Creative new show created by Drew Carey

Drew Carey's  Improv-a-ganza is a very creative new show that mimics Whose Line Is It Anyway.  After participating and hosting Whose Line Is It Anyway, Drew Carey has decided to start his own show of world-class improvisation.  Drew's new show features various scenarios for actors/actresses to improv a scene for the audience to enjoy.  The show even consists of actors who used to be on Whose Line Is It Anyway.  I used to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway all the time when I was a kid but I never got the opportunity to participate in an improv until my creativity class.  I enjoyed the improv activity my class did and I finally realized how difficult improvisation really is.  It made me realize how absolutely amazing the professional actors/actress are on these improvisation shows.  I am very interested in watching Drew Carey's new show and see some of the best improvisation in the world has to offer.  I suspect Drew Carey's Improv-a-ganza to be a big hit now and in the future.

Four Keys Principles of Personal Innovation

Anne Mulcahy, the chief executive officer (CEO) who revived Xerox after a brush with bankruptcy, was asked recently whether she looked for different qualities in job candidates than in years past.

“We look for adaptability and flexibility,” she replied. “We have to change all the time. The people who really do the best are those who actually sense the need to change, and enjoy the lack of definition around their roles and what they can contribute.”

Asked how she gets a sense of whether a person has that quality, she explained that Xerox now looks at a candidate’s “appetite for not just vertical career ladders, but their appetite for what I call horizontal experiences, where it wasn’t always just about a title or the next layer up. And there was this desire to learn new things, to kind of grab on to things that were maybe even somewhat nontraditional.”

What you’re going to find in this book are nontraditional skills. They will demand you learn new ways. They will require that you adopt a new mind set. In this chapter, we’ll begin our exploration of personal innovation by examining what I call the four I-Skill Principles. They are:

PRINCIPLE 1: Innovation is not something you do after you get your work done; it’s how you do your work

Innovation is about approaching your daily work and the challenges you face with an open mind and a creative, can-do attitude. It’s about seeking unconventional solutions to the problems on your plate. At work, it’s looking at everything you do and figuring out where you can do better, in less time, with fewer motions, in a way that adds value to both internal and external customers.

Instead of approaching a single task with the attitude, “Okay, now I‘ve got to get creative,” the innovator approaches everything in life with this attitude. Instead of looking at “being creative” as something you need to do consciously, see it as something you do unconsciously, like breathing.

You can innovate in any job, any department, or any organization. Innovation is about taking action.
Ordinary people “innovate” every day. They find slightly better, easier ways to accomplish some routine task. They figure out new ways to close a sale, design a clever slide, increase production, or satisfy an internal customer’s request for a solution to a problem that has never come up before.

The list goes on and on. And sometimes they’ll notice an opportunity with great potential, which is what happened to one facilities manager.

Paulette I, a facilities manager, got the call from a new boss asking for help in transforming a division. “I was working at a large bank, supporting the head of the credit card division,” she explains. “He came in wanting to create a new culture. I got inspired. I began looking at how workspace could add value to the culture. I thought long and hard about what that could mean to me as a facilities manager. I concluded it meant I needed to look out ahead, anticipate our needs in the future, and not wait for management to figure out how facilities management could help. I needed to go to them, and I did.”

The basic role of facilities management is providing space for people to work in. “A lot of people in this profession leave it there,” says Paulette. “We’ve talked for years in our professional association about being more strategic. That’s often meant life-cycle management of buildings, looking for greater cost savings and green buildings. To me, being strategic means something different. It means innovating, finding new and better ways of doing things,” she explains. “There are no hard and fast rules for doing what I do. Things are changing so fast that you ’re confronted daily with problems and situations you’ve never faced before, and I’ve been doing this work for 20 years.”

The same attitude of experimentation that permeates the research lab can fill every area of your thinking. It involves coming up with possibilities and putting ideas to work to solve problems and generate opportunities — for yourself, your team, your company, and your career. It’s not something you do after you get your job done. It’s how you get your job done.

