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November 4, 2005

Tell us your best business innovation hack

Over the past two weeks, the FORTUNE Business Innovation blog has been highlighting the types of big thinkers and strategic viewpoints that will be part of the upcoming FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York City. We’re now pleased to welcome Douglas Rushkoff, a globally-recognized thought leader on media, marketing and Internet culture, as a regular contributor to the Business Innovation blog. During November, in the weeks leading up to the forum, he will be contributing unique insights and views about business innovation and commenting on different topics that appear on the blog. (He's also helping us judge a business innovation contest - more of that below. Or, if you're impatient, skip to the fourth paragraph)

His forthcoming book, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, is full of insights and observations about the ways that companies can re-connect with true innovation, instead of becoming lost in jargon-speak about efficiencies, business transformations and strategic overhauls. It’s an interesting premise – that after decades of being told to “think outside the box,” it’s now time for corporations to start thinking about ways to “think inside the box.”

Since the theme for the FORTUNE Innovation Forum is “Innovation is Everybody’s Business,” we’d like to open the blog doors to our readers to hear their opinions on business innovation, and specifically, about ways that companies can think “inside the box” to generate positive change.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce the first of our weekly contests on the site: “What is your favorite business innovation hack?” We’re not looking for the latest consulting strategy du jour or the newest theory from an Ivy League business school – we’re looking for the types of simple, everyday business innovations that help companies re-connect with their customers and partners.

Submit your selections over the next few days for your favorite “business innovation hack,” and you could win a free, autographed copy of Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out by Douglas Rushkoff. The most innovative entry, as judged by Doug, is the winner. That’s all you need to know – so start submitting examples of ways that companies can start getting back into the box (either by adding comments to this blog entry or sending email responses with "CONTEST" in the subject line to: basulto@gmail.com).

Not sure where to begin? Here are two "business innovation hacks" from Doug's new book to get you started:

"Adobe Systems, the software company responsible for Photoshop, has encouraged a porous relationship between its developers and its users. As a result of the free flow of information, the user community ends up developing a great many of the “plug-ins”for Adobe’s programs, and takes its delight when their efforts are integrated into the next release, for the benefit of all."

"Shoemaker John Fluevog offers an “open source footwear” forum on his Web site through which his fans can create and post their own footwear designs. Fluevog picks finalists from among the hundreds of entries and then invites the online community vote for their favorite one."

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FORTUNE cookies: Innovation Linkage

Pepsi marketing meets Friedrich Nietzsche [Antonio Lucio, SVP of Insights and Innovation, PepsiCo]
Can business and creativity co-exist? [Jory Des Jardins]
A change of scenery boosts productivity [Lifehacker]
The future evolution of design [Coca Cola M5]
Objectif Innovation: a French book about innovation [Pasta and Vinegar]
Can Innovation and Safety Co-Exist? [MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation]
Moore's Law and a common roadmap for technological innovation [Trends in VLSI Ecosystem]
Open Brainstorms [Brain Reactions Online]
The Mechanical Turk [Amazon]
The cult of the FORTUNE cookie [Flickr]

[graphic: Luck is Coming Your Way on Flickr]

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Nokia: Don't Push the Brake on Innovation!

Carlo Longino on the MobHappy blog points to a recent article in Wired Magazine ("Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone"), in which Anssi Vanjoki, the head of Nokia's multimedia unit, makes a passionate defense of innovation in the corporate workplace:

"I have not seen an example in this business or any other business where braking innovation - you know, Push the brake! No innovation! - would benefit mankind. I have not seen that! But where you let innovation come to the marketplace and even help it come to the marketplace, it has always resulted in a bigger cake to be divided."

As an aside: Vanjoki is the type of person we'd like to do business with... According to the Wired article, "Vanjoki is Nokia's resident renegade, legendary for having once been slapped with a $103,000 fine for speeding on his Harley (reduced on appeal to $5,200)."

[graphic: Nokia N91 phone, Wired Magazine]

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In the world of distributed work, are we getting things done?

