green roofs are so last year, look out for the honey bees…..
For those of you are are totally into the foodie game, check out Melbourne City Rooftop Honey which has sprung up all over Melbourne town. You’ve heard of green roofs, well this is just as important and definitely more delicious. Vanessa Kwiatkowski and Mat Lumalasi launched Melbourne City Rooftop Honey after learning that beekeepers in cities such as London, New York and Paris were reintroducing bees to urban areas. Since then, they’ve installed hives on the rooftops of more than 15 CBD and inner-city businesses, mainly cafes and restaurants, and half a dozen suburban gardens. More than 100 people have joined their waiting list.
Nikolsky’s grandfather was a commercial beekeeper and he has strong memories of people coming to his grandparents’ door to buy honey. When Nikolsky read a small newspaper article about Melbourne City Rooftop Honey last year, he offered to host a hive.
For a $250 annual fee, Kwiatkowski and Lumalasi visit fortnightly to check on the hives. In return, the Alphington couple gets a share of the honey and, thanks to the busy bees, a measurable improvement in garden productivity.
“It’s good for us because we like to grow our own vegies and try to be as sustainable as we can,” says Nikolsky. “We’re not talking food miles here. We’re talking food metres.”
A wander down the NZ aisle…
I’ve been in NZ which is one of the reasons why I haven’t posted in a while. The other being that there are times when I have a lot to say and others less. But right now I’m good for a little conversation.
I like NZ a lot. I like the people, they always seem friendly to me. I like the country, I like it’s landscape and I’ve always had this notion that NZ is a very innovative country. After all, they brought us Sir Edmund Hillary, they had a female NZ prime minister from 1999 to 2008 and let’s face it, their lamb is good.
I had also heard that NZ was a particularly innovative country for it’s size and that it had one of the largest numbers of patents both registered and pending, per capita. Where I heard this from is akin to the ‘my teacher told me’ adage and I have not found any robust statistic that proves this to be correct.
The unique demographic, economic conditions and geographic location makes New Zealand an interesting case study for understanding the processes which foster innovation. New Zealand is a small and isolated economy which, at least in a textbook sense, is institutionally almost ideal for promoting local entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet, in spite of a macroeconomic and institutional framework which should be ideal for promoting innovation, if you wade through the NZ Govt collected data and the latest innovation measures, the observed innovation performance of New Zealand is poor, and this is particularly noticeable in comparison with other small isolated countries such as Israel and Finland. However, I do know that some companies [Australian and otherwise] have used NZ as a kind of test market due to its size, isolation and the propensity of its residents to be receptive to new products. I also know that there is some great product development coming out of smaller NZ manufacturers as well as the big dairy cohorts like Fonterra who continue to innovate within their sectors and export around the world.
Anyway I digress. I simply wanted to share with you how much I enjoyed my local wanderings through the NZ supermarkets. Row upon row of interesting packaging, product positionings and use of typeography, colour, material and language. Tree hugging aside, I’m a big sucker for great packaging [if it's environmentally friendly all the better], but I love a bit of imagination and design goodness, especially when applied to the mundane things that we all need to buy – like toilet paper or peas.
So if you’re in NZ. Stop by a supermarket. You’ll be glad you did.
Packaging porn to die for
I know it’s not fashionable in this eco-ridden-hessian-wearing-let’s-eat-organic-and-recycle-the-packaging-and-omygod-didn’t-you-bring-your-own-shopping-bag age but..I love a bit of fabulous packaging.
Don’t get me wrong I care about the planet and try to do the right thing. I have for instance a total of about 35 Coles eco shopping bags sitting in my kitchen as we speak [I keep forgetting to bring them so I buy more each time I go] which I get isn’t the point by the way, but even just walking to the car with those cheap plastic bags which are so eco terrible makes me feel less whole some how…
But I digress. The point here is that there is beautiful packaging in the world. You wouldn’t know it at Coles in Surry Hills and it sure isn’t on the shelves in my local Woolworths either but for those of you who are very much into package design, here are a few of my favourite links.
The DieLine site is without a doubt the best site I’ve seen for packaging porn. Look at the image above, who ever thought butter could look so good? Check out the sites and bookmark them for the next time you’re looking for a little eye candy or perhaps some stimulus for a preso or a workshop.
