more cumbersome as we start to consider all the meta-data. However, data is amazing. We have the opportunity to track and monitor data, and then translate these complex data sets into valuable information that provide insight, and guide our future decisions and behavior. By making big data small, we can begin to see the world around us in new ways. Below are a few of our favorite TEDTalks that simplify big data and highlight the beauty of insight.

Hans Rosling

"The best stats you've ever seen."

Deb Roy

"The birth of a word."

Aaron Koblin

"Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data."

Jean-Baptiste Michel & Erez Lieberman Aiden

"What we learned from 5 million books."

David McCandless

"The beauty of data visualization."

Shyam Sankar

"The rise of human-computer cooperation."

Nate Silver

"Does racism affect how you vote?"

Jamie Heywood

"The big idea my brother inspired."

Malte Spitz

"Your phone company is watching."

Chris Jordan

"Turning powerful stats into art."

by Eric Kogelschatz

108 Years of Herman Miller in 108 Seconds

Source: Herman Miller

At Herman Miller we think, learn, and communicate through design. It is the language with which we share new ideas and address the problems people face. Before we decide what we do and how we do it, we must first ask “why?” It is in this spirit of inquiry that we approach the stories we tell on WHY. For us, design is never just about a finished product. It is a narrative that extends from the designer’s vision to the people it touches and places it transforms. With WHY, we invite you to discover why we do what we do at Herman Miller.

"At Herman Miller, design is never just about a finished product. It is a narrative that extends from the conceptual thinking that informs a designer’s vision to the people it touches and the places it transforms."

by Eric Kogelschatz

IBM Watson at Your Service. One Step Closer to Passing the Turing Test.

IBM has recently unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, "a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing and sales." Brands such as the Royal Bank of Canada and market research organizations such as Nielsen, are taking notice.

According to IBM:

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is a first of a kind system designed to help customer-facing personnel assist consumers with deeper insights more quickly than previously possible. Delivered through cloud-delivered services and online chat sessions, IBM Watson will empower a brand's customer service agents to provide fast, data-driven answers, or sit directly in the hands of consumers via mobile device. In one simple click, the solution's "Ask Watson" feature will quickly help address customers' questions, offer feedback to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.

Watch out Apple, Google and Microsoft; the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is now infringing on your territory for voice recognition and artificial intelligence technology. Who will beat the Turing Test first?

For me, the great opportunity is not only in augmenting the customer experience, but also analyzing it, revealing frustrations, pain points and also opportunities to improve the experience as customers interact with the digital interface. Further, organizing data and allowing users to access it conveniently and learn quickly is immensely important.

According to IBM:

“Around the globe and across platforms, Nielsen provides insights into what consumers watch and buy—helping marketers engage with their customers in the smartest possible way," said Randall Beard, Global Head, Advertiser Solutions for Nielsen. "Our work with IBM’s Watson is the latest from the Nielsen Innovation Lab, founded to advance research in advertising effectiveness. Watson's unique capacity to uncover insights from Big Data by simply posing a question in natural language is incredibly powerful. Using Watson, we will explore the ways we can help agencies and their client brands more effectively engage with consumers across devices and improve the impact of their advertising and media plans.”

The race has begun. Who will develop a world-class solution to not only organize big data sets and make information intuitively accessible, but also provide an interface that can pass the Turing test? Only then will a victor be crowned.

by Eric Kogelschatz

American Noise

We stumbled upon "American Noise," a documentary by Nokia Music and The Sundance Film Festival that reveals the emerging sounds of our nation. It's a great series, and we're looking forward to the future additions as the investigate the rest of the country.  It features:

If you scroll to the bottom of the page you can also vote for the next city to be included in the series. Hint, hint, hint...VOTE CLE.

Watch all of the videos here.

From Nokia:

Each film will take place in a different city and showcase the new guard of young talentand unique sounds of American music today. Showcasing diverse genres: the strip clubs of Atlanta, the indie scene in Portland, genre mixing soul music from Detroit, the sensation of New Orleans' sissy bounce, underground alternative rap culture in New York City, and electro music created in LA's valley, each of the films will reveal cinematic portraits of distinct music sub cultures.

by Eric Kogelschatz

Beat 2012

DJ Mark Ronson will be traveling the world to meet up-and-coming athletes in order to intentionally record their passively generated music, or record the sounds they make when they compete in their sport.