PRINCIPLE 2: Innovation is about more than inventing new products; it’s about figuring out how to add value where you are

When the global economic crisis hit, everything changed. Four dollar lattes suddenly became unaffordable luxuries. McDonald’s attacked with McCafé. Dunkin’ Donuts began serving premium coffee. Starbucks was forced to shutter 800 stores, lay off 5,000 employees, cut $500 million in costs, offer discounts, advertise, and look for even more ways to become efficient.

Innovation is about more than innovating new products. It’s understanding where you can add the most value where you are.

PRINCIPLE 3: You can innovate in any job, in any department, in any organization

Many times I’ve heard people voice the assumption that “My company doesn’t want me to be creative. They just want us to get our work done.” The question isn’t whether innovation is wanted and needed in your firm, it’s where and when.

“As a first-year auditor, I am not encouraged to be innovative,” grumbles Jonathan A., at a Big Four accounting firm in Los Angeles. “We are given large amounts of tedious work and asked to complete it as accurately and quickly as possible. They do not want us to be creative or try things our way. My peers and I often feel like we could improve the procedures, but it is discouraged. They want us to listen to directions and complete things exactly as we are told without resistance.”

A lot of young workers will no doubt relate to Jonathan’s lament. He’s bright, ambitious, and eager to make changes. He’s also in the apprentice phase of his career, so innovation is not appropriate just yet. Being a good apprentice means mastering how things are done in your organization and allowing yourself to be amazed that they work as well as they do.

Be curious when a veteran employee or manager tells you why things are done the way they are. Certainly listen to that voice in your head when you see a better way of doing something. And then channel that big – picture opportunity- spotting mind set right back into how you do your work.

In the course of our conversation, Jonathan mentioned that quite often he has to “eat hours.” He explained: “Let’s say I am given a work paper to complete and they budget ten hours for me to finish it. I work my ass off but it takes me 12 hours to complete. I can either book 12 hours and look inefficient or only book 10 to look good. If I were to charge 12 hours on that project, my manager would question me. HR would want to know why it took me so long. I would have to write a memo explaining all the issues. It is much easier to just eat the hours.”

“Are any of your first - year colleagues not having to eat hours?” I asked. “Have they figured out how to shave time while still following procedures?” Jonathan tells me that “the innovators here are the most efficient workers, cutting out unnecessary testing, discovering quicker ways to finish work papers, testing multiple things at once, etc. Innovation for you would be to figure out what they do that you don’t. Ask them about their techniques, and make changes in your methods.”

Certainly there are those jobs where, at first glance, innovation would seem to be nobody’s business. Certainly we don’t want any innovative thinking from airline pilots, right? We want them to follow the rules, conform to procedures, and get us safely to our destination.

But what about when the pilot is not actually flying the plane? Wouldn’t he or she be able to contribute ideas for increasing safety, or cutting fuel consumption, or reducing turnaround time at airports? In the wrong context, deviating from established procedure to try out some new idea would be a serious breach of company policy. But in the right context, any job in any department in any organization can use an injection of creativity — as long as it’s done in the appropriate context, at the appropriate time.

Had I not probed Jonathan’s situation further, I would have come away convinced that he’d found one of them. As we continued speaking, he offered: “The firm asks that we learn to do things their way for the first few years. Once we have been promoted, we are able to try things our own way with total responsibility for our testing.”

PRINCIPLE 4: Innovation is about taking action

Nurse Sue Kinnick was in charge of tracking and reducing medical errors at the Topeka, Kansas, Veterans Hospital. Sue’s research showed that medication errors — either giving the patient the wrong medicine, the incorrect dosage, or a duplicate dose — were common. One estimate was that 770,000 medication errors occurred each year in U.S. hospitals, while untold cases went unreported.

On a trip to Seattle, as a rental car agent scanned a bar code on her agreement and issued a receipt, a thought popped into Sue’s head: “If they can do this with rental cars, why can’t we do this with medicines? ”She was so excited about the idea she almost missed her flight.