The DieLine is brilliant, full of good res packaging design images [free to search]
Global Package Gallery is another one full of product examples from around the globe [free trial then subscribe]
Another site is Under Consideration although not as good as DieLine [free to search]
The world’s first website where nothing ever happens
Check out this new website from Kit Kat. Following on from their famous and fabulous ‘Have a break campaigns, here they present us with just that. A complete and total break. A break from Twitter from Facebook from email from being bombarded with advertising messages, banner ads and Flickr boxes. No widgets, no downloadable icons or message boards. No forums, no email newsletters no avatars no handles. A complete and utter break.
And that’s not the best bit . . at the bottom it reads, ‘If you detect something happening on this website, it’s probably a bug and we’ll try to fix it’.
Love it.
Check it out
Thanks to Stephanie Branston for the pointer
Pet vitamins..?
what the . . ?
We know people love their pets and we also know that the pet industry is closely following the baby industry in its overpriced indulgences. Now we all want to apply the same quality of care to our pets as we would to our family or ourselves.
With wellbeing products on the increase it’s no wonder the pet care industry is following suit. It’s not enough to just have a friendly pet or even a stylish pet, now you need a pet who can perform at optimum levels & reach his or her own personal potential. After all, you can’t be the fastest pup in the park if you’re not feeling your best now can you?
Whilst the pet care industry has already developed food for bone growth, weight loss & tooth protection – most food is limited to obvious functional benefits.
What about mood food for pets? Supplements or treats that address anger, stress or other negative behavioural issues. After all, no one wants a grumpy puppy or an A.D.D. hound.
Whatever you can get away with selling to people, you can almost certainly get away with selling for pets. It goes without saying that in the era of celebrity canines, anything goes. Better still, take the behavioural angle & sell it back to humans. Can you imagine a cereal that was targeted at teens to alleviate that grumpy
school morning attitude? With the right products, there’s no reason why everybody can’t play nice…
What mother . . .?
September 14, 2008, 5:45 am
Filed under:
australia,
beverages,
Brand,
FMCG innovation,
Food trends & info | Tags:
australia,
beverage,
coca cola amatil,
coke,
fast moving consumer goods,
FMCG,
grocery,
Innovation,
Marketing,
mother,
product development,
Retail,
soft drinkI saw this in a sydney supermarket the other day and had to take a shot. It’s the new Mother drink from Coca Cola which offers the slogan “New..Tastes nothing like the old one!”. Is there a witty marketing-ism or product innovation positioning I’m not getting or is this really as stupid as it sounds?
Which begs the question...
Go judge a book by its cover
June 23, 2008, 10:27 am
Filed under:
Designers,
FMCG innovation,
Food trends & info,
Innovation,
Innovative marketing,
Innovative promotions,
Innovative stimulus,
Marketing,
new product,
Nice Design,
Nice products | Tags:
FMCG,
Innovation,
innovative packaging,
new product
While you can’t judge a book by its cover, we often judge food by its packaging. One dollars worth of spaghetti sure looks a million dollars with a bit of fancy pants wrapping doesn’t it…Never underestimate the importance of appearance when it comes to food, or anything for that matter…
Why do pet care companies always put an animal on the front of their pet food? The dog can’t read but the owner can. Why are we packaging pet food for the pet? They know what dogs look like, talk to them in their own language.
I’d take a premium supermarket pet food brand & stick it in a stylish black tin with silver labeling & discrete branding with no visual reference to animals. Risky you say? I doubt it.
And another thing… why do washing detergents all use bright colours & show water or clean clothes? We make our decisions on what detergent to buy on the perceived quality of the brand. In the absence of any
laundry powders which don’t present pictures of clouds or water gushing through logos, let’s be honest, we pick the one we think looks more sophisticated or innovative or expensive than the rest.
Why not take washing powder & stick it in a metal canister that sits proudly on the laundry shelf instead of embarrassingly in the cupboard? Or better still, cook some good looking detergent granules &
put the stuff in a stylish transparent container.
For a fresh spin on packaging, make it design-orientated not product-orientated. Just because you’re selling pasta doesn’t mean you need a fat Italian & a bunch of tomatoes on the front. Lord, this is 2008.
