I’m hosting a panel discussion exploring the differences + similarities between Products and Services Development at Dilworth Neighborhood Grill on 9/22/11.  We’ve got a neat lineup of cross-breed panelists who have worn both hats and they’ll be sharing their stories over snacks and drinks starting at 5:30.

This is all on behalf of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), Carolinas Chapter.

Innovate Carolina attendees, use priority code Innovate2011 to get a discounted registration rate!

Since tax day’s been extended, there’s no excuse for innovators to miss this one!

logo via charlotte startup weekend

Posts have been less frequent than intended as of late, but I wanted to post two events that are happening here in May.

The first is Charlotte Startup Weekend over at Enventys Friday the 14th through Sunday the 16th.   If you’re looking for an excuse to stop talking about your great business idea and actually start doing something about it, then this is for you.  Billed as a “un-conference,much in the same vein as Barcamp, this partners entrepreneur types with developers in teams to get pitches up and running.

Also affiliated with UNCC is a panel event on May 19th at the Levine Museum called “Charlotte’s Creative Class: How Innovation Can Lead the Queen City Beyond the Recession.”  Yet another discussion about this town’s identity post-financial  crisis, but this time through the lens of Charlotte’s creative class.

photo via sirconferences

I wanted to quickly highlight a handful of design+innovation events in the Queen City before they sneak up on us!  Who knew we were such a hotbed?!

• Perhaps as a preview to TEDxCharlotte, TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman is visiting Charlotte to host a double feature on 4/7 and 4/8.  The first is “Charlotte as a Learning Playground,” which is geared to be “an interactive conversation on Charlotte’s present and future identity.”  At $199, it’s a little pricey, but one perk is that it’s at the new Ritz Carlton Uptown, where attendees can enjoy a fancy spread of hors d’oeuvres and try out the locally filtered water through its first-of-its-kind LEED setup.
• Charlotte’s own AIGA chapter is coordinating the city’s first annual Design Week, and they’re kicking it off at Imaginon on 4/13 with a Design Unplugged panel discussion of local creative directors and businessfolks.
• The next two conflict with an innovation event I’m attending in Chapel Hill, but I figured I’d share it here for those staying local that weekend:  Barcamp Charlotte is hosting version 3.0 at Area15 on 4/10 and the Southern District Conference for the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is in Charlotte on 4/9-11, themed The Economy of Design.

photo via easybloom (click for larger)

At work, I’ve been thinking a lot about how consumers consume data and use it to make everyday decisions.  Now that we live in always-connected, info-lusting world, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that there are examples of it everywhere after I leave the office.  I’ve been using a calorie-counting app on my iPhone to balance food with exercise over the last two weeks.  I’ve played around with Mint.com and TurboTax to make decisions that deal with money.

Over the weekend, I used a sensor-based device called EasyBloom to decide what seeds to plant in my backyard, based on the chemistry of the soil and the amount of sun it gets (clearly, my plants get no sun at night, as the picture will above confirms.)  And while the chart is nice to have for reference, what’s far more important about the data is what I should do about it.  Since I’m no gardener, the insight and the expert recommendations that companies make for me is where the value lives.

I’ve written about data visualization before, and there’s many many beautiful examples of it everywhere.  Then what’s the lesson here?  Sometimes as designers and businessfolks, we forget to finish drawing the conclusion and offer the viewer a point of view by which to process those great charts, graphs, and lines.  Be that an insight, a recommendation, or a call to action, remember to give consumers the ending!

Until then, here’s one of my favorites from Dan Pink talking about the topic of his most recent book, Drive, which is all about human motivation.  A wonderful lesson for service designers everywhere.

The economy undoubtedly presents a cost challenge, and it may seem like a luxury to whisk away your most productive employees for a day.  However, I’ve seen dramatic differences in idea quality when teams downgrade to ideating in an internal conference room.  In light of that, I suggest a few affordable creative spaces in Charlotte, all of which cost far less than a boring hotel ballroom and worth the investment for results.

photo via Magellan/IMR

The Best Buy:  Magellan Idea Center
Located just outside Uptown in the Atherton Lofts, this space was designed with ideation in mind.  (They also use it for focus groups and other types of market research.)  It’s a huge space packed with creative stimuli (magazines, toys, and local art) and has smaller spaces ideal for breakout exercises.  Lots of amenities are included, like coffee, snacks and tech equipment.

The Local: Imaginon
One of the benefits of having a session in a children’s museum is that it encourages your participants to think like kids again.  Frank Blair of PLCMC suggests choosing one of the round rooms, adjacent to the courtyard, to have a session outdoors.  Note that meetings technically have to be open to the public, so it may not be ideal for super-secret topics, but would be a nice place for brainstorming with potential customers.
Runner up “public” space: The Green at Wachovia

The Extra Sensory Experience: Amelie’s French Bakery
Though I haven’t had a workshop here myself, I imagine it would be a lovely place to host one, especially with the tasty treats so close by.  And it would be a neat option for teams who are most creative during non-business hours, since they’re open 24/7.
Runners-up: The galleries at the Light Factory or the studios at Area 15 in NoDa (site of local meetups and barcamps.)

I’d love to hear about spaces that other folks in the area have tried.  Post them in the comments!

If you’ve got a few more dollars to invest in a quick workshop on innovation, consider “Building your Innovation Capacity” taught by the McColl School of Business at Queens University on March 17-18.  I don’t know much about it outside the website, but it looks to hit on a broad range of steps in the innovation process.

Local grocer Harris Teeter has also been using its lower-tech way to raise money at the register for the cause.

What these both have in common is that donations occur at the point of thought, removing the consumer’s barriers of inconvenience.  No need to sit down to write (and mail) a check or enter in a bunch of credit card information.

And today, local WFAE reporter Julie Rose told us how those donations actually make it to relief teams on the ground, disputing the myth that the money is taking 90 days to be useful.

logo via Queen's Feast

For some reason, my mindmap over the summer about Charlotte Restaurant Week got lots of hits, so I thought I’d revisit the topic.

The winter version of the event is here once again, and like many Charlotteans, I will put my New Year resolutions on hold to participate.  Why is it so successful?  It’s great for restaurants because it fills empty tables during a slow period.   The scarcity of a $30 deal at a fancy restaurant will sucker any diner into trying something new.

Personally, I like it because it’s another reason to bring people together.  But it also cuts down the number of decisions I have to make when ordering off of a menu.  This reminds me of a little publicity blitz by Menu Engineer (that’s right, an engineer) Gregg Rapp went on last fall.  His interviews with Time and the Today Show reveal all the tricks he teaches restaurants as they redesign their menus to get you to spend more on your meal, including using center justification and taking out dollar $igns.  He also uses fanciful descriptions that make their popular dishes hard to resist.

You don’t often get to read a person’s mind as he/she processes a menu to see if these tactics work.  This Charlotte Loafing blogger shares her mental gymnastics on one of Restaurant Week’s participants, Liberty Gastropub, and it looks like the tasty descriptions work on her.