By the time she got to her office, Sue had become convinced that a hospital bar-code system had the potential to greatly reduce medical errors and save many lives. An added benefit was that it would streamline the process for delivering prescription drugs to patients. Sue and her team became passionate champions for the new method, got seed capital of $ 50,000 approved, built a prototype, worked with the scanner manufacturer to develop a bigger screen, and collaborated with software developers. They piloted the system on a 30-bed long-term care ward for a year and then rolled it out in the entire Topeka hospital. Soon the entire VA system converted to Sue’s way.

At the Topeka hospital where Sue worked, errors involving the wrong medication or dosage have been cut by two thirds. Errors involving the wrong patient or the medication given at the wrong time have been reduced by more than 90 percent. Even though breast cancer would cut her career short, Sue continued her crusade for as long as she could. On her dying day, she told her colleagues gathered around her in the hospital to keep looking for ways to reduce medication errors and serve our veterans.

Like all of us, Sue could have had a good idea and not followed through with it. She could have blamed bureaucracy. She could have convinced herself that innovating a new method went “beyond her job description.” She could have turned the idea over to someone else to pursue. But she didn’t — she took action. And she overcame the obstacles and built the buy-in for her new idea and refused to take “no” for an answer.

Sue Kinnick knew that it’s not enough to have a good idea. You also have to take action.

These principles show that innovation is a mind set, not a job title. That innovation means adding value. That innovation is possible for everyone. And that innovation is about action.

Anne Mulcahy has redefined how businesses view and use innovative ideas to become a successful business.  Mulcahy's I-Skill Principles have shaped the way business will foster innovative practices.  These four principles can be applied to IDEO's project with the shopping cart.  Principle 1 - Innovation is not something you do after you get your work done; it's how you do your work:  IDEO split into teams that used various practices to inspire innovation.  IDEO did field research to see what qualities customers look for in a shopping cart.  Each group came up with ideas for the shopping cart to add to the final product.  Principle 2 - Innovation is about more than inventing new products; it's about figuring out how to add value where you are:  Each team came up with an idea that added value to the shopping carts.  Teams came up with ideas such as grocery crates inside the cart that customers are able to take out and move about the store and also a creative way to ensure children's safety inside the cart.  Principle 3 - You can innovate in any job, in any department, in any organization:  IDEO used cross-functional teams within the organization to help with the final shopping cart.  IDEO's idea generation teams worked with the design department to help construct the ideal shopping cart.  Principle 4 - Innovation is about taking action:  IDEO was able to take ideas from each group and combine them to make the final product.  In conclusion, IDEO developed an outstanding product that changed the way customers view shopping carts.  Anne Mulcahy's principles are fantastic and if companies will follow suit as Xerox did, then I believe innovation will be a tremendous tool for business to be successful in the future.

Creativity with the new iPad 2!

Apple has once again outdone itself in creating the iPad 2.  The iPad 2 has revolutionized the way we look at the tablet bubble.  The iPad 2 offers an operating system that is twice as fast as the first iPad.  This is a huge competitive advantage for Apple because we all know that faster is better in our technological world. The iPad 2 also offers a front and back camera for users to take pictures on the go as well as facetime capabilities.  Clients are now able to contact one another across the world that will allow businesses to have video conferences with clients abroad.  This innovative technology will pave the way for businesses in the future.  I recently purchased an iPad 2 for graduate school and I am very pleased with my buy.  I no longer even have the need for a laptop.  The iPad 2 has a Microsoft office app that allows me to create and edit word, excel, and powerpoint documents with the touch of my fingers.  I also have instance access to the Wall Street Journal as well as updates on stock markets such as the Dow Jones and S&P 500 index.  I believe the iPad 2 will be a game changer in the tablet market and I look forward to what other companies like Google will come out with to challenge the iPad 2 for market share.

Smartphone Alternative For Peek

A simpler way to get email on the go

Not everyone wants a phone that does it all. Some people just want to stay connected to their email without being chained to their computer—or carrying around an expensive, feature-heavy smartphone. To meet their needs, Peek joined forces with IDEO to design a streamlined mobile device that delivers one thing and one thing only: unlimited access to email.

