Image via DMI

Reporting by Deb Aldrich

Innovate or die. Collaborate or fail. But innovate collaboratively and succeed. That's the message shared by a variety of speakers and exhibitors at the current DMI Design Thinking Conference in Santa Monica, California. We know that designers and design thinking drive this process, but which best practices, emerging technologies and new ideas can inform our efforts?

Some highlights of Tuesday's mainstage included keynote, Larry Keeley, President & Co-Founder of Doblin Inc., who shared insights from his practice and his book, Ten Types of Innovation and the Discipline of Building Breakthroughs. By embracing and managing the complexity of the innovation process as well as the creativity behind new ideas, he pointed out how design leaders can guarantee success in the face of accelerating innovation. Although we've generally been taught to bring new ideas to the forefront through a more freeform brainstorming process, Keeley suggested that real innovation success requires high protocols, great teams of thinkers and a systematic way to measure and assess progress.

Batterii, an exhibitor and the technology that is supporting DMI's new Design Value Research project, demonstrated how their cloud-based platform can connect teams for knowledge creation, as well as innovative product development. And Sarah Brooks, founder of Networked Culture, explained how environmental and cultural systems models can help designers consider ways to move away from authorship toward co-creation for shared value and strength.

It's like the "Jenga Conundrum": Do you pull a peg to weaken the structure so yours is the last move, or do you work together to build the tower as high as possible? A collective orientation when combined with rigorous systems of analysis and evaluation are the keys that will not only help us communicate more effectively with clients and with each other, but also enable our businesses, economies and cultures to flourish in the future.