The next frontier: Design Thinking
March 19, 2008, 3:55 am
Filed under:
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Food trends & info,
Future of Work,
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Looking for insights,
new product,
Nice Design,
Research Methods,
Work Futures | Tags:
Andrew Tan,
CENCOR,
Design Thinking,
GE,
IDEO,
Innovation,
new product,
prototyping,
The Mayo Clinic,
what if,
whatif,
whatif innovationHere’s another little ditty from Andrew Tan’s blog WhatIf which covers innovation & design from an Asian perspective. And no, he’s not part of the global outfit Whatif Innovation, he runs his own innovation company and this is his personal blog.
Design thinking is t
he latest and hottest methodology talked about to help a company innovate. GE calls it CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize). The Mayo Clinic calls it SPARC (see, plan, act, refine, communicate). Andrew’s new company calls it GIP (Gather, Ideate, Prototype). Its most obvious and direct power is in the creation of new products and services. Design thinking allows an organization to differentiate its products and services in an avenue other than pricing.
Andrew’s method is not dissimilar to the IDEO method of industrial design, one which has nurtured some of the most popular innovations of the past few decades. Apple’s first mouse. Prada’s ultrahip Manhattan store. Stand-up toothpaste tubes that don’t get icky. The Palm V.
In the Ideo universe, great design doesn’t begin with a far-out concept or a way-cool drawing. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of the human condition. The first step for any Ideo team on any project is to try to empathize with the people who might use whatever product or service that eventually emerges from its work. Ideo has crafted a set of systematic research methods for understanding what the firm calls “human factors.” It then goes on to develop ideas and from those ideas, prototypes which can be tested for real responses on real people.
Beta goes meta: From innovation to trend in a heartbeat
January 31, 2008, 11:20 pm
Filed under:
beta,
Brand,
Community,
content communities,
creativity,
Digital culture,
Emergent media,
FMCG innovation,
Future of Media,
geek,
Geek stuff,
Innovation,
Innovative marketing,
Lifestyle trends,
Macro trends,
neophiliac,
new product,
Nice Design,
Social,
Social media,
Thinking,
Work Futures | Tags:
beta,
Beta-culture,
Facebook,
Forrester Consumer Forum,
Google,
Innovation,
MySpace,
Radiohead,
social networking,
trends,
TwitterInnovation isn’t limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement–powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be ‘always in beta’–learning and evolving along the way.
The idea of being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.
But it’s not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything’s in beta, the public doesn’t have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.
Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new “radical transparency” meant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It’s Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the “Facebook economy,” Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook “as a post-modern book” or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the “MySpace generation,” and from Facebook to the “Facebook generation” and then to the “Fakebook generation.” Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead’s “pay what you want” online release has instantly led to the coining of a “Radiohead Generation” and praise for the band “as a pioneer of the digital revolution.” And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead’s decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album–in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.
Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.
What if we kept a record of all the random ideas we have?
January 25, 2008, 3:07 am
Filed under:
creativity,
FMCG innovation,
Future of Work,
Genius,
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unbusiness,
Work Futures | Tags:
blog,
blogger,
creativity,
idea,
ideas,
Innovation,
random ideas,
the innovation company,
what if,
what if they did,
whatif,
whatiftheydid
Looking for a bit of Friday folly to procrastenate over while I garner the energy for another crack at work this afternoon, I stumbled across a new blog called ‘What If They Did’ – it’s basically a bunch of ‘what if’ ideas, a collection of random thoughts across all categories & platforms.
At first I thought might be an informal blog from someone at WhatIf The Innovation Company, after all, it would sit perfectly under their banner as a way of creating dialogue beyond the company lines. But no, it’s actually written by two creatives out of London who are using it as a playground to stash their collection of random ideas.
So whether you’re after a wacky idea for a particular category, or simply want think more laterally about how you go about generating ideas, this site is worth a look.
I love this idea for a lucky dip on the Skye Remote Control and when you think about it, it’s not so different from the concept behind iPod’s shuffle.
Check it out here
he latest and hottest methodology talked about to help a company innovate. GE calls it CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize). The Mayo Clinic calls it SPARC (see, plan, act, refine, communicate). Andrew’s new company calls it GIP (Gather, Ideate, Prototype). Its most obvious and direct power is in the creation of new products and services. Design thinking allows an organization to differentiate its products and services in an avenue other than pricing.