The result is an inexpensive gadget that’s stylish, lightweight, and straightforward. The design team paired a large (2.5 inches), high-contrast display with a full keyboard and a scroll wheel to make reading text and navigating onscreen menus easy. A soft rubber skin over the keypad promotes typing comfortably, and the metal frame with aluminum backing is sturdy and sleek. The device is extremely thin (10mm) and light (3.8 ounces). (For comparison’s sake, an iPhone is 25 percent thicker, and a Blackberry is nearly 2 ounces heavier.)

The Peek supports up to three email accounts, Web-based or otherwise. At setup, it prompts users to enter their email handle and password. The device, available at Getpeek.com and Target stores, sells for less than $100 and unlimited nationwide service is $19.95 per month; no contract required. Bonus savings: When using the Peek to send email, consumers use 97 percent less electricity than emailing from a PC.

Time magazine named the Peek one of the best inventions of 2008. Forbes featured it as a “Gadget We Crave.” And Wired magazine gave it top ranking in its gear that helped them forget the year’s economic downturn.

“It won’t satisfy convergence-rabid smartphone fetishists, but for the rest of the world (i.e., the majority of it), this one-trick pony is a godsend,” wrote Terrence Russell in Wired. “In terms of looks, its slim profile stands up to the big boys. But the real treat is the interface. Instead of forcing you to wrestle with laborious setup menus, the Peek asks for a name, email address, and password. That’s it."

Peek has asked the always faithful IDEO to join together and help come up with a device that can compete with the extremely popular smartphone.  Through extensive research, Peek has introduced the first portable emailing device.  I would assume that Peek discovered that a number of smartphone users only had a smartphone to have instant assess to their email account.  To obtain this information, researchers more than likely went out into the field and asked smartphone users directly.  Many creativity advocates suggest that field research fosters creativity.  Peek's new emailing device could possibly be a game changer that dampens the light on smartphones.  With affordable monthly rates, this innovative device will be attractive to smartphone owners that are primarily interested in their emailing needs.  I am interested to see how big of a dint the Peek emailing device will put in the smartphone market.  

San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity

The San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity (SASIC) is a public school in San Antonio, TX.  There is no tuition at SASIC and its main focus is creativity in the arts, applied to "normal" (math, science, history) classes.  SASIC does have your standard curriculum classes but applies the arts to each class.  SASIC's mission statement is: San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity strives to honor its name: At our school, constructive learning through the arts taps into students’creative and analytical abilities and rewards them with relevant learning as well as a deeper understanding in all academic areas.  Although I feel like SASIC is innovative and has acknowledged that creativity should be implemented in our school systems, but why does society always tie creativity to "the arts."  Creativity is not just present in the arts, creativity is in every subject area in school systems.  Instead of SASIC wanting to "get creative" using the arts in classes like math and history, why not get creative in math using MATH.  When people generally think of innovating they think of "thinking outside the box."  Well, if SASIC is only using the arts to implement in other classes I think that they are really "staying INSIDE the box."  Until schools find a way to foster creativity in each subject, focused on the actual subject at hand, schools will continue to have the creative problems that researches are so worried about.  I feel that if schools can become creative in each subject INDEPENDENT of one another, then maybe, just maybe, we will see a progression in our school systems.

The 6 Myths of Creativity

Creativity.

These days, there's hardly a mission statement that doesn't herald it, or a CEO who doesn't laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, maddeningly little is known about day-to-day innovation in the workplace. Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers?

Teresa Amabile has been grappling with those questions for nearly 30 years. Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top B-school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity, is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation.

Eight years ago, Amabile took her research to a daring new level. Working with a team of PhDs, graduate students, and managers from various companies, she collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn't tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email, about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. She then coded the emails for creativity by looking for moments when people struggled with a problem or came up with a new idea.

"The diary study was designed to look at creativity in the wild," she says. "We wanted to crawl inside people's heads and understand the features of their work environment as well as the experiences and thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs."

