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January 27, 2006
January 27 innovation linkage
Innovation as a topic for the President's State of the Union address? [Research Research]
Microsoft beefs up its R&D presence with two new labs [Information Week]
The VC industry: ready to be disrupted [Disruptive Thoughts]
The Metaverse Roadmap [Accelerating Studies Foundation]
The 2006 Silicon Valley Index [URENIO]
How a lowly parking space became a park [Rebar via Inhabitat]
What business are theaters in? [Mark Cuban's Blog Maverick]
Taiwan towers as tech innovator [Mercury News]
[image: PUSH 2006, a "mini-Davos" in Minnesota]
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The Innovative CEO attends the World Economic Forum
At this week's World Economic Forum, one of the major buzzwords has been the "creative imperative." It was even mentioned in the keynote address by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who outlined how creativity and innovation can lead to economic prosperity and social well-being. This year, for the first time ever, the World Economic Forum also created a separate track of events and programs dedicated to discussion of this "creative imperative." As I pointed out on CPH127, a number of bloggers covering the Davos event have already mused about the importance of creativity and innovation for a modern market economy. Clearly, some people get it.
However, is creativity the solitary province of journalists, designers and researchers? Or does creativity have a role in the daily life of the CEO as well? In the days leading up to Davos, the Wall Street Journal downplayed the probable importance of the "creative imperative" at the World Economic Forum, noting that world leaders always pay lip service to different ideas currently in vogue, but that the meat and potatoes of the conference would be dedicated to more pressing concerns: oil, the Middle East and security concerns.
However, there are signs that the Innovative CEO has a permanent future place at the table at the World Economic Forum. As companies in North America are finally learning, a corporate strategy based on cost-cutting, efficiency enhancements and a relentless focus on the bottom line can only go so far. As a result, new buzzwords like design, creativity and innovation are slowly finding their way into executive suites across America. Suddenly, innovation has emerged as a weapon in the arsenal of corporate CEOs wrestling with the issue of what to do about the mounting competitive threat from places like India and China.
Consider, too, that one of the acknowledged paradigms of corporate productivity and efficiency – General Electric – is now jumping on the innovation bandwagon. The company is encouraging risk-taking behavior in its workers by encouraging radical technological innovation in the form of Imagination Breakthroughs. In recent interviews, CEO Jeff Immelt has detailed the various steps that the company is taking to tap into the innovation trend – working alongside design consulting firm IDEO, experimenting with ideas like an “innovation gym,” and developing a whole new set of leadership traits that are used to train future corporate leaders at GE.
It is clear that right-brain and left-brain thinking must somehow co-exist within a corporation. The task ahead is finding the right blend of right-brain and left-brain thinking that will satisfy stakeholders in the short-term, while providing the basis for robust growth in the long-term.
[image: Xbox 360]
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The winner of this year's Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas
Concrete Canvas, a rapidly deployable hardened shelter for disaster relief, was named the $100,000 winner of the fourth Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas yesterday. Concrete Canvas, which beat out a field of ten other entrants (including Wikipedia), was created in response to two world disasters -- the devastating earthquake in Pakistan and the Asian tsunami. The innovation is the creation of two postgrad Industrial Design Engineering students from London's Royal College of Art.
According to plans submitted by these two design students, Concrete Canvas provides the infrastructure necessary for aid agencies to communicate and operate effectively anywhere within 12 hours. Last March, Wired ran a great article about Concrete Canvas called Need a Building? Just Add Water, in which emergency relief workers as well as designers praised the invention for its portability, ease of assembly, durability and low cost. The judges of the Saatchi & Saatchi award agreed, pointing out the details that made the entry a winner:
Their shelter needs only water and air for its construction. One untrained person can put up the structure in under 40 minutes and it will be ready to use in 12 hours. The shelter consists of just two elements: a cement impregnated fabric, which is bonded to the outer surface of an inflatable plastic inner. The unit is delivered folded in a plastic sack and weighs 500 pounds (227 kilos). Four can be delivered on a pick up truck or light aircraft. The cloth is hydrated, the plastic lining inflated, and the shelter is ready to use in 12 hours. Although it's very quickly erected the shelter could last for 10 years, compared to the less than three weeks some tents last in Afghanistan's harsh, windy conditions."