As more companies attempt to take advantage of "distributed work" trends like online collaboration and interest-based communities, are they really able to translate all these "conversations" into real, tangible products? That's the question asked by Elizabeth Albrycht of Future Tense, who wonders aloud how effective these online communities actually are in getting things done:

"Whether it be online communities of practice (associations, alliances, ventures), interest-based communities (dogs, Vioxx, Treos) or distributed work for one organization, I hear a lot about "listening" and "conversations" and "emergence" -- many of these discussions exhibiting a rather utopian bent. While there is still much to learn about those three topics, and many other related ones, it seems there is a lack of widespread debate about transforming all that listening and conversation into action in the real, physical world.

Now, clearly, in the case of distributed work for an organization, the people involved by definition need to produce something in the real world. But are they truly efficient in doing so? In the case of communities of practice (or the perhaps not-so-aptly-designated activist communities), how many of them have really made something happen? A change in behavior, a change in legislation, a person elected, a product designed and delivered, and so on. How many times have we seen a failure of expected result (ineffectiveness or impact failure) despite all of the buzz?"

The key, says Albrycht, is designing the online community in an appropriate way from the very beginning:

"When action (and the rules that need to be put in place to facilitate this) is an afterthought, you can't hammer it onto a community that has only vaguely addressed it. When action has to happen, all of the hidden biases, struggles, vanities, egos, weaknesses etc. that have been glossed over during the listening/conversing phase jump into heavy relief. And the result can be disheartening and discouraging."

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Bob Dylan and Creative Destruction

Inspired by the Martin Scorsese documentary about Bob Dylan (No Direction Home) on PBS, John O'Leary argues that Bob Dylan can teach business leaders a lot about creative destruction:

"The film is a powerful reminder that it sometimes makes business sense to blow up what you're successfully doing and start over. No Direction Home accurately portrays Dylan as a pioneer/mutineer who kept burning his bridges and creating new markets as he moved on. Initially he branded himself as a traditional folk singer, then as a singer of self-penned topical protest songs, then as a stream-of-consciousness psychedelic poet, then as a rock star—before retiring, temporarily, in the late 1960s. Want to see creative destruction in action? Witness Dylan "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (and in other concerts for the next two years) with a noisy band of rock musicians—a move that ENRAGED many of his core customers. Yet Dylan picked up new customers with every reboot. He'd be loathe to call it a business strategy, but it was certainly a successful one. Something here for us to learn?"

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Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and innovation

In an interview with Express Computer (an Indian IT business weekly), Hans-Kurt Lubberstedt, an executive vice president with UGS, explains how Product Lifecycle Management solutions (which involve all the processes from the content development stage to the market entry stage of products) can help companies become more innovative by expanding the scope of the potential innovation network:

"PLM has the capacity of changing the innovation framework of the company, possessing a dispersed private network to a global innovation network. This is achieved by transforming the process of innovation, by providing a common idea and knowledge base through PLM. As a result the business evolves from separate departments of the cycle to partners handling the different segments of the lifecycle. Some of our customers like Fujitsu, GE, Motorola, and Fiat have been able to accomplish these gains."

The UGS Web site is actually chock-full of innovation case studies, featuring real-world examples of how PLM has helped companies like Allied Aerospace, Canon, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Palm, Procter & Gamble and Saab to become more innovative.

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Business model innovation vs. technical innovation

Last week, Russell Beattie wrote a post called Where's the Ambition?, in which he bemoaned the lack of real innovation in the Web 2.0 economy. Instead of breakthrough new products, according to Beattie, there are only "scrape engines" (niche search engines) and "mashups" and "RSS holes." These products might be nice, but they are nothing really innovative.

In response to the Beattie post, Heidi Adkisson, Director of Interactive Architecture with Seattle-based Blink Interactive Architects, weighs in with her take on the current state of Internet innovation:

"His post brings forward for me the argument over which type of innovation is more sustainable: technical innovation or business model innovation. The problem I have with the whole “promise of Web 2.0” is the discussion seems focused on technical innovation. Much more interesting to me is the business model innovation on the Web – notably, the economics of serving the long tail (niche markets that pre-Internet were difficult to serve profitably). [...]

