The Logo
The logo symbolizes the key characteristics of our design philosophy: innovation (bright core), 'develop once, deploy everywhere' (surrounding squares) and structured design process (it is a structured tool).
The symbol originates from a Japanese management planning technique called "Mandala". The core product application is placed in the middle of the grid, and new uses derived from that are placed in the surrounding rectangles. Each one of them is in turn placed in the middle of a new grid (so now you have eight new grids) and you can derive new uses for each one of them.
For example, Hitachi would start from 'fine-mechanics' as the core competence, the businesses where this core competence would be essential and beneficial are cameras, copiers etc. Now create a new grid to the side with copiers in the centre. Hitachi could do personal copiers, colour copiers, print copiers etc.
Smart Media's core competence lies in building Internet based business applications. These can be ecommerce, intranets, extranets, human resource applications, intranet enabled kiosk applications. The grid below illustrates how the Mandala approach was applied to our Intelligent Intranet product.