Amabile and her team are still combing through the results. But this groundbreaking study is already overturning some long-held beliefs about innovation in the workplace. In an interview with FAST COMPANY, she busted six cherished myths about creativity. (If you want to quash creativity in your organization, just continue to embrace them.) Here they are, in her own words.

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types

When I give talks to managers, I often start by asking, Where in your organization do you most want creativity? Typically, they'll say R&D, marketing, and advertising. When I ask, Where do you not want creativity? someone will inevitably answer, "accounting." That always gets a laugh because of the negative connotations of creative accounting. But there's this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren't. That's just not true. As a leader, you don't want to ghettoize creativity; you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas, including your financial people. Over the past couple of decades, there have been innovations in financial accounting that are extremely profound and entirely ethical, such as activity-based costing.

The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical. Over the past five years, organizations have paid more attention to creativity and innovation than at any other time in my career. But I believe most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation. The anecdotal evidence suggests many companies still have a long way to go to remove the barriers to creativity.

2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator

The experimental research that has been done on creativity suggests that money isn't everything. In the diary study, we asked people, "To what extent were you motivated by rewards today?" Quite often they'd say that the question isn't relevant -- that they don't think about pay on a day-to-day basis. And the handful of people who were spending a lot of time wondering about their bonuses were doing very little creative thinking.

Bonuses and pay-for-performance plans can even be problematic when people believe that every move they make is going to affect their compensation. In those situations, people tend to get risk averse. Of course, people need to feel that they're being compensated fairly. But our research shows that people put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognized. People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. So it's critical for leaders to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

In our diary study, people often thought they were most creative when they were working under severe deadline pressure. But the 12,000 aggregate days that we studied showed just the opposite: People were the least creative when they were fighting the clock. In fact, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover -- when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down not only on that day but the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.

In fact, it's not so much the deadline that's the problem; it's the distractions that rob people of the time to make that creative breakthrough. People can certainly be creative when they're under the gun, but only when they're able to focus on the work. They must be protected from distractions, and they must know that the work is important and that everyone is committed to it. In too many organizations, people don't understand the reason for the urgency, other than the fact that somebody somewhere needs it done today.

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs

There's this widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity. There's even some psychological literature suggesting that the incidence of depression is higher in creative writers and artists -- the de-pressed geniuses who are incredibly original in their thinking. But we don't see it in the population that we studied.

We coded all 12,000 journal entries for the degree of fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love that people were experiencing on a given day. And we found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. The entries show that people are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they're more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. There's a kind of virtuous cycle. When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity.

5. Competition Beats Collaboration

There's a widespread belief, particularly in the finance and high-tech industries, that internal competition fosters innovation. In our surveys, we found that creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

Maybe it's only the public-relations departments that believe downsizing and restructuring actually foster creativity. Unfortunately, I've seen too many examples of this kind of spin. One of my favorites is a 1994 letter to shareholders from a major U.S. software company: "A downsizing such as this one is always difficult for employees, but out of tough times can come strength, creativity, and teamwork."

Of course, the opposite is true: Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing. But it's even worse than many of us realized. We studied a 6,000-person division in a global electronics company during the entire course of a 25% downsizing, which took an incredibly agonizing 18 months. Every single one of the stimulants to creativity in the work environment went down significantly. Anticipation of the downsizing was even worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. More troubling was the fact that even five months after the downsizing, creativity was still down significantly.

Unfortunately, downsizing will remain a fact of life, which means that leaders need to focus on the things that get hit. Communication and collaboration decline significantly. So too does people's sense of freedom and autonomy. Leaders will have to work hard and fast to stabilize the work environment so ideas can flourish.

Taken together, these operating principles for fostering creativity in the workplace might lead you to think that I'm advocating a soft management style. Not true. I'm pushing for a smart management style. My 30 years of research and these 12,000 journal entries suggest that when people are doing work that they love and they're allowed to deeply engage in it -- and when the work itself is valued and recognized -- then creativity will flourish. Even in tough times.

