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we’re also seeing a renaissance of something decidedly traditional: the corporate R&D department.

We all need mechanisms and a culture that encourage the embrace of new technologies, kindle the passion for knowledge, and ease barriers to creativity and serendipitous advances

Conventional wisdom holds that organizations die of starvation from a shortage of good ideas and projects. In reality, they are much more likely to die of indigestion. A surfeit of projects with inadequate staffing makes delivering on anything less likely.

best learning can happen when we are uncomfortable,

 Observe, look, challenge, and wonder about the things on the walls and the learning in the school like it was your first day, every day.

Impact one other teacher in your school, and you impact probably a minimum of twenty students (that year only).

two essential design practices: changing your point of view and prototyping

To get started with prototyping, come up with the smallest possible experiment to see if you’re on the right track and avoid the tyranny of the rollout.

Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.

The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.

The time is now to support the role of learning in the pursuit of discovery and to embrace the powerful agency of culture.

Does adopting PBL mean we should use it all the time and teach everything via projects? If not, then how many projects should teachers do per semester or year?

Project Based Teaching Practices are actually just good teaching, period, and many of the practices can be used in the classroom when students are in between projects.

“Just make two high-quality projects per year for every student be the goal.” In a K-12 system, that means each student would experience 26 projects at a minimum—which sounds like a lot! But that’s only the start. Perhaps students in middle and high school, at first, would experience two projects per year in one subject area—if, say, only social studies teachers begin to use PBL. But assuming PBL spreads across the school, students would do projects in other subject areas, or do interdisciplinary projects, and eventually experience many more than 26 projects if they stayed in one K-12 PBL-infused system.

Whenever you have something innovative and that works, it is like a healthy freshwater fish. When you drop it into a traditional system, it is like dropping a freshwater fish into a saltwater tank. At some point, it dies. Part of the challenge as a district is to identify specific contaminants, the salt in the water. How do you start to turn that into fresh water? How do you create an ecosystem that fully supports and is aligned to implement with fidelity? What does it mean to have strong culture? That is a process, a very deliberate, conscious process.

One thing we did at the original New Tech was that we got rid of as many class periods as possible. Authentic work does not get broken down into 'Ok, we're going to focus on this area.' It was more holistic.

important that integration of formal and informal learning have champions

Web 2.0 technology is a key enabler for this marriage

Technological tools and leadership support alone will not be enough to make the marriage of informal and formal learning work. The shared values, beliefs, mental models, habits, and behaviors of the workforce in an organization – its culture is key.

bringing human-centered design to education, government, healthcare — the sectors that need it most — requires a few important culture shifts:1. We need to bust out of siloed design practices.2. We need to develop ever-broader capacities, taking an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative approach.

We turn our own questions on ourselves: What if we could help design education that readies today’s kids for the technologically enhanced (and challenged) environment they’ll grow up into? While we’re at it, what if we could then start addressing the very policy that shapes those educational institutions? That kind of moonshot systems thinking requires both agility and scale — it requires networked organizations and creative collectives. It requires designers who never stand still.

when individuals with their own aspirations and talents come together to build upon each other’s work and drive toward a greater goal, we can gain traction on much bigger challenges — and find new ways forward.

institutional inertia seems relatively simple: institutions, organizations, and people tend to remain at rest (i.e. satisfied with the status quo) or in uniform motion (i.e. slightly tweaking the status quo over time), unless that state is changed by an external force (i.e. transformation).

“Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace,”

the gravitational pull of the status quo is so incredibly strong, that escaping it can be a monumental task.

“We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.

IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.

corporate trend in design thinking

Simply put, design thinking is not enough. True success comes from building a complete design system, and no organization can build such a system on design thinking alone

design thinking only has value when combined with design doing and supported by a strong design culture

successful design thinking must also include an element of making – early experience prototypes are important to validate thinking and align teams.