As always it's not about chasing the technology - it's about delivering straightforward value to customers. Social networking in Netflix and MySpace seem good examples of this - here social networking encourages activity in the long tail. Netflix also has a useful implementation of Ajax: I can now easily scan my (rather large) queue of movies and view a helpful summary of each without having to click through to a different page. Slowly, “Web 2.0” will dramatically improve the user experience on the Web and help businesses deliver greater value. But I just don't see it leading a business model revolution."

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November 3, 2005

The dark side of innovation

In a guest entry for the FORTUNE Business Innovation blog, Dr. Jay Kent-Ferraro, founder of Empowerment Technologies (an executive coaching, training and consultation firm), discusses the "dark side" of innovation: corporate burnout. As it turns out, the very traits required of any tireless innovator - like discipline and focus - can lead to corporate burnout. In a hyper-competitive corporate environment where innovation is the watchword of the day, this problem can be particularly acute. Dr. Jay Kent-Ferraro explains:

"With a word as sexy as “Innovation”, who wants to bother focusing on a potential down side? Understandable, yes; However, to not recognize the underbelly of anything great can be an occupational hazard and ultimately responsible for its demise.

So, with that caveat I submit that success has requirements and the very things essential for generating successful innovation – focus, discipline, execution, accountability and an unstoppable resilient spirit can be simultaneously grist for the mill of “Corporate Burnout”.

The word itself is so overused it’s a cliché. But, is there something of value in it to pay attention to? Is there a dark side of high achievement and demanding the best from ourselves, the entrance fee into the theater of success? Do those of us who push the envelope of excellence run the risk of derailing in the midst of our noble pursuits? You better believe we do and if you don’t heed to call of prudent introspection, the insidious bite of Corporate Burnout can show up and stop you in your tracks."

In a full-length article called "The Dark Side of Innovation" (available for download here), Dr. Jay Kent-Ferraro also points out the five warning signs of possible corporate burnout and provides three practical strategies for beating corporate burnout.

(photo: William Schaff, "Portrait of a Young Man Trying to Relax")

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The five keys to rapid prototyping

In a recent Gamasutra article ("How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days"), there's a wealth of information from the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center on tips, tricks and methods to speed up the R&D process. In this specific example, four grad students at Carnegie-Mellon made over 50 videogames in just 1 semester. For ease of use, the tips & tricks are divided into four distinct categories: Setup, Design, Development, and General Gameplay.

Along the way, the grad students learned the five key steps to setting up and thinking like a rapid prototyper:

(1) Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking

(2) Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)

(3) Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More

(4) Gather a Kick*** Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent

(5) Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

(graphic: Gamasutra) (Hat tip: Renee Hopkins Callahan of IdeaFlow)

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The lifetime of the average S&P 500 company continues to shrink

In a Powerpoint presentation for KM Asia 2005, John Seely Brown included a graphic (from the book Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them) which shows how the average lifetime of a S&P 500 company has steadily declined over the past 100 years or so. Extrapolating into the future, it's clear from the graphic that the typical S&P 500 company is facing a lifetime of less than 15 years. The findings, which originally appeared in 2001, are still jarring almost five years later. Apparently, large S&P 500 companies still have not learned how to innovate their way to success - as a result, they are experiencing ever-shrinking lifetimes.

For more on what the chart graphic (available as a McKinsey PDF document) means for Corporate America, check out John Hagel's informed explanation:

"It tracks the average lifetime of companies on the S&P 500. It's enough to keep any executive awake at night. Back in the 1930's a company coming on the S&P 500 list could expect to remain there for 65 years. In recent years, the average life-time of a company on the S&P 500 has declined to about 15 years - a decline of almost 80%. Once again, this is not a smooth trendline - there are brief periods when average life-times improve, but then they resume their downward trend again. It's not only getting harder and harder to generate profits, but it's getting harder and harder to maintain market position - even when you are the very largest companies in the U.S."

The lesson is clear: America's biggest and best companies need to continuously innovate if they hope to avoid landing on history's corporate scrap heap. At the upcoming FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York, Richard Foster (author of Creative Destruction) will be moderating a panel discussion on "Innovation, Risk and the Threat of Failure," which will examine how companies can bring new ideas, products and services to market in a timely way.

