Alexander Manu

Alexander Manu (born December 10, 1954, Bucharest, Romania) is a leader in strategic foresight and innovation.

In 2006 Peachpit Press released Manu's book "The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation in the Global Economy". The book is considered to be provocative to individuals and companies seeking to maximize their creative potential, while it offers companies practical advice and tactics to bridge the imagination gap, and to identify and fulfill new business opportunities. Manu's insight and applied methodologies for creating possibility, and transformative innovations, are viewed to be resonate through real-world scenarios from companies such as Motorola and Red Hat, and from conversations with MIT's Mitchel Resnick, who discuss how the most innovative products and services arise from creative play.

Manu teaches " Innovation, Foresight, and Business Design" at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto and is a Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He is a strategic innovation practitioner, lecturer, and author and since 2007 a Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator at InnoSpa International Partners, a worldwide consulting firm reshaping business thinking by helping large corporations explore and define new competitive spaces. He was the founder of Axis Group International, a design, development and applied research consultancy established in 1980 in Toronto where he was responsible for the development of strategic intellectual property and pre-competitive business concepts that integrate a broad range of skills in the areas of Conceptual Design, Intellectual Property, User Interaction Design, Ideal Experience Mapping and Industrial Design. His original research in motivation theories led to the application of play behaviour in innovation strategies, competitive analysis, trend mapping, new business models and the creation of compelling user experiences for companies as diverse as Motorola, LEGO, and Whirlpool.

In tandem with his teaching and consulting work, Manu has made regular appearances as an international lecturer. Having been the keynote speaker at international conferences, he is sought-after his motivational talks on the subject of leveraging the imagination upwards to creative strategies. By asking 'what-if...?' questions relevant to the archetype level of humanity's nature and desires, as the result of a focused and recognized passion towards the discovery and sharing of new design methods.

Until late 2007, Alexander was the Founder and Executive Director of Research at the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, a non-profit research institute based in Toronto. With strong ties to the Ontario College of Art & Design, Manu's work developed new methodologies in strategic foresight, focusing on the intersection of behavior, technology and organization.

Manu generated the concept of ToolToy, a methodology for the development of physical models that integrate the characteristics of play value into products, services and system features. He was also one of the early advocates of Experience Design, which he described as the true esthetic of design in a series of articles written in 1994 for the magazine "Studio" published in 194, 1995 and compiled in book form in "The Big Idea of Design" published in 1998.

Founder of The Humane Village (1993) and editor of "The Humane Village Journal", a periodical dedicated to the exploration of design as an instrument for social change, Alexander Manu chaired the "Socially Responsible Design Task Force" of the Ontario Design Strategy in 2004 and was Co-Chair of the Organizing Committee of "ICSID 97’ Toronto", serving as director and Chair of the Program Committee.

A past president of the Association of Chartered Industrial Designers of Ontario, past board member of the [http://www.icsid.org/ International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID)] , and past member of various government-level advisory boards in Canada and Asia, consulting on design strategy for the Department of Canadian Heritage, the China External Trade Development Council and the Korea Institute of Design Promotion. He is presently on the Advisory Board of the [http://www.voice-of-design.com/home_am.html Japan Institute of Design] (Tokyo) and Design for the World - Barcelona, an international NGO that provides and promotes humanitarian design solutions. For his contribution to the development of the visual arts, he has been elected an Academician of the [http://www.rca-arc.ca/ Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA)] .

In 1978 Manu received his Master of Decorative Arts (MDA- Industrial Design), from the Institute of Fine Arts of Bucharest, Romania.

Written works

* [http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321413652 The Imagination Challenge (2006)]
* [http://www.emu.dk/gsk/paa_tvaers_af_fag/temaer/design/litteratur.jsp#indhold998 The Big Idea of Design (1999)]
* [http://www.ddc.dk/ddc/DDCshop/ddc_boeger/shop_bog_tooltoys ToolToys: Tools with an Element of Play (1995)]