What will the fate be for brands that fail to fully embrace design thinking?
Marty: Generally speaking, they’ll find their products and services will become increasingly commoditized and even obsolete as their competitors race ahead. Q: You discuss the importance of collaboration within companies, but what opportunities do you see for companies to collaborate with groups (i.e., consumers) outside the company walls? What about online collaboration? Marty: The web is actually the technology that unleashed collaboration. I’ve always said that we don’t live in the Information Age—we live in the Collaboration Age. The web has allowed people to work together across distances in real time for almost no money. This new connectedness has also made it necessary to work together, because there’s no place to hide in a network. Customers now know things about brands and companies that even their employees don’t know. Customers are literally running the show. So it makes sense to enlist them as a functioning part of the brand machinery. I love how Skittles has turned their w