Tags: Saatchi innovation
[image: Core77]
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How General Electric generates $100 million ideas
In a column for Newsweek, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt describes how the company is tapping into the innovation potential of its customers in order to generate $100 million ideas. GE calls these ideas (e.g. the hybrid locomotive) "imagination breakthroughs." Here, Immelt explains how GE goes about finding and then developing these innovative projects:
"To find these opportunities, we try to understand our customers' businesses really well. This fall we had about 40 health-care leaders at our training center. They were hospital CEOs, pharma CEOs, people from Washington think tanks. We spent a day framing some of the major trends in health care, discussing how technology needs to integrate with them and going through a whole series of exercises on how we can make it happen. That's what we call a "dreaming session." It's not overly sophisticated. It's really just looking beyond the next quarter to find out what's on customers' minds. Some of that data feed into what we call "imagination breakthroughs." They're projects we think can generate $100 million in incremental revenue within a three- to five-year time period. We've got about 100 of them right now. For example, we have a team working to produce hybrid locomotives."
Tags: GE innovation
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Innovation blog of the week: SHARKRIDE
Yesterday, I stumbled across a brief press release from Matthew Jaunich, who officially launched a new innovation blog this week: SHARKRIDE. (Which is to say, I found him, and he didn't find me.) At the very least, check out the logo for the site: a man riding a Great White shark while underwater. Already, Matthew has posted on a wide variety of topics: the democratization of the product design process, an "artificial sun" from China, innovation in the bathroom, and the GAP's ongoing innovation effort.
Anyway, here's a quick blurb about the site and its founder:
"Matthew Jaunich has launched a blog, SHARKRIDE.com, which is dedicated to profiling innovative concepts, and offering an informal collection of innovation related news, thoughts and ideas. Matthew says about the blog, "Innovation is an emerging strategic imperative for businesses to remain competitive, and I started SHARKRIDE.com to inspire and entertain executives and entrepreneurs. There is no industry focus, because cross-pollinization can be a powerful force for innovation. Creativity is not necessarily synonymous with originality, but fresh adaptability, or exponential improvement."
Matt has worked for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Creative Artists Agency, and as an independent strategy consultant. He also co-founded Biodefense Council, a non-profit formulating strategies to defeat next generation biological threats."
Tags: innovation shark
[image: "Caribbean Reef Shark," via Flickr]
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The employee suggestion box should not be a paper shredder
In a post about Ford Motor Company's newfound willingness to tap into the ideas of its workforce (now that the automotive ship appears to be sinking...), Idea Sandbox explains why the best ideas come from employees and how companies can create a nurturing environment for innovation before it's too late:
"You may have worked for a company where the suggestion box may have well been a shredder. However, smart companies know, the best ideas may come from employees - the people who know your product literally inside-and-out. It is a smart move to ask for... and reward good ideas from your workforce. [...]
Your company limits its innovative potential if you're leaving front-line employees off of your 'sources of great ideas' because you fear them. And you SHOULD compensate employees for their contribution. If they come up with a million-dollar idea, reward them for it! It doesn't have to be a million dollars. Recognition can be more than monetary. And you'll quickly start a chain reaction where others will want to be recognized for their input to the latest and greatest idea."
Tags: Ford innovation
[image: Idea Sandbox]
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January 26, 2006
FabLabs and the future of municipal innovation activity in Finland
On her English-language blog about technology, fashion and craft, Finnish designer Ulla-Maaria Mutanen (aka The HobbyPrincess) describes an upcoming talk that she will be giving at a seminar organized by the Finnish Foundation of Municipal Development. What's interesting is that the seminar on "municipal development" (yawn, right?) is anything but boring. Scheduled to attend are the President of the Finnish National Fund for Research and Development (SITRA), the President of the National Agency of Technology (TEKES), the President of the Academy of Finland, and... Tarja Halonen, President of Finland. Whoa. Time to wake up and pay attention.