I'm a huge fan of intentionally passive music composition, it's absolutely brilliant and always inspires me. I hope this inspires you as well. This anthem will be created for Coca-Cola in preparation for the summer Olympics in London. The track will be used in advertising, but I think the documentary, directed by Kim Gehrig, will be much more interesting.

by Eric Kogelschatz

Thinking Cities

We've been daydreaming and dreaming about the future of Cleveland since Hallie's first day back in the city and my first day ever in the city. It's our passion to understand current urbanization trends and adapt those best practices to our city. We all need to understand these trends, because each of us will be affected and more importantly, some trends may reflect your passions in life allowing you to get involved and not only voice your opinion, but actively participate in the future of Cleveland. Before you can do this, you need to understand those trends, a documentary called Networked Society does an excellent job of revealing this information.

As we enter a new era of mobility, an emerging mindset is creating endless opportunities that are limited only by our imaginations. Technology has enabled us to interact, innovate and share knowledge in entirely new ways – creating a dynamic shift in mindset. People are empowered, business is liberated and society is more connected than ever. At Ericsson, we’re just beginning to explore the possibilities of a Networked Society.

The urbanization trends featured in this documentary rely on information and communication technology (ICT) immensely. There are also a few excellent case studies to illustrate the trend.

  1. The Science of Cities
  2. The Talking City (Case Study: Trash Track Project)
  3. The Social City (Case Study: Citizens Connect)
  4. The Smart City (Case Study: Stockholm Royal Seaport)

The contributing experts are:

The documentary analyzes the cities of Stockholm and Boston in regard to the trends identified throughout the documentary. Our hope is to bring these innovations to Cleveland and we know you share the same hopes and dreams for the city we all love. What lessons can we learn from this? And how can we reinvent Cleveland together?

by Eric Kogelschatz

The Future of Market Research

5 Innovations to Watch

The great David Ogilvy once said, “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.” Those words from the great David Ogilvy are as true today as they were then.

Market research professionals, firms and organizations from IBM to Forrester Research are projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight.” If you ask me, that’s what market research has always been. An effective market researcher should be able to plan, conduct, analyze, and report actionable market insights and solutions to  clients.

If you can’t do that, you’re probably just sharing stats that you found on eMarketer. I’m not discrediting eMarketer, which is an excellent research provider, but I see many advertising and marketing professionals searching for and relying too much on the latest stat or trend instead of taking that data point and translating it to something of value. Does that trend even make sense for your client’s unique situation? Or are you simply trying to impress them? This is not a problem with the research provider, but the researcher himself.

Instead of projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight,” which should already be innately infused into the mantra of the market researcher, I project the future of market research to be the convergence, or mash-up, of emerging technologies and lateral creative thinking across industries with the discipline of market research.

We are all living in a perpetual state of beta. We all have the ability at any time, to analyze our past and present to optimize for the future. And for market researchers, now is the perfect time to seize the opportunity to innovate the industry in ways George Gallup could have never imagined. So borrow from other competitors, borrow from other industries, borrow from culture – use lateral creative thinking to expand your potential and create new methodologies to reveal new insights and solutions. Below are five examples of this approach, which will continue to grow, especially in 2012.

 

Mash-up: Neuromarketing

Lateral Thinking: The Convergence of Neuroscience & Market Research

What is it? How does it work?

  • It has been a goal of market research professionals to better understand motivations and behaviors for years. We are always asking ourselves why someone behaves the way they do. There are traditional quantitative and qualitative techniques that allow us to better understand this, but some insights are buried deep in the subconscious part of the brain that we can’t always reach. Neuromarketing takes the discipline of neuroscience and applies it to marketing, allowing us to gain insights into the subconscious.
  • Neuromarketing can be utilized via several different methodologies, each with a unique purpose:
    • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): To measure increased brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.
    • Steady state topography (SST): To measure increased brain activity by detecting brain electrical activity or neural processing speed. This is much more cost effective than fMRIs.
    • Electromyography (EMG): To measure electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.
      • Facial Electromyography (EMG): To measure electrical activity produced by facial muscles.
    • Biometrics: To measure human body characteristics such as fingerprints, eyes, hands, vocal and facial patterns, and even DNA.
      • Galvanic skin response: To measure the electrical conductance or moisture levels of skin.
      • Eye Tracking: To monitor and track eye movement in order to denote the levels of attention on specific areas.