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Game-changing innovations

Mike Docherty, CEO of Venture2 (a consulting and new ventures management company focused on launching breakthrough innovation in the consumer products industry) explains the notion of a "game-changing" innovation:

"In our view, 'game-changing' innovation comes from finding and exploiting the intersections between unmet (and often unspoken) consumer needs, enabling technologies/solutions, and marketplace opportunities. Success in any one (or even two) of these arenas will seldom result in new product success or lasting competitive advantage."

To illustrate this point, Docherty points to the example of Spalding, which recently introduced two "game-changing" innovations: the infusion basketball and the Never-Flat basketball. To most people, basketballs are a commodity product, but the team at Spalding took a broader look at the overall customer experience and found a way to fulfill an unmet customer need with an innovative solution. As Docherty points out, the experience at Spalding can be applied by other companies as well:

"There are few (if any) commodity categories that can't be re-invented through true innovation. It's all about defining the problem correctly and in searching for solutions to a more broadly defined goal... Identifying compelling unmet (and often unspoken) consumer needs is critical. In this case, [Spalding] identified a non-obvious yet important need (inflation frustrations) by looking beyond the basketball itself and at the entire usage experience."

(photo: Knicks official site)

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What "The Jetsons" cartoon can teach you about innovation

On his How to Save the World blog, Dave Pollard consistently has some of the most thought-provoking articles and commentary on the topic of innovation. One of his recent posts is called "Innovation, Discontinuity, and Weak Signals" - it examines why so many so-called futurists fail to get things right when they predict the future.

As a classic example, Pollard points to the 1960's cartoon series "The Jetsons." At the time, it certainly appeared likely that we would have flying cars and stay-at-home wives taking care of household robots in the year 2000. In fact, we have neither, and Pollard explains why. In the world of business, futurists are also making the same kinds of mistakes - focusing on "continuities" (i.e. trends like outsourcing) rather than looking around for "discontinuities". Pollard explains:

"Read what futurists are saying today about the world of tomorrow and you will see they continue to make these same mistakes -- projecting the future as a continuation of the trends of the past... These extrapolations not only ignore foreseeable discontinuities, they fail to appreciate the evolutionary notion that increased diversity creates increased accident, and increased accident produces more discontinuities..."

Pollard follows this analysis up with insights into how businesses can predict future discontinuities - and thereby prepare themselves for radical future change:

"The most compelling approach is what is called amplifying weak signals -- continuously scanning for developments and ideas that have not yet received mainstream attention, and thinking seriously about their potential implications for your organization and the spaces (industry, labour market, customer market, economies, communities) in which it operates and which affect it."

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The death of the original idea

Has innovation in the Internet sector stalled? Gordon Taylor, an IT project manager in Australia, says "yes." In fact, on his Over the Falls blog, Gordon has put together a "Web innovation map" that shows conclusively that many of the new "innovations" from Internet players like Google and Yahoo are actually derivative of earlier products and services:

"There aren't any new ideas at all... All 'new' ideas are just a baked together collection of old ideas. Lets use the internet technology world as an obvious example of what I'm talking about, because that's something that moves pretty fast, and something I (sort of) understand. [...] Every time something new comes out in the web tech world, it seems like you've heard it all before. And you know why? Because for the most of it, you have. Check out my innovation map of who made what and how, and you'll see that there are only 7 original ideas, from the 21 products listed..."

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The Innovation Obstructions

Innovation consulting firm Doblin has developed an Innovation Discipline Model that identifies obstacles to successful innovation in both innovation project methods and in innovation project definition and support. If you mouse over different parts of the Innovation Discipline Model on the Doblin site, there's a brief explanation of the eight obstructions to innovation (example: "few deep insights about unmet customer needs, especially of the kind innovators can use").

This notion of "innovation obstructions" would make a great topic for an art house-type film, wouldn't it? If you're a film buff, remember the 2004 Lars von Trier/Jorgen Leth film The Five Obstructions, in which a famous Danish filmmaker was challenged to re-make the same film 5 different times, each time while confronting a different obstruction? (In this case, a company would be forced to re-make a product eight different times, each time overcoming one of the eight obstructions.)