Ulla-Maaria will be exploring the link between organizations such as MIT FabLabs (which emphasize do-it-yourself-fabrication) and the "future of municipal innovation activity." For smaller communities in Finland, unable to compete with urban centers like Helsinki, FabLabs may represent an important innovation catalyst:
"The ability to develop new, global-scale innovations and competences in small peripheral communities is weak and getting worse. Small communities generally lack resources in basic research and education. In addition, many of the small communities -especially in the eastern and northern Finland- suffer from brain drain to urban areas. This hinders the accumulation of new, socially and economically meaningful competences in these areas and thus, the viability of the communities... Small communities in Finland will have to radically change their innovation policy in the near future. This will include the moving from strictly institutional, business-oriented idea of innovation and competence development towards an idea of innovation as practice-based, interactive, and often times semi-professional learning activity."
On the Hobby Princess blog, there's also a link to something called the "Draft Craft Manifesto": a 12 -point analysis of why "craft" has exploded in popularity on a worldwide basis. Reason #1: "People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products."
Tags: Finland fablab innovation craftmanifesto
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Are librarians and educators a disruptive influence?
Looks like there's a counter-revolt of sorts going on in the world of education, as librarians and educators - tired of being marginalized by technology (i.e. Google) - are fighting back. In Ohio, for example, librarians and educators are banding together to come up with a comprehensive strategy of disruptive innovation. The Disruptive Library Technology Jester has even posted an open letter to disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen in the hopes of sparking debate. The letter is noteworthy for another reason - it includes a generous helping of Internet jargon like "truly disruptive innovations" and "loosely coupled organizations." The Disruptive Library Technology Jester is a young blog (established in December 2005), but it looks like there's a lot of energy here. The tagline for the blog is "We’re Disrupted, We’re Libraries, and We’re Not Going to Take It Anymore..."
Then, over at The Shifted Librarian, there's extensive commentary about an extreme makeover for libraries. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, including the notion from Omar Wasow ("Library 2.0") that "technology hollows out real estate." As an example, consider what ATMs did to bank branches. Does anybody actually go inside a bank anymore, unless they have to? The same thing, apparently, has happened to libraries. With Google available 24/7, does anybody actually go inside libraries anymore - unless they have to? The answer is: yes. But only if libraries focus on what has made them so important for hundreds of years: they are "temples of thought" and "public parks for the brain" that transform as much as educate.
Tags: librarian innovation
[image: Libarian Action Figure via Flickr]
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Innovation as "an annoying business buzzword"
At The Innovation Insider, we like to give full vent to bloggers and other thought leaders who may have points of view radically different from our own. For example, check out Seattle-based blogger NeonTetra, who writes the Sandcastle in the Tide blog. In a recent blog post, he described why innovation is so overrated:
"In the business pages I read companies bragging about innovation ad nauseum. Their own innovation of course. Most ludicrous of all is Microsoft. Microsoft says innovation is their one true "core competency". Bill Gates even says his position in the company is "chief innovator". Naturally companies can be expected to brag and bluster, but Microsoft innovative?
The problem is larger than an annoying business buzword. It is a philosophical assumption that innovation is always good, that there is no downside, that there is no cost nor drawback to innovation. A free lunch. Society, and particularly progress, depends on innovation. It is a freight train that can not slow down. If it did, then the unthinkable would have to be thought. The freight train of progress must, by definition, make the world a better place. Technology is widely admired. The myth is that it will make our live easier and give us more free time. Like an ad for a handheld computer, showing a person in office attire using a gadget at the beach - technology has set the person free!
The reality is exactly the opposite. Nobody goes to the beach more often because innovative technology has given them more free time. Innovation means working more hours, not less. We also assume that innovation is that proverbial rising tide that floats all boats. That everyone will benefit. But inconveniently, disparity of wealth is growing, not shrinking. The technocrats' answer is of course: more innovation."
It should be pointed out that Sandcastle in the Tide appears to be bearish about life in general, which may account for his negative take on the value of innovation. Here's a blurb about his world perspective from his blog (the only thing missing is a plague of locusts):
"The world is changing, we are entering an era of energy and materials shortages. Currency, energy, and global trade is peaking. History is turning backward: first to the 70s, of civil unrest, cruel imperial stuggles, and economic chaos. Then we will slide back to the 30s and the Great Depression."
