Monday Vision: Collective Inspiration
Monday, January 10, 2011
We’ve stretched out from the holidays, warmed up (well, as much as a snowy New York allows you to) and we’re feeling super energized about 2011 and the exciting possibilities for us to demonstrate The Brilliance of Change™.
Last November we shared our thinking on Collective Innovation. We’ve extended this theme to Collective Inspiration and would like to share how we gather insight and inspiration that fuels design ideas. We’ve built our positioning and model around the collective concept, because we believe it’s the best way to keep insight, inspiration and ideas flowing while giving us the agility to adapt to change.
The concept of Collective Inspiration enables us to gather valuable thinking, on a global scale, from diverse talent (our growing Collective). This spans inspiration from people we either know well and respect for their opinions, or those we have carefully identified for their potential to provide us with new thinking. They simply fall into three types: thought leaders; creative consumers; and our design community.
Our Collective Inspiration is another way in which Monday Collective demonstrates its difference and value as we continue to collaborate with entrepreneurial thinkers to design meaningful change for brands and businesses. It’s a smart way of working because it taps into diverse thinking to open our imagination and ‘inspire’ design ideas. We then enjoy playing with the possibilities way before putting pencil to paper.
Now for some fun! We set the same challenge to four very different experts within our Collective – a graphic designer, a fashion stylist, a medical professional and a cultural observer. Find one piece of inspiration that represents ‘the future of natural’ to you and briefly explain why.
A: The company PET:Cell hand make jewelry from recycled plastic. They transform the humble PET bottle into beautiful and eco-friendly objects inspired by nature. Fashion stylist, NYC
B: The camouflage patterns and colors found in nature are so powerful yet sometimes overlooked, we should remember to look twice at the beauty that already exists around us. Graphic designer, NYC
C: ’Dandelight’ by Design Drift beautifully combines nature with technology by lighting up real dandelion seeds with an electronic circuit to create little light sculptures. Cultural observer, UK
D: Man-made synthetic cells, a kind of artificial life form to be used in the future to yield new biofuels, create clean water and possibly replace petroleum-based products like plastics. Medical professional, Australia.
Our culture at Monday Collective is built on gathering collective insights to create remarkable design. Great ideas can come from many places, inspiration should be encouraged from diverse sources. It’s what stretches our thinking and allows us, our Collective and our client partners to experience The Brilliance of Change™.
You’ll be able to see what we’ve been busy working on in a month or two when our projects start to launch, so please do keep your eyes peeled. In the interim, do send us your thoughts on the topic of Collective Inspiration, and if you have something that inspires you please join in the fun and share it with us at change@mondaycollective.com. We’ll be selecting our favorites for our Change gallery, credited to you of course. We’re keen to build this and if you’d like to see it grow, and benefit from seeing what others share too, please do contribute and join our movement to demonstrate The Brilliance of Change™.
Monday Vision: Collective Innovation
Monday, November 1, 2010
We’ve been discussing innovation a lot recently, mostly because we’re constantly scouting for new innovations and we’re just not as inspired as we’d like to be. We’re still seeing incremental changes and extensions to existing offers, yet very little in the way of meaningful, ground breaking innovation that makes a real difference to our lives.
So today we’re going to talk about us, for a change! Those of you who have been following our blog and checking out our web site - www.mondaycollective.com – will know that the soul of our brand design partnership is The Brilliance of Change™ – demonstrating how transformational design can create a positive impact for brands and businesses.
Our name Monday Collective reflects our innovative and nimble business model. We use Mondays as a fresh start, to observe and gather insight. We protect this day to focus on identifying opportunities to design meaningful change. As we recognize that it’s important to get an abundance of ideas flowing, we have a diverse, organically growing, global Collective of thought leaders. This means we don’t just bang on about change, we have created an ecosystem of people that inspire and feed responsible change. We think it’s pretty cool.
Monday Collective Ecosystem
Our Collective culture is tuned for observation, exploration and imagination. Four white walls are like prison to us and not an environment to inspire new thinking, which is why you’ll find us out and about a lot looking for insights and ideas. It keeps us both inspired and inspiring. Our brains and sketch books are never short of scribbled ideas, from all sorts of weird and wonderful places. Perhaps we’ll put them all into a book and sell them one day too. We think we’ll just hold onto them for now.
The creation of new, more meaningful and differentiating ideas will deliver more success than the abundance of nothingness we’re experiencing today. Company cultures need to shift from one of efficiency to one of exploration and experimentation. We’re on a mission to break down the barriers and set creativity free. By encouraging healthy participation to reveal insights and fresh ideas, we’re exploring divergent possibilities for making the world (of brands) a better (and healthier) place.
We’re always looking for thought leaders to join our Collective and campaign for The Brilliance of Change™, so if you think you could bring talent to our growing Collective please do get in touch with us through collective@mondaycollective.com. You’ll be involved in some healthy debates from time to time about the future of select topic areas. It’s usually the first Monday of the month for a couple of hours, but also in between if a project requires an additional injection of future thinking – we may call upon you randomly, which keeps life interesting. Just the way we like it.
Collectively, we are constantly sharing ideas and embarking on a journey of innovative discovery that makes us all better design thinkers so that we can make the change happen. If you are a company that sees the value and possibilities this can bring to your business, we’d love to hear from you through more@mondaycollective.com. Of course, we encourage you to participate in the fun too. Are you game?
