Who are your next customers - not just the ones you are serving today but the ones you'll need three, five, ten years from now? How do you figure out what goods and services will attract them in the future? How do you figure this out ahead of your competitors? According to globe-trotting innovation expert Jan Chipchase, most of the clues are right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. The key is learning to see the ordinary in a revolutionary new way, to see beyond what people are doing to understand why. As Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at frog design, an award-winning global design and innovation company, Chipchase shows us how to see the world differently, drawing on the everyday from making a phone call, to filling up a gas tank through to ascertaining whether its half and half you are pouring into your coffee. He's eternally looking for opportunities-gaps, anomalies, and contradictions-that will give his clients, some of the world's largest companies, a distinct competitive advantage, whether they're delivering the most low-tech bar of soap or through to the most high-tech wireless network. In "Hidden in Plain Sight", Chipchase takes readers on his journeys across the globe, sharing his methods for identifying unmet customer needs. No matter where he stops-whether Kabul or Cleveland-Chipchase's goals are the same: to spot and decode the routines of daily life and to help readers use the very same tools that he and his team use to see - and capitalize upon - what is hidden in plain sight today to create businesses tomorrow.
About the Author
Jan Chipchase is the executive creative director of Global Insights at frog, where he runs global research and insights practice. He has more than twenty-five patents pending, and his research has been featured in leading international media, including the New York Times, the BBC, the Economist, National Geographic, and Wired, and his blog Future Perfect is read in 191 countries. In 2011 Fast Company named him one of the one hundred most creative people in business. He is based in San Francisco and travels extensively and frequently throughout the world.Simon Steinhardt is the associate creative director of Editorial at the digital agency JESS3. He is the former managing editor of Swindle magazine, and he has contributed to and edited several books on global street culture and art, including OBEY: Supply and Demand―The Art of Shepard Fairey, The History of American Graffiti, and Art for Obama. Read more