June 6, 2006
San Francisco, California
Products and their Ecosystems
Understanding the power of context in product innovation
Photos
Podcasts
Jessie ScanlonBusinessWeek
Robyn WatersRW Trend
Speakers
Jessie Scanlon is the editor of BusinessWeek Online's Innovation and Design channel. She writes frequently for Wired, Popular Science and The New York Times.
Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Portigal Consulting helps clients to discover and act on new insights about how their customers work, play, shop, entertain, eat, and live their lives around products and services. Steve has worked with a wide range of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Nestle, France Telecom, Bosch, Chevron, Shure, WNBA, SC Johnson, and General Mills.
In addition to regularly speaking at design and marketing events, Steve teaches Design Research Methods at the California College of Art. Steve is also known for his writing, especially FreshMeat, a semi-regular email column about the relationships between business, culture, technology, products, and consumers. He is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.
Diego Rodriguez leads IDEO’s strategic business design efforts, working with senior executives from industry and government to create organic growth via innovation.
Diego is also an Associate Consulting Professor at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. He serves on the school’s Board of Directors.
He speaks and publishes frequently on the value of design thinking and innovation to business and design audiences around the world. Diego is a columnist for BusinessWeek Online, and Fast Company calls his blog Metacool “…a must-read for anyone who wants to incorporate design thinking into their work.”
Prior to IDEO he held positions at HP, Nissan, and Intuit. He earned undergraduate engineering and humanities degrees at Stanford, and a MBA from Harvard.
Peter Rojas is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Engadget, a weblog with daily coverage of gadgets, consumer electronics, and personal technology, and the cofounder of Joystiq, a weblog covering the world of video games. He is also the Chief Strategy Officer for Weblogs, Inc., the world's largest blog network, and a Programming Director with AOL, the parent company of Weblogs, Inc. He is a frequent commenter on technology for several radio and television programs, and in 2005 served as a guest host on G4's Attack of the Show.
Prior to founding Engadget, Rojas served as the editorial director of technology weblog Gizmodo, as a contributing editor at Cargo, as an editor-at-large at Sync, as technology editor of VMan, Visionaire's men's fashion magazine, as a columnist on emerging technology for British newspaper The Guardian, as a features and news writer for the original Red Herring, and was a contributor to Wired, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Salon, Slate, Vice, Surface, Food & Wine, Popular Science, Fortune, Fortune Small Business, SCI FI Magazine, Money, and Business 2.0. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of Sussex (U.K.) and resides in New York City.
Robyn Waters is founder and president of RW Trend, LLC, a trend consulting company based in Minneapolis, MN. She brings over twenty five years of experience tracking and translating trends into sales and profit to this venture. Most recently, Robyn was Vice President of Trend, Design and Product Development for Target, a $48 billion upscale discount store based in Minneapolis. Under her direction the trend and design team traveled the world tracking and translating trends into unique product designs that enhanced Target's upscale brand image of "Expect More, Pay Less." One of Robyn's core values is the belief that good taste and great design don't have to be expensive.
Robyn is the author of the book The Trendmaster's Guide: Get A Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next, a practical and fun handbook designed to simplify and demystify the art of trend tracking. Each letter offers an insight into navigating the unknown and a helpful hint to prepare you for what's next. She's also a contributor to The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable, an "unprecedented collaboration of 33 of the world's smartest business thinkers." Her second book on the subject of trend is slated for release October 2006 from the Portfolio division of Penguin USA.