If you're interested, here's an extended excerpt of the film review of The Five Obstructions in The New York Times:

"In 2000 von Trier summoned Mr. Leth to Denmark with a proposition: the older director would remake his movie five times, acting under a series of bizarre, arbitrary constraints dreamed up by Mr. von Trier. First he would reshoot the movie in Cuba, with the proviso that no shot could last more than 12 frames, which translates into half a second of screen time. Somehow Mr. Leth turned the stuttering staccato of abrupt jump cuts into elegant syncopation, and his success drove Mr. von Trier to impose ever more drastic conditions.

The next version had to be shot in "the worst place on earth," which turned out to be a Mumbai slum. Mr. von Trier, disgusted by the results -- "It's a marvelous film, but you didn't follow the rules" -- punishes Mr. Leth by ordering him to go back and do it again, and then when this order is refused, to make "a film without rules."

After that he had to remake the film as a cartoon, for which he enlisted the help of Bob Sabiston, the Texas-based computer genius who animated Richard Linklater's "Waking Life"... "

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November 2, 2005

Instructables: make cool stuff with others

Innovation is being democratized, it seems, with each passing day. Check out Instructables, an online resource from SQUID Labs (an engineering design and technology innovation firm in California) for showing what you make and how others can make it. Here's the quick explanation from the Instructables site:

"Making things is part of being human. Whether you make bikes, kites, food, clothing, protocols for biology research, or hack consumer electronics, good instructions are critical...Instructables is a step-by-step collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. We hope to make documentation simple and fast. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff."

Right now, it looks like Instructables is still in an early phase, with contributors posting step-by-step instructions on how to make, among other things, a bicycle trailer and canned applesauce. But imagine this system of collaborative innovation 12, 24 or 36 months from now. What cool things will people be making together online then?

[graphic: CD hovercraft for tabletop hockey]

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Jim Carroll: 10 ways to kick-start innovation

On his personal blog, innovation expert Jim Carroll shares a list of 10 ways to instill innovation within any organization:

Heighten the importance of innovation
Create a compelling sense of urgency
Ignite each spark
Re-evaluate the mission
Build up experiential capital
Shift from threat to opportunity
Banish complacency and skepticism
Innovation osmosis
Stop selling products, start selling results
Create excitement

The "innovation osmosis" idea is an especially intriguing one for corporations that don't have the slightest idea of how to go about making themselves more innovative:

"If you don't have it, get it -- that's a good rule of thumb for innovation culture. One client lit a fuse in their innovation culture by buying up small, aggressive, young innovative companies in their industry. They then spent the time to carefully nurture their ideas and harness their creativity."

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Is Wi-Fi an incremental innovation or a disruptive innovation?

In a recent interview with the Always On Network, futurist George Gilder recently categorized wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and WiMax as incremental innovations - not as disruptive innovations:

"Wi-Fi and WiMax were supposedly disruptors, and it seems to me that they're pretty boring, too: They're incremental advances and they're actually inferior in potential to Qualcomm's EVDO. Wi-Fi and WiMax are not disruptors; they're the desperate response of the establishment trying to defend itself against the rise of the cellphone as the dominant computer technology...

The chief promoters of Wi-Fi and WiMax are Intel and IBM and all the old players who are responding to the usurpation of the computer networking industry by digital communicators. And then these Wi-Fi advances are going to be promoted by municipalities, municipal governments? They're a real leading-edge source of innovation! So we're going to have municipal wifidels and fiberdoodles all over the country, and China will never catch up!"

Which raises the question, of course, of whether an incremental innovation can ever become a truly disruptive innovation. Moreover, if you see a disruptive technology, will you recognize it as such? The supporters of Wi-Fi and WiMax no doubt viewed these technologies as "disruptive," but along comes George Gilder, who says they're "boring" and "incremental." Certainly, the idea that someone with a laptop computer can tap into a wireless cloud and access the Internet for free sounds disruptive, but is it?

With this example of Wi-Fi as context, JB's Circuit continues the debate about incremental and disruptive innovation with another, thought-provoking question:

"Does incremental innovation eventually lead to big-time innovation? Think not? Let me try the question from a different angle: Who can tell me the last big innovative technology? Was it the web? e-mail? Mobile phones? More importantly, did anyone clearly predict the last big innovation technology before it was easily recognized as being big and innovative? Or as the hip say today, "disruptive?"

