Kimball Office and 76ers open Innovation Lab Philadelphia
The Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted by Kimball officially opened the doors to its 8,000 square-foot workspace located in Philadelphia.
Kimball Office co-founded the lab, in part, to better study the changing work patterns and emerging challenges of high growth, fast paced work environments.
“The rapid pace of change is compounding workplace challenges related to density, privacy, space optimization and general productivity in the workplace,” said Wendy Murray, director of marketing at Kimball Office. “The real-time data from the lab will enable us to make faster decisions, as we work toward integrating technology and intelligence into our brand’s portfolio.”
The Innovation Lab is intended to incubate and accelerate the development of new businesses.
Since the lab’s announcement last spring, they have received hundreds of applications from across the globe. On Tuesday, July 18th, they announced the inaugural companies who were selected to join the lab. Kimball Office and the Sixers both receive a small equity position in the hatched companies, and they plan to expand the number of companies participating in the lab, over the next few months. For more information on the selected companies or the lab, please visit http://sixersinnovationlab.com/
“Our partnership with the Sixers and our joint creation of this lab epitomizes the thought-leadership and genuine innovation that is fueling the success of Kimball Office,” said Mike Wagner, president of Kimball Office. “We couldn’t ask for a better place to host prospective clients, to showcase our latest in product innovation, and provide a real-life view of how Kimball Office researches and improves workplace performance and enhances corporate culture.”
With all respect to the entities and efforts involved, what the #@%* did I just read – what does this actually say??? Sounds somewhere between ultra-trendy double-speak and politically correct poppy-cock in terms of understanding what the ? they’re talking about. For one, what exactly do the “Sixers” have to do with all this? Aren’t they a professional basketball team? What is the relationship (not explained) with Kimball? For another, rather than “high-growth, fast-paced work environments, changing work patterns and emerging challenges” (translate to layman terms, please), we ought to be slowing things waaay down with some “emerging” (return to) basic tried and true customer service skills: think courtesy and human, one-on-one communication (all forms). It’s quite appalling, from retail on up. Younger generations (to include college-educated adults) can’t even spell or write in proper English grammar (sentence structure, punctuation, et al) – and they’re the ones writing our computer programs and word-processing systems. We’ve become too big for our britches and it’s getting worse, not better – we’re getting way ahead of ourselves and forgetting or confusing sound, logical and basic priorities in thinking that “innovation” and technology can do it all for us. It can’t – not without reducing humans to mere things, numbers, etc.