We have examined Teresa Amabile thoroughly in class and I found this article a nice addition to our previous discussions.  Amabile has been a "creative prodigy" and provides six myths of creativity in today's business-world.  After reading this article I feel that I am a little less creative than I originally thought I was.  In particular to the myth, "money is a creative motivator."  I have wanted to enter the world of business for quite some time now and one of my main reasons for doing so is because there is a lot of money to be made in business.  I enjoy business very much but I honestly feel that I would be more motivated to do well in my job if a large bonus was the reward.  My father is in the scaffolding business and his bonus solely depends on how many jobs he lands for his company.  I just honestly feel that I would come up with creative ways to make more money for my company if I was to "get a piece of the action" as well.  Another myth that I find they may hinder my creative ability is "competition beats collaboration."  I am not very fond of working in groups and I personally think that I can get more quality work done when working by myself.  I am an athlete so I thrive on winning; competition is just something that gets my blood going.  However, I do agree that when working in a group it is imperative to collaborate with one another to gain a group cohesiveness.  There should NOT be competition among group members because everyone is wanting to "get his/hers" and not worried about the overall success of the group.

Redefining Self-Service Banking for BBVA Group

BBVA is a global financial-services provider with more than 47 million individual and corporate customers. The company, which operates in more than 30 countries, is the largest bank in Mexico and a leader in Spain and the Americas, including significant holdings in the United States. In 2009, BBVA — which takes pride in its sharp customer focus — was named the Best Bank in Latin America as part of Euromoney magazine’s Awards for Excellence.

At the outset, the team faced the challenge of overcoming ATM industry standards. Product development was driven by hardware manufacturers, which supplied banks with a catalog of available ATM models to choose from. BBVA teamed up with IDEO to develop a system based on customer needs. It’s also an automated teller machine designed to gain a competitive advantage. With IDEO’s help, it has shifted the industry paradigm to custom-design a machine around user experience.

The multi-phased project began with work to fully understand these needs. The design team interviewed and observed ATM users at BBVA and other bank branches in Spain, Mexico, and the United States. The team also examined analog self-service experiences, such as those at gas pumps, supermarket checkouts, and train-ticket kiosks.

Using insights they gained through this research, IDEO and BBVA outlined a strategy of innovations around the self-service channel and the business case for building a custom-designed ATM that offered all of the most common banking transactions in a simple, flexible, and intuitive manner. The team also revamped the bank’s internal communication strategy and collaborated on user feedback programs during the pilot stages. Throughout the development process, IDEO and BBVA worked closely with manufacturing partners NCR and Fujitsu to ensure that the original design intent was maintained throughout the engineering, build, and implementation of the new ATM.

The new machines improve privacy, ease of use, and simplicity. The customer stands at 90 degrees to anyone else who may be waiting, shielded by a frosted panel. All operations, including PIN entry, are completed on a 19-inch touch screen that displays only information relevant to the transaction at hand. All cash, statements and receipts are handled in and out through a single slot.

Five pilot ATM units were installed at BBVA branches in Madrid by early 2010 and BBVA plans to roll out the ATMs in different countries over the next few years.

IDEO and BBVA group have teamed up to redefine the ATM self-service banking.  BBVA has shifted their organizational goals to customer service and priorities.  BBVA has designed an innovative ATM machine that one can get all the benefits of interacting with a real life bank teller.  This could possibly be a "game-changer" in the banking service.  The redesigned ATM is a 19” touch-screen that customers can have complete access to all banking needs.  I would imagine that IDEO used the same process that they used in the grocery cart video we watched in class to design this innovative ATM.  IDEO more than likely went out in the field (like many researchers suggest enhances creativity) to ask customers what they liked and dislike from their banking services' ATM machines.  This is where they I am sure they added the frosted glass screen to  help ensure customer privacy.  This innovative ATM machine has revolutionized we look at self-service banking and I look forward to seeing what other banking corporations do to stay ahead of the game as BBVA has done.