HITS
HITS Spring Keynoter Stresses Bottom-Top Approach to Innovation
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UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — You know that old saying, “form follows function”? Well, Jeff Julian, founder and CEO of design thinking firm Lab5 Systems, has a problem with that.
“Form follows function, but is dictated by ceremony,” he said May 17, speaking during a keynote presentation at HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit.
A Hollywood A-list creative-futurist and designer, Julian (“Doctor Strange,” “A Wrinkle in Time”) pointed to why we still buy books, even though we have tablets. And why we eat sushi with chopsticks, instead of a fork. “The reason is, we love ceremony,” he said.
Julian walked HITS attendees through ideas on how creative strategies can impact organizations, and offered insights into how media and entertainment companies can nurture creativity to effect change. And part of what he sees wrong among some companies is that corporate culture continues to be a top-down endeavor. That’s changed, he said.
“It’s not working,” Julian said. “In the past decade, I haven’t been to a company that actually innovated top to bottom.” Innovation usually starts from the bottom, he said.
And even the best and biggest of companies make major misses when it comes to innovation, by not thinking their designs through, or by forgetting the ceremony aspect of innovation. This is why Google missed the boat with Glass,” he said.
Additionally, he said true innovation needs to balance the digital world we live in with the basic aspects of how humans operate. “Fundamentally, we’re analogue creatures, but our technology is digital,” he said.
HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event is being presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.