Tags: buzzword innovation
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The creative imperative at the World Economic Forum
The Narnia Effect points to a live webcast of German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressing the participants at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos. In her speech, Merkel outlined the importance of the "creative imperative" (one of the buzzwords at this year's event):
"What kind of order do we need so that all can benefit from the fruits of the economy? The Creative Imperative is the answer. Politicians must shape the conditions in which people can have the freedom to develop the best ideas which release the creative imperative. There is a need for a new social market economy. The most dignified market and social economy needs to believe in the mature citizen that can exercise responsible freedom to translate innovative ideas into action... Our target is to make Europe the most dynamic continent. But to turn the creative imperative into real innovation, that is something that we must not give up on as our future prosperity depends on it..."
Anyway, the World Economic Forum weblog has already uploaded a number of interesting podcasts from the event, including a podcast with Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and a podcast with Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype. Also, be sure to check out FORTUNE's David Kirkpatrick interviewing Sergey Brin about Google's decision to put up a site in China that accepts censorship.
Tags: creativeimperative worldeconomicforum
[image: World Economic Forum]
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How good should your prototype be?
In a post called "The problem with prototypes," Seth Godin explained that "your prototype has to be better (better build quality, faster interface, better lighting, whatever) than the finished product is going to be. That's what people expect anyway--they see your prototype and take off 20% for reality." However, Diego Rodriguez, a design & innovation thinker at IDEO and Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, disagrees. On his Metacool blog, he's posted a thorough rebuttal to Seth's original argument:
"Part of the problem is that there are many, many levels of prototypes. There are sketchy prototypes, rough prototypes, works-like prototypes, looks-like prototypes, works-looks-like prototypes, launched product prototypes (Gmail), you know what I’m talking about.
What I find is that prototype owners aren’t very good about setting context for their audiences. They focus too much on the prototype and don’t tell enough of a story about it. In fact, I’ve found the best way to get people to understand a prototype isn’t to show them the prototype on a table, but to shoot a video of someone using that prototype, or to use the prototype as a prop in a skit. Then you can show how and why it creates value in someone’s life, which is the point of the whole exercise anyway... So, I guess I disagree that prototypes need to be better than the real thing. It’s the storytelling that needs to be better than reality."
Tags: prototype innovation
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Return on innovation (ROI) and the three pillars of innovation
Booz Allen Hamilton's recent study showing the lack of any direct link between R&D spending and key microeconomic indicators like profitability generated quite a bit of controversy. According to the BAH study, spending enormous sums of cash on R&D does not guarantee innovative product offerings sometime later down the road. Instead of asking "How much money should I spend on innovation?" the proper question appears to be: "How do I maximize my return on innovation?" A recent article by two Booz Allen Hamilton consultants attempted to answer this question:
"Profitable innovation, in other words, cannot be bought. Simply spending more usually leads to a waste of resources on increasingly marginal projects. The solution to innovation anemia is not to boost incremental spending, but to raise the effectiveness of base spending - to increase the return on innovation investment, lifting the firm’s ROI. How? The answer can be found deep within the firm’s microeconomic fundamentals. Through work with clients in a number of industries, including recent transformational engagements for several leading global consumer and health-care companies, we have identified three principles we believe can improve the return on innovation investment of any company engaged in the development of new products or services. We call these principles the three pillars of innovation."
For anyone interested in learning more about how to quantify their "return on innovation," Jess McMullin of the Business + Design blog points to a number of outstanding resources on ROI:
Raising Your Return on Innovation Investment [Booz Allen Hamilton]
The Innovation Scorecard [Peter S. Cohan & Associates]
What's your return on innovation? [The Hub]
Making innovation pay [Boston Consulting Group]
Making innovation more profitable for high-tech manufacturers [IBM Institute for Business Value]
Tags: ROI innovation
[image: "The Innovation Effectiveness Curve"]
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January 25, 2006
January 25 Innovation linkage
Podcast: management model innovation [Killer Innovations]
Small is the new Big [Seth Godin]
"Cyberspace" is dead [Wired]
Podcast: design customization and innovation as habit [The Prepared Mind]
A survey of the modern corporation [Grassroots Innovation via The Economist]
RIP: The Individual Innovator [Innovate on Purpose]
Video: Tomorrow's Engineering Crisis [MIT World]
Interview with Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff [World Economic Forum]
[image: "Innovation DNA," FreedomLab.org via Flickr]
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What's next for Ford Motor Company?
