« January 29, 2006 - February 4, 2006 | Main | February 12, 2006 - February 18, 2006 »

February 10, 2006

February 10 innovation linkage: Ciao!Torino

The Olympic Innovation Scorecard [Acro Logic U.K.]
A mind map of A Whole New Mind [Dipankar Subba via Dan Pink]
In the box, out of the box, big box, burn the box! [Idea Flow]
Bill Joy's Six Webs [MIT World]
The new, double-top-secret Time, Inc. website [OfficePirates.com]
Organizational innovation in India [Gautam Ghosh]
Inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame [EurekAlert!]
Jesse Patel's "The Innovator" videoblog [Google Video]
China's aggressive R&D strategy [Global Market Development blog]
Emotion vending machines [We Make Money Not Art]

[image: LinuxHelp Italy]

Posted by dominic at 8:47 AM | Comments (87) | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Innovation word of the day: Spime

At the LIFT06 conference in Switzerland, American science fiction writer Bruce Sterling discussed a new word - "spime" - that could soon be making its way into the design & innovation lexicon. He wrote about "spimes" in his recently-published book Shaping Things, and in the text of his LIFT06 speech ("Spimes and the future of artifacts"), he discusses how he came up with the neologism:

"I made up the word "spime", it's a noun, i don't expect it to stick or pass the general usage but as a novelist and a journalist and design critique I need a single syllable noun for an object that is plannable, findable, trackable, recyclable, uniquely identified that generates digital histories.

That's what a spime is and building this concept into a single verbal package, it's a kind of victorinox knife, a swiss multi-tool. I want to say things like "that's a spime, she's spimable, it's too spimmy, that is not spimmy enough."

Oh, spime is not the end of it, by any means. Sterling has thought up a few other terms as well to describe the future of innovation:

"Let's listen to some others, some synonyms of my concept. Number 1, a personal favorite, blogject, actually a younger word than spime, objects that can blog, that can emit data about themselves, it's like available to other people, i like this word a lot, i don't think it's very easy to say and i am not too happy of its derivation, a spime is very much like a blogject, a spime is much like a blog that can make objects. something like can make magazines with open-source recipes for amateurs building things, so we have the blog about the object and of course if you want to hit my paypal button, i will fab it and ship to you, we will track it together and we can share the data.

Other terms: ufos: ubiquitous findable objects, kind of an interesting term, i dont like that terminology because too sci-fi, a spime is what everyday's lift look life. Other terms: mobile social software, mobile appliances, automatic networks, these are real phenomenon, the network of spimes, blogjects or ufos..."

Definitely worth checking out. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow called Shaping Things "a fantastic nonfiction book about the future of industrial design and society."

Tags: spime BruceSterling LIFT06

[image: Bruce Sterling, via Hobby Princess]

Posted by dominic at 6:56 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Old Media: Innovation is an opportunity, not a threat

On the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal (link via Broadcasting & Cable), News Corp. president & COO Peter Chernin writes that Old Media corporations are embracing innovation like never before. In fact, he claims that Old Media corporations are standing on the threshold of an exciting new media world created by breakthrough new technologies:

"Traditional media is not dead. In fact, our companies are leading the charge into the networked digital future. The media industry stands at the dawn of a new golden age—fueled on the demand side by ever-more discerning consumers, and on the supply side by fresh thinking, new products and oceans of new content.

The reality is that new technology, far from being a threat, offers media companies the chance to solve an age-old problem. Our businesses were built on our ability to enlighten, entertain and educate—whether through the pages of a novel, the images on a screen, or the facts in a news broadcast. We exist to connect masses of people with compelling content...

Thanks to advances in both hardware and software, we can now reach almost anyone, anywhere, at any time, through a wide variety of devices. This new reality of ubiquitous low-cost distribution gives us more ways than ever to tell our stories and get them to an audience. Think about the most exciting elements of the technology revolution and how they are changing the media business today..."

Chernin then goes on to explore a number of new technologies - such as on-demand technology, high definition video and Internet-based community-making tools, claiming that Old Media is successfully adapting these technologies in innovative new ways:

"These innovations are helping transform the content business in revolutionary—and profitable—ways. They allow what was once a one-size-fits-all, mass-only industry to reach out to niche audiences and create new markets. They give us license to take risks and be more flexible. All of our stories no longer need to be geared to a mass audience. We are free to experiment, free to be adventurous, and free to explore our boldest impulses. As choices explode even further, consumers will be the ultimate winners."

Tags: oldmedia newmedia innovation PeterChernin

[image: Peter Chernin, via Comdex]

Posted by dominic at 6:45 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

An innovator in the corn fields of Iowa

FORTUNE Small Business profiles "a half-dozen entrepreneurs who have a new idea, business, or invention you're bound to be hearing