Nodes of Design#43: Crafting a culture of Innovation by Janaki Kumar

Janaki is a thought-leader in design-led innovation in the enterprise. She had delivered award-winning products and services that help businesses transform the way they work.  She is currently working as Head of Design, Commercial Bank at JPMorgan Chase & Co and Co-Instructor of the Customer Engagement Design at Stanford University.  

She is a proven leader in building, coaching and inspiring high-performance design teams, leveraging design-thinking, customer empathy, and co-innovation. She is an inventor on over 20 patents, and also Janaki was named as Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal in 2016.  

She is an active writer and speaker on Innovation and design. She is the co-author of Gamification at Work–Designing Engaging Business Software. She was a speaker on various occasions like TEDx, IxDA and many more. She has guest-lectured at Stanford d.school, Carnegie Mellon University and San Jose State University. 

In this episode, Janaki had shared wonderful insights on Crafting a culture of innovation and how to bootstrap and foster those cultures as a design leader. She shared a few insights on gamification in the workplace to nurture better innovative and productive minds, along with a few outstanding examples and case scenarios.  In the end, we discussed how design leaders could measure success or failure for various modules that we implement, be it innovative models or gamification or anything new that we set up for the betterment of the company and our peers?

Takeaways: How to bootstrap culture off innovation, How does gamification help nurture better culture, Different ways to measure the process implementations. 

Tales from Designers around the world - medium.com/design-warp

Janaki Kumar's Website - janakikumar.com 

Janaki Kumar recommends books: 

The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman // Also available as a free online course at udacity.com

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All -Tom and David Kelly

Business Model Generation A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Osterwalder & Pigneur

Addition: If you enjoy thinking about how the human mind works, check out Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman and Blink by Malcom Gladwell

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Nodes of Design is a non-profit and self-sponsored initiative by Tejj.