Tom Wujec (born July 14, 1959) is the author and editor of several books, a fellow at Autodesk, an adjunct professor at Singularity University, a multiple TED Conference speaker and a pioneer in the emerging practice of business visualization.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Wujec graduated from the University of Toronto with degrees in astronomy and psychology.[citation needed] Starting in 1983, he worked as a writer, lecturer and producer at the McLaughlin Planetarium and in 1989 became a creative director at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada's largest cultural institution, where he produced a wide variety of large scale interactive exhibits.
After leaving the public sector in 1996, Wujec joined Alias Wavefront, a Canadian computer graphic company to lead a variety of marketing, sales, product management and consulting functions. Wujec helped bring several products to market, including Autodesk Maya and SketchBook Pro.[citation needed]
In 2006, Wujec joined Autodesk as a fellow, where he currently charts long-term strategy, introduces disruptive technologies and facilitates innovation practices internally as well as for leadership teams serving the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing and entertainment industries.
Over the past decade,[when?] Wujec has delivered over 200 keynote speeches, presentations and workshops to a wide range of organizations on the subjects of innovation, creativity and technology disruption. He has developed a facilitation practice incorporating visualization, rapid prototyping and business mapping and has applied it to the financial, manufacturing, energy and entertainment sectors as well as non-profit organizations.[citation needed]
Books
Wujec is the author, co-author and editor of four books on creativity, design and imagination.
Wujec is a passionate[citation needed] supporter of TED, having participated in over 20 conferences. He has spoken at TED and TEDX events, conducted master classes, produced animations and participated twice as the invited TED artist.
Singularity University
Wujec is a founding professor at Singularity University where he teaches design paradigms, collaboration techniques and exponentially growing design technologies. Frequently, he produces massive wall drawings, sometimes hundreds of feet long, that graphically capture several days of presenters' content, providing visual reference for participants to develop comprehensive business strategies.[citation needed]
In business theory, a disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The term was defined and first analyzed by the American scholar Clayton M. Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, and has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans generalized this term to identify disruptive science and technological advances from more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014. Their work was featured as the cover of the February 2019 issue of Nature and was selected as the Altmetric 100 most-discussed work in 2019.
Innovation is commonly defined as the "carrying out of new combinations" that include "the introduction of new goods, ... new methods of production, ... the opening of new markets, ... the conquest of new sources of supply ... and the carrying out of a new organization of any industry" However, many scholars and governmental organizations have given their own definition of the concept. Some common element in the different definitions is a focus on newness, improvement and spread. It is also often viewed as taking place through the provision of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art works or business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society. An innovation is something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society. Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention: innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention to make a meaningful impact in a market or society, and not all innovations require a new invention. Technical Innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation.
Research and development, known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products and improving existing ones. Research and development constitutes the first stage of development of a potential new service or the production process.
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, and academics, and any other white-collar workers, whose line of work requires one to "think for a living".
Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. A very broad coefficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. Thus, it is a major aspect of new product development.
Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.
LEGO Serious Play is a facilitation methodology developed at The Lego Group. Since 2010 it is available under an open source community-based model. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication. People build with Lego bricks 3-dimensional models of their ideas and tell stories about their models. Hence the name "serious play".
Technology forecasting attempts to predict the future characteristics of useful technological machines, procedures or techniques. Researchers create technology forecasts based on past experience and current technological developments. Like other forecasts, technology forecasting can be helpful for both public and private organizations to make smart decisions. By analyzing future opportunities and threats, the forecaster can improve decisions in order to achieve maximum benefits. Today, most countries are experiencing huge social and economic changes, which heavily rely on technology development. By analyzing these changes, government and economic institutions could make plans for future developments. However, not all of historical data can be used for technology forecasting, forecasters also need to adopt advanced technology and quantitative modeling from experts’ researches and conclusions.
Social innovations are new social practices that aim to meet social needs in a better way than the existing solutions, resulting from - for example - working conditions, education, community development or health. These ideas are created with the goal of extending and strengthening civil society. Social innovation includes the social processes of innovation, such as open source methods and techniques and also the innovations which have a social purpose—like activism, virtual volunteering, microcredit, or distance learning. There are many definitions of social innovation, however, they usually include the broad criteria about social objectives, social interaction between actors or actor diversity, social outputs, and innovativeness. Different definitions include different combinations and different number of these criteria. Transformative social innovation not only introduces new approaches to seemingly intractable problems, but is successful in changing the social institutions that created the problem in the first place.
Design management is a field of inquiry that uses project management, design, strategy, and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.
Conceptual economy is a term describing the contribution of creativity, innovation, and design skills to economic competitiveness, especially in the global context.
Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. Many of the key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, across different design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and natural contexts.
Collaborative innovation is a process in which multiple players contribute towards creating new products with customers and suppliers.
Sir Kenneth Robinson was a British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education and arts bodies. He was director of the Arts in Schools Project (1985–89) and Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (1989–2001), and Professor Emeritus after leaving the university. In 2003 he was knighted for services to the arts.
Digital Prototyping gives conceptual design, engineering, manufacturing, and sales and marketing departments the ability to virtually explore a complete product before it's built. Industrial designers, manufacturers, and engineers use Digital Prototyping to design, iterate, optimize, validate, and visualize their products digitally throughout the product development process. Innovative digital prototypes can be created via CAutoD through intelligent and near-optimal iterations, meeting multiple design objectives, identifying multiple figures of merit, and reducing development gearing and time-to-market. Marketers also use Digital Prototyping to create photorealistic renderings and animations of products prior to manufacturing. Companies often adopt Digital Prototyping with the goal of improving communication between product development stakeholders, getting products to market faster, and facilitating product innovation.
The Imagination Age is a theoretical period beyond the Information Age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value. In contrast, the main activities of the Information Age are analysis and thinking. The concept holds that technologies like virtual reality, user created content and YouTube will change the way humans interact with each other and create economic and social structures. A key concept is that the rise of an immersive virtual reality—the cyberspace or the metaverse—will raise the value of "imagination work" done by designers, artists, etc. over rational thinking as a foundation of culture and economics.
Jeanne M. Liedtka, is an American strategist and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for her work on strategic thinking, design thinking and organic growth.
Salim Ismail is a Canadian serial entrepreneur, angel investor, author, speaker, and technology strategist. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and lead author of Exponential Organizations. In March 2017 he was named to the board of the XPRIZE Foundation.
The term serious play refers to an array of playful inquiry and innovation methods that serve as vehicles for complex problem-solving, typically in work-related contexts. Lego Serious Play is one of the best known examples; however, serious play methods also include improv theater, role play exercises, low fidelity prototyping, as well as certain simulations and gamification interventions, etc.
Frank Mruk is an architect, author, artist and strategist. His research explores the nature of strategy in the creative pursuit of competitive advantage and innovation. He is the executive director of the New York Center for Strategic Innovation and the Boston Center for Smart Building Technology. He was educated at Pratt Institute, Pace University and at the University of Oxford. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, Roger Williams University, the Parsons School of Design, New York University, and at the New York Institute of Technology where he served as associate dean for the School of Architecture and Design and has been a visiting critic at the WE School, the United Nations, Oxford Brooks University, the University of Chile, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Columbia University and at Yale University.
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