	Design Relationships reviewed by Mechanical Engineering magazine Our very own Adriano Galvao recently had his book,"Design Relationships: Integrating User Information into Product Development" reviewed by Mechanical Engineering (ME) magazine. Adriano's book examines how to design user-product relationships into the core of a product’s configuration, based on information from product functions and user studies. He presents a methodology, the Function-Task Interaction Method, which is based on the concept of “affordances” and identifies, represents and quantifies the relationships that one has with a given a product. Check out ME's review of Adriano's book here. Get more details about the book at Amazon.com.

Innovate	Change	Learn
In Search of Innovation When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere. Innovating Innovation: The Best Ideas Can Come From Anywhere Great ideas can be found anywhere, from your customers, in the call centers, or on the blogosphere for instance. Joel Rubinson of the Advertising Research Foundation advocates that companies need to stop thinking about innovation as a linear, product-based process and be more open to finding innovation in unexpected places.	Dusting Off a Big Idea in Hard Times Automated innovation—relying on computers to roll out new products—was a dud. Now it's a sharp tool for cutting costs. Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation A soured economy has prompted a boom in crowdsourcing. The question is, "Will this creative, efficient trend outlast the recession?"	The Consumer Decision Journey The McKinsey Quarterly report says, "Consumers are changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should." Note: Don't miss the interactive presentation at the end of this article abstract. Make Cost Cutting Invisible to the Customer If you are going to cut expenses in a recession, do so in ways that are the least visible. This will ensure that the customer experience surrounding your product is as unchanged as is possible.

Sylver Consulting is an international research and innovation firm. Our results extend beyond traditional market research in that the process we employ, Design Ethnography, seeks to not only offer a picture of who customers are, but to define intersections between their needs and your business' priorities and capabilities. For more information about our company, please call or write us. We'd love to hear from you! 1-312-239-0346 • info@sylverconsulting.com

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