 

Lateral Thinking: The Convergence of Gaming & Market Research

Mash-up: Research Through Gaming (RTG)

What is it?

  • Creating market research environments infused with the dynamics and mechanics of gaming in order to monitor and analyze behavior.
  • RTG can be used on almost any analog or digital platform, whether it’s event marketing, Facebook or a mobile application. The goal is to create an environment with goals or achievements that the participant can earn, which encourages participation; and a metrics tracking suite that records all behavior, so that data can be analyzed following the study.

 

Lateral Thinking: The Convergence of Mobile Technology & Market Research

Mash-up: Mobile Technographic Research

What is it? How does it work?

  • As the adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets continues to increase and the technology that supports these devices is enhanced, market research professions will have the ability to go native, conduct research and report results in real-time. This can include smartphone and tablet surveys, texting surveys or mobile apps.
  • Who has used this?
    • At a previous agency, I conducted primary research for RIDGID, using multi-touch surveys on iPads.
  • How can I learn more?
    • Research survey apps for tablets and smartphones in the Apple App Store, Android Market, BlackBerry App World, etc.
    • Research gadgets such as microphones and camera lenses to enhance your mobile device as a research tool.

 

Lateral Thinking: The Convergence of Social Media & Market Research

Mash-up: Social Intelligence or Digital Anthropology

What is it? How does it work?

  • Every day we share our opinions, preferences and lives with people online via Facebook, Twitter and beyond. All of our passive data, or tweets, photos and videos, are archived online by the social networks to which we belong. Social media data is insanely valuable to marketers because it does not represent our intended behavior, but our overt behavior. Social media isn’t just word-of-mouth, but passive consumer behavior and consumption translated to consumer intelligence. However, before brands can act on this, they need access to this data in order to translate it into information that can improve their marketing strategies. Therefore, brands must enact listening platforms (e.g. community managers) and data mining tools (e.g. Radian6) to gain access to this data and harness the power of social media. Social intelligence can be used to develop new products, messaging platforms or define audience personas.

 

Lateral Thinking: The Convergence of Crowdsourcing & Market Research

Mash-up: Online Panels

What is it? How does it work?

  • People love to hate focus groups. I think every market research professional can agree that there are positives and negatives to conducting focus groups. But the ideal environment for a focus group fosters co: (community, collaboration, crowdsourcing and co-creation). When you take that ideal concept and apply it to a closed digital environment with incentives for passionate stewards of the brand, you will be inspired with consumer insights focused on innovation for your brand.

Lastly, while it is not one of the innovations listed above, I believe reporting should be a priority for all market research professionals. We must always understand how to translate data to information and reveal insights that are clear, concise and simple. We've been spending the past few years, creating and refining our infographics, data visualization applications and websites to better illustrate our strategic insights. These visual representations of our insights infuse energy into our research, bringing our insights to life in a compelling manner. While the future of market research is truly dependent on mashing-up emerging technologies and market research, it’s up to the individual to harness the potential and infuse strategy and creativity into the process.

by Eric Kogelschatz

Remix the City

Once again, mobile apps are redefining how artists compose music. I stumbled upon this app the other day and immediately saw the potential in utilizing this technology for the CLE. The app is called Fresh Push Play, it was developed by W+K Tokyo Lab, HIFANA (a breakbeats duo from Tokyo that created the Nike Music Shoe) and Rhizomatiks. HIFANA launched the app by taking it to the streets of Tokyo and documenting their journey, collecting sounds of the city as they explored, until they reached their destination - a show with friends performed with only their iPhones and iPads.

Just imagine the potential for CLE. Can you imagine the song that we could create for Cleveland?

by Eric Kogelschatz