It's official: the "Way Forward" for Ford Motor Co. includes massive job cuts, painful plant closings and an unprecedented retrenching as the automaker tries to figure out the brave new world of manufacturing and selling automobiles. Over the next six years, the company plans to slash up to 34,000 jobs in North America and shutter 14 factories. That's nearly 25% of the company's entire workforce! As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, "The question now is whether the painful cuts at Detroit's struggling giants are the beginning of a new, more competitive era, or just the beginning of the end."
So... despite all the talk from the Ford executive suite about "innovation" being a key to the future, does it really all just come down to job cuts and a pledge to figure it all out later, once the bleeding stops...?
Maybe not. Jeff Thurston of the Vector One blog has posted some interesting observations about ways that Ford can still innovate its way out of the current mess:
"The future of the car is changing and innovation may mean a re-think about transportation systems and mobility products and services... Has a new door opened? A car is much more than wheels alone. A whole ‘Infotainment’ industry is arising alongside the car industry, an industry that see’s the automobile as something different than simply wheels. Today the Internet encircles cities through WiFi connections. Students tap into communications through wireless phones and devices and roads are becoming more electronic oriented. Routing and directions are monitored via satellite and other transportation networks, like air and rail, all impact and interface roads and meeting points. Pricing pressures are also affecting car use, along with taxes and so on.
The car is changing. It is no longer a solitary mode of transportation, but depends on and is connected to other networks - often digital in nature. It will be interesting to see what Ford means by ‘innovation’."
Tags: Ford innovation
[image: Ari-Pekka via Flickr]
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Innovation from Italy
Earlier this week, Italian journalist Emil Abirascid alerted me to an interesting new Italian innovation blog that covers a lot of ground: Innovazione. The logo for this Italian innovation blog is "idee, ricerca, tecnologie... il nuovo si fa strada." I ran this through the Google (Italian -> English) translator and it came out as something like "Ideas, search, technologies... the new one makes road." (Aargh! can't anyone make a decent online language translation tool?) Anyway, there's a recent post from IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger about the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as well as a very diverse blogroll - links to design, fashion, cinema, journalism, science and religion in addition to technology.
[image: "Innovazione," by Umberto Santucci]
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January 24, 2006
Irving Wladawsky-Berger on patents and innovation
On the Always On Network, Irving Wladawsky-Berger (a blogger as well as the vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM) comments on the progress of community-based initiatives at IBM to improve overall patent quality. IBM has ranked #1 in terms of the number of patents granted by the USPTO for 13 consecutive years. As a leader in the patent community, IBM is doing its part to generate debate about overall patent quality:
"This year, in partnership with the U.S. Patent Office, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and members of the open source software community and academia, we are announcing a set of initiatives to apply the power of communities to improve patent quality... The first initiative - Open Patent Review - is designed to help make sure that patents really represent significant progress over what has been done before, by creating an open, collaborative, community review within the patenting process to improve the quality of patent examination... As its name implies, the Open Source Software as Prior Art initiative aims to make it easier to find potential "prior art" against patent applications in the millions of lines of code developed by thousands of programmers working in open source communities... Finally, the Patent Quality Index initiative will focus on deriving a unified numeric index representing the quality of patents and patent applications."
Tags: IBM innovation
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Collaborative science yields breakthrough innovation
Last Friday in the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley's "Science Journal" column featured a great example of how collaboration in the medical sciences can yield breakthrough innovations. Acting on a tip from a colleague, a molecular geneticist may now be on the path to discovering a cure for multiple sclerosis years before anyone thought it was possible. The key to biomedical collaboration, says Sharon, is getting scientists and clinical investigators to talk to each other. Corporations can also apply this same kind of logic - getting departments that normally don't talk to each other to share data and perspectives on the overall business. The director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital explains how a lack of collaboration has slowed down progress in the biomedical field:
"Basic scientists and clinical investigators haven't had enough to do with each other. The resulting bench-to-bedside block has been of great concern throughout academic medicine. But now we're starting to see things that hopefully will overcome it..."
