Michael Plishka
Michael Plishka
Michael Plishka is the President and Founder of ZenStorming Solutions, LLC an innovation design consultancy. He believes in co-design methodologies, sharing design thinking essentials - empowering people and companies to make a difference with their products and services.
Want to Harness the Power of “We”? Innovation Starts with “I”
People like to point to the fact that Thomas Edison had an entire innovation factory working for him, that innovation was a team effort. ...
Systems Thinking Tools for Understanding, Visualization and Communication!
Innovations often have multiple repercussions both intended and unintended. Systems modelling is a powerful means to understand interactions and their consequences. It can give insights into...
Talking Hearts and Other Parts
Every once in a while someone takes a technology and uses it in a slightly different way than usual. A friend of mine who...
Communicating The New — A Book Review
I recently finished reading, Communicating The New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation by IIT Institute of Design Professor, Kim Erwin. The premise of the...
The Time is Ripe for Physicians to Become Mobile Medical App Entrepreneurs
On September 25th of this year, after approximately 2 years of soliciting comments from Industry, the FDA released a guidance document entitled "Mobile Medical...
Creative Milwaukee Work – My Summary in Words and Pictures
A couple weeks back, I was at the Creative Milwaukee @Work Conference. I've put together a social media summary at Seen.
How Monsanto Should Be Innovating
It seems that every week someone mentions something about Monsanto, and it's very seldom good. Doesn't matter if it's Facebook, or Twitter, or...
Ideas Aloft – A Reflection on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Winds rustled the trees and chilled me as I walked through the woods. A marsh bordered my path and I was amazed by...
Highlights from IIT’s 2013 Design Research Conference
Once again the IIT Institute of Design has put on a provocative and stimulating conference. Under the theme "Exploring Creative Balance in Design", the conference...
Never Underestimate the Power of Beauty
Think about this, next time you're designing a product, a service – an experience… If a fly lands on your food, or your hand: Wave…
Get Insights Into Human Behavior by Paying Attention to the Everyday
Looking for insights into human behavior? Sometimes they are right in front of us. The problem is that we are in such an automatic mode,...
Here’s One Thing You Need to See, Analyzing Words Upon a Tree
Great innovations occur when we can see things in ways that others haven't. To that end, we study people, their behaviors, what they say, and...
A New Tool for Understanding People’s Emotions – Beyond Verbal
"Hey, Bill, how are you doing?" "Things are going well!" "It doesn't look like it. Looks like you're tired and worn out. Something bother...
5 Insights Into Innovation From the Coyote
Graphic Courtesy of Nature.com (Click on it to read article on Coyotes) Every once in a while when I'm out jogging, I'll come across a...
How to be Interesting (and Innovative, and Creative, and
What really struck me about, Jessica Hagy's, "How to be Interesting (in 10 Simple Steps)", was both its simplicity and profundity. Through the use of...
Innovation – It Was Never About Failure
In my last post about the IIT Design Strategy Conference, I mentioned that Bruce Nussbaum presented on what it means to move from a...
New Directions in Innovation and Design – Insights from IIT’s Design Strategy Conference
I was at the IIT Institute of Design's Design Strategy Conference this week. This is, no doubt, one of the best, little known, innovation and...
When Success is Bad – The Math Behind Why Failure Is Essential
We all know Murphy's Law: "Whatever can go wrong, will." But, what happens when the right things happen for what we think are the right...
Sound, Remembering, and Sleeping – An Innovative way to Design Memorable Experiences
The idea of learning while we sleep has been around for almost a hundred years. It turns out that getting information while we...
Sonic and Multi-Sensorial Branding
Over at FUSE 2013 , Scott Power, Senior Brand Strategist for Kaiser Permanente, discussed sonic branding vis-à-vis KP's work with Audiobrain. Power pointed out how...