[graphic: BlackBeltJones via Flickr]

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Diffusion of Innovation theories

For anyone interested in how, why and at what rate innovations spread throughout a society, check out the following Wikipedia entry: Diffusion of Innovations. The earliest thinking about the diffusion of innovation dates back more than 40 years ago:

"Diffusion of innovations theory was formalized by Everett Rogers in a 1962 book called Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers stated that adopters of any new innovation or idea could be categorized as innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%), based on a bell curve. Each adopter's willingness and ability to adopt an innovation would depend on their awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. [...] Rogers showed these innovations would spread through society in an S curve, as the early adopters select the technology first, followed by the majority, until a technology or innovation is common."

[graphic: The diffusion curves of many household innovations, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)

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In the automobile industry, do consumers even care about innovation?

In the automobile industry, consumers may talk the talk about their desire for innovative new cars, but they don't walk the walk. Left Lane News points to an article from The Truth About Cars, which argued that many automobile consumers place less emphasis on innovation than one might suppose:

"...The more innovative the automobile, the less likely it’ll sell [...] Automobilists don’t want to drive the radical new machine bristling with innovative technology and design. They want the same car as the one they’re driving, only a bit newer. How else could you explain the fact that GM continues to sell cars that are two product cycles behind the competition– to the same people who bought one before? Sure, automakers put a lot of gee-whizzery in mass market motors, but there are still a large number of motorists who’d rather celebrate their birthday at the Registry of Motor Vehicles than program a sat nav system."

If innovation doesn't matter, what does matter? Reliability and safety, for starters.

[photo: The Truth About Cars]

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The "solution looking for a problem" trap

Ever wonder why so many innovative new technologies fail to gain broader market acceptance? Don Dodge of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team has the answer: too many entrepreneurs attempt to create a technological solution without first understanding the real needs and problems of the market or industry. Apparently, the problem is so common that there's even a formal name for it: "Entrepreneurs fall into the "solution looking for a problem" trap when they try to solve problems from a technical perspective and don't completely understand the business aspects."

Don explains further about the "solution looking for a problem" trap:

"I have talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years about new ideas and starting a company. I have found that when they have worked in the industry and have lived the problem they are trying to solve, they have a much better shot at success. They understand the problem, who is effected by the problem, what the alternatives are, who the competitors are, what their weaknesses are, who the buyer is, who the approver is, the cost impact of the problem, and the reasonable price for the solution. In effect they have done their market research by working in the marketplace and experiencing the pain."

These lessons - while particularly salient for entrepreneurs - are also applicable, one supposes, to the problems faced by corporate R&D labs at large FORTUNE 500-type companies.

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What outsourcing giants like India and China can teach us about innovation

Over at Optimize Magazine, John Hagel and John Seely Brown have posted a thought-provoking piece: "What India and China can teach us about innovation." The premise of the article is not what you might think - it's not arguing that business executives in China or India are more creative or innovative than their Western rivals. However, Chinese and Indian firms are developing some innovative management techniques in response to the global outsourcing imperative - and for Western firms, it's important to understand the changing dynamics of global business. In the article, Hagel and Brown emphasize the important - but often overlooked - link between innovation and global outsourcing:

"CIOs must begin to rethink their traditional approaches to outsourcing, especially in light of the quest for globalization. The critical connection between innovation and outsourcing is a key theme that many business executives seem to overlook. Ask most executives to define innovation, for instance, and you'll likely hear that it's the ability of a company to develop and commercialize breakthrough new products and services. Unfortunately, this answer reveals three misconceptions about innovation..."

At the upcoming FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York City, John Hagel will be developing some of these themes in a roundtable discussion called "Technology Innovation: Not in My Backyard." The U.S. may still be a hotbed for product and service innovation, but are American firms missing out on other types of innovation that are rapidly occurring in places like China and India?

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Innovation from the heart of Africa

If you had to create from scratch the perfect innovative enterprise, what would it look like? First of all, the enterprise would probably devise a way to create a breakthrough product with a huge potential market opportunity. The product would be well-loved by its consumers - in fact, the consumers would probably enjoy the product so much that they would actually become part of the co-creation process at the grassroots level. Moreover, the products would be at the same time cheap, durable and easy to make from materials that are readily available. In a best case scenario, it would also be possible to launch the innovative enterprise with a mind-bogglingly small amount of up-front capital.