A Stanford neurologist agrees:
"There are so many biomedical discoveries, but we're not converting enough of them into treatments. We haven't taught researchers enough about human diseases. They know about mice and worms, but not about people."
With this in mind, Mass General is holding a meeting this month to discuss how to increase interactions between basic and clinical investigators. Then, later this year, Stanford University will launch a master's of science in medicine program, training Ph.D. students in bench-to-bedside research.
Tags: collaboration innovation
[image: Science Museum, U.K.]
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Stanford's Bob Sutton on the importance of prototyping
Over at Always On, Stanford University professor Bob Sutton (author of the book Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation) offers his perspectives on the importance of prototyping for successful corporations:
"I propose that you try to view everything you're doing, instead of being done and finished, as a prototype that is constantly in flux and changing, especially in the case of management. It really is interesting to see the difference between the logic and language of product prototyping. When somebody announces a product prototype, the last thing he or she usually says is that it's done and finished - it can always be better. If business is always sort of treated as the final answer, books like Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done are treated like the final answer. There might be good ideas in these books and there might be good organizational designs, but they are not the final answers. When you look at organizations that have been effective over time, they tend to treat what they're doing as a prototype."
According to Sutton, Yahoo! has already made prototyping part of its corporate DNA as it continually strives to come up with innovative new solutions for users:
"I was at Yahoo! talking to some folks in the data mining group. I knew they did some experiments, but I didn't realize how controlled and how frequent the experiments are. At any one time on the Yahoo! home page, there are 20 experiments going on. Typically, each experiment is done with about one-tenth of one percent of the people who visit the site. Yahoo! gets 25 million visitors each day. In just a couple of hours, the data miners can get opinions of a couple hundred thousand people to see whether moving around a box, for example, increases click through or not. These miners are viewing the Yahoo! homepage as a sort of living prototype."
Tags: prototyping innovation
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A Web tribute to Peter Drucker on January 25
Tom Peters will be among a handful of the world's top business thinkers paying tribute to legendary management guru Peter Drucker on Wednesday, January 25 via a live Web seminar. Tune in at 12:00 noon (ET) via Microsoft Office Live Meeting:
"Meet a distinguished panel of Thought Leaders, as they pay tribute to Peter Drucker’s influence on their work and lives. Based on Drucker's work, the panel will offer ways to improve productivity, profitability, leadership and more. There will also be an extended Q & A. Join us and discover what today’s thought leaders want you to know about this influential thinker. “The crucial question is not ‘How can I achieve?’ but “What can I contribute?’” Join us as we review what the questions are that need to be addressed in today’s business world."
If you're looking for the source of the "A computer is a moron" quote, check out Erick Schonfeld's blog post over at Business 2.0:
"The computer is a moron, it can’t handle more than one logical system. All it can do is say zero or one, period. That is all it will ever be able to do. That is its strength and its weakness. It forces you to do the systems analysis and come out with one logic for all your data. The human mind can handle quite a few logical systems at the same time. I can look at something and it is basically symbolical logic, and there is Aristotelian logic, and there is Whitehead and Russell logic (which is what underlies computer logic), and the human mind can handle it. Until you have done the logic, the computer collapses. The computer can’t do anything we could not do before, it just does it much faster, but demands logical clarity that forces us to be rigorous. If you are sloppy the computer goes on strike. Logic cannot perceive, and logic also cannot convince."
Tags: Drucker innovation
[image: cote via Flickr]
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A TV channel dedicated only to innovation
If there can be a 24-hour sports channel, a 24-hour food channel and a 24-hour music channel, why not a cable TV channel devoted to innovation and invention? That's the premise behind The Invention Channel, a new channel that will soon be available to the 500,000 or so subscribers of Queens Public Television in the New York City borough of Queens:
"Arthur Gabriele Productions (the producer of the show) reveals that there will be presentations of ten new inventions to each show, up to two and a half minutes per spot. Also that new inventions are now being excepted for presentation for the first show [to be announced]. Incubators will be covered as well. Inventions can be submitted from anywhere in the world. Inventors can send a camcorder recording or a sample of their product."
Vincent Gabriele, a programmer and author, will be the host of the show.
