del.icio.usIn November 2006, Teehan+Lax invested $50,000 in ten companies that are solid innovators for user experience and design. One year later, in 2007, the fund was up 39.3%. It’s a great story of how design helps companies outperform (the UX Fund handily beat S&P 500, NYSE, DOW, and NASDAQ).
Now almost two years later, we see that design isn’t immune to the vagaries of the market. The ten stocks chosen are now collectively down 22.37% from 2006 as of this writing, with Apple, Nike, and RIM the only three to stay up compared to 2006. But even those three are losing value as the markets slide, compared to their 52 week highs.
With an afternoon rally today on American markets, we see that loss lessening to only 19% in the time I’ve been writing this post. That loss is less than the indices over the same time, making the UX Fund still a better investment than index funds. However, while design and innovation can buffer loss, it’s certainly not immune to the bigger issues of markets, credit, and investor trends.
VC firm Sequoia Capital is telling its portfolio of start ups to tighten their belts. They have an excellent overview of how the economy got to where it’s at now, and their view on prospects for a long recovery instead of the relatively rapid recovery after the dotcom bubble burst. Check out their ‘RIP Good Times’ presentation:
thanks to Venturebeat for the deck.
Interviewed by Bloomberg TV, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley discusses how Procter & Gamble is accelerating their innovation investment during the current downturn in order to increase their growth and improve their market position.
I was fortunate to be in one of the early public workshops where Scott Hirsch and Janice Fraser shared their Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience report. At $395, the report wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it. Four years later, it’s still one of the best pieces on the business value of design, and now Adaptive Path is sharing it for free. If you haven’t looked at it already, grab the PDF today.
Thanks to Peterme for sharing this more widely…designers are better off for it.
In two months we’ll be hosting the fourth annual Canadian User Experience Workshop—CanUX—at the lovely Banff Centre. The event runs from November 16 to 18, with an optional pre-conference UX Bootcamp.
We’ve got an excellent line-up of speakers—Dave Gray (XPLANE), Brandon Schauer (Adaptive Path) and Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo!)–with a couple of slots yet to be filled.
The great thing about CanUX is that it’s more like a retreat than a conference. The people who come to participate in all the activities (like the artist-led workshops, the design slam, the show-and-tell reception and, of course, the drinking) have a great time.
As always, we’ve worked to keep the price low and all-inclusive. A mere $899 gets you into the event, plus two nights accommodation and meals. The price goes up next week, but it’s still cheaper than a lot of other events.
The full program, speaker bios and other details are available on the CanUX website.
