Category: Ideas in Action

Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’

TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …

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Co-opetition – friendly competition

Combining traditional Vietnamese fine art with pioneering technology has created success for VietnamArtist.com, a virtual online gallery based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Tran Thi Anh Vu (pictured, right), an art gallery proprietor, set up VietnamArtsist.com in 1999, seizing the opportunities offered by e-commerce to develop her business. She engaged the services of an …

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Selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts

Cassandra Postema and Dong Shing Chiu (pictured) are in the business of selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts called ‘Hope Tees’. Their Hong Kong creative enterprise is called ‘Dialog’ because it embodies an exchange of conversations between marginalised Asian textile craft wisdom and modern western design. The result is an attractive and fun range of …

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Cheeky Guerrillas in Utrecht

The four friends formed a band at college but it didn’t work out, so they call themselves ‘Autobahn’ as a tribute to the band that never plays in the film The Big Lebowski. Instead they focus on what they excel at – using their best creative talents to design publications and websites that have something …

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Ideas in Action – JAB Design

JAB Design, a design consultancy based in Liverpool, is a great example of a creative business using business thinking to make their creative enterprise even more successful. JAB Design features as an ‘Ideas in Action’ case study in the book ‘T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity’. This section of the book …

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