Tags: invention innovation
[image: wastedpapiers via Flickr]
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January 23, 2006
January 23 Innovation linkage: Innovation news from around the Web
Innovations from a robot rally [Scientific American]
The perils of zero-sum thinking [John Hagel's Edge Perspectives blog]
The Patent Office's Fix [MIT Technology Review]
The Digital Universe Foundation [Washington Post]
Inside India [Information Week]
IBM opens more innovation shops [CRN]
Secondhand games stifle innovation? [Slashdot]
Can China Top the U.S. in R&D? [eWeek]
Zhongguancun Software Park in China [eWeek slideshow]
The "play" model of information system design [Penn State Live]
[image: "DARPA Grand Challenge," via Stanford Racing Team]
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How to impress a high-level government official with your level of innovation
The Accelerating Innovation blog has posted highlights of a recent tour of an innovation lab by U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez: Commerce Secretary Tours Rockford's EIGERLab. The EIGERLab is a next-generation R&D lab for the manufacturing industry located in Rockford, Illinois that collaborates with partners such as the University of Illinois and Northwestern University. As noted on the Accelerating Innovation blog, the U.S. government appears to be most interested in innovation projects that lead to tangible results and commercial products:
"Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez took a whirlwind tour of Rockford’s EIGERlab on Monday, January 16, 2006 and proclaimed it is a great example of innovation and competition. He seemed most concerned about the commercial viability of the projects under way. Commercialization — moving pure research projects to the marketplace — is the ultimate standard by which the federal government can evaluate its $4 million investment in the EIGERlab, Gutierrez said. “It really is about jobs and tangible outcomes,” he said. “How many new businesses have been created because of the investments? What has it done for the creation of jobs? Ultimately, you have to have something you can sell.”
At the end of the posting, there's a link to an EIGERLab PowerPoint presentation for Mr. Gutierrez and other high-level guests: The National Innovation System and Regional Hot Spots. There's a lot of great information embedded in the presentation: a graphic showing the evolution of innovation networks, a top-level view of the National Innovation Act, a chart showing the projected innovation superpowers of 2050, and a collaboration taxonomy from Don Tapscott.
Posted by dominic at 10:49 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack
Innovation cartoon of the day: Standardized Thinking
Tony Dowler has uploaded an amusing set of cartoon sketches over at Flickr. This one, for example, is called "Standardization." Isn't this what happens at every large company that loses its innovative edge? Every employee is indoctrinated with the same values, the same knowledge, and the same managerial approaches that have worked for years... If you're interested, there are also innovation-themed cartoons such as Group Think, Group Think 2, and Crap In, Crap Out.
If you're looking for cartoons for an upcoming presentation on innovation, why not think about contacting Seattle-based sketch artist/cartoonist Tony Dowler (aka orkboi)?
Posted by dominic at 10:26 AM | Recommend this! (2) | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack
MIT's Eric von Hippel on Democratizing Innovation
The OpenBusiness blog has posted an interesting interview with MIT professor Eric von Hippel, who was a guest speaker at last month's FORTUNE Innovation Forum. Von Hippel literally wrote the book on Democratizing Innovation and has documented in detail how corporations are making use of new user-centered innovation methodologies. At the FORTUNE Innovation Forum, for example, Eric explained how elements from the skateboarding culture of California (as featured in the highly-entertaining film Dogtown and Z-Boys) - such as innovation with new materials and techniques - are now finding their way into the corporate boardroom. If users are excited about your products (as skateboarders were with their skateboards), they will take them apart, examine them, and discover innovative new ways of using, making and sharing them.
According to von Hippel, these user-centered innovation processes have been the norm for "hundreds of years." With new technologies and new communication methods, though, the user-centered innovation process is now moving to the forefront:
"Sophisticated design tools are far more widespread, less costly and easier to use. By and large the vast improvements in computation has been the driving force. And most importantly the increasing communication between users, because of the Internet, has made it much easier to share knowledge and drive innovation."
In the interview with OpenBusiness, von Hippel also points out what the "democratization of innovation" means for traditional business models:
"Users have a natural advantage in the innovation process. They know what they need and can distribute their ideas much more effectively than large corporations. You know there is a general rule – markets start small – therefore