Well, if that's true, it looks like a company in Uganda has just engineered the perfect innovative enterprise. According to the Changemakers Web site, the winner of the Ashoka/Changemakers Innovation Award in the business category was none other than Uganda's Mango Tree Educational Enterprises:

"Mango Tree manufactures educational products (e.g. games, toys and pictorial charts) and provides training to use these tools to encourage active learning and participatory teaching. The tools are designed collaboratively with grassroots educators. They are culturally relevant, durable, inexpensive, and made from local materials that can be replicated by users (such as grain sacks, bottle tops, recycled flip-flops, bicycle spokes, gourds, and plastic jerry cans)."

The company now has 30 shareholders and more than 125 products and services and was started with an initial capital investment of only $2,500.

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November 1, 2005

A play date with innovation

On October 19, the Invention at Play exhibit opened in Minnesota:

"An interactive exhibit developed by the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Invention at Play invites you to discover the similarities between the ways we play and the creative processes used by leaders in science and technology innovation... In Invention at Play, you'll meet inventors like Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, and Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar. You'll discover how a dog inspired the invention of Velcro and how a melting chocolate bar led to the invention of the microwave..."

Oh - and check out the doodling sketchpad on the Invention at Play Web site: you can literally sketch your own invention or brand new idea. The sketch on the left, for example, is the original sketch for the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell made in 1876. [Any ideas on what a venture capitalist would have told him when he sketched this very raw diagram on the back of a cocktail napkin?]

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Tips on how to shop for innovation

On the Core77 industrial design site, Steve Portigal (founder of Portigal Consulting) and Niti Bhan (a strategic design consultant) break down the three steps required to choose the best design firm for a particular project:

"There are many things you need to consider before hiring a design firm, but we're going to start with three: The Problem (defining your needs), the People (who the players are), and the Partnership (the nature of the engagement). Design firms are businesses, but with unique perspectives and unique work processes. Understanding a bit of the industry culture will go a long way in helping you to establish a successful engagement."


Certainly, the discussion of the different types of design firms (i.e. the "dream team," the "boutique" design firm and the "Big Box" design firm) makes the article a must-read for anyone interested in the growing convergence of business strategy and design into one discipline ("strategic design"). But what I really enjoyed was the light bulb joke:

Q: How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Does it have to be a light bulb?

(Hat tip: IdeaFlow)


(pic #1: Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting pic #2: Niti Bhan)

Posted by dominic at 2:46 PM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Frans Johansson announces the most innovative MBA students in the world

On the audio blog Innovation Challenge, Frans Johansson (best-selling author of The Medici Effect) and Anil Rathi (the president and founder of Idea Crossing) announce this year's Top 10 Innovation Challenge Finalists. The top 10 finalists in the innovation competition were teams of MBA students from UC-Davis, Thunderbird, Indian School of Business, University of Rochester (Simon), Vanderbilt (Owen), Harvard Business School, MIT (Sloan), Case Western (Weatherhead), and Cornell (Johnson). In fact, there were two teams from Indian School of Business in the top 10 - a clear sign that the Indian subcontinent is fast becoming a fertile area for producing some of the world's future leading innovators.

On the audio blog, Frans also discusses the "explosion of interest in innovation by global corporations, organizations and individuals" and offers his take on the types of individuals who have successfully used cross-pollination to create breakthough ideas. As a bonus, Frans suggests three ways that individuals and teams can become more innovative. (Hint: "Be prepared for failure") At the upcoming Innovation Challenge Hilton Awards Dinner at Thunderbird later this month, Frans will be delivering the keynote address.

Posted by dominic at 2:13 PM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Every idea generation method known to humankind

Martin Leith, a UK-based consultant specializing in co-creation, has compiled a staggeringly comprehensive list of ways to come up with new ideas. Leith explains:

"This website lists and explains every idea generation method I've encountered during the past 15 years. It is the result of extensive research; my many sources include books, management journals, websites, academics, consultants and colleagues. The methods have b