New Shopping Carts Being Implemented at Last … but Not by IDEO

The future of the shopping cart is here, at last. In this interesting story, Yannig Roth provides a follow up to the early developments of new style shopping carts as was described in a famous 1998 IDEO video. As Roth puts it in his post, this is a subject which I had debated a few times already (check http://bit.ly/ideosc for details) but what is interesting is that IDEO’s principles are now being implemented by … companies which have nothing to do with IDEO.

One more proof of what Steven Johnson describes as “the slow hunch” in  ”where good ideas come from”  and also that being a prime mover in an innovative field may not always be a good idea.

[ps: the shopping carts I saw last November as quoted by Roth in my blog comment  were actually very similar if not entirely identical to IDEO’s original prototype. You can find them in the above slideshow. The pictures were taken last November at a the Franprix supermarket in Limeil Brévannes, in the Paris region. Franprix is a subsidiary of French retail giant Casino]

I remember writing a blog post about another IDEO concept: Shimano Coasting. Their concept was supposed to make cycling attractive for the masses, but it eventually got dropped, what led my to question about the possible reasons for this failure. This post, is about a well-documented IDEO case: a shopping cart developped in 1998, that obviously didn’t make it to the stores… … Read More

via Yannig Roth / marketing, design & other exciting subjects

Original Post: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/new-shopping-carts-being-implemented-at-last-but-not-by-ideo/#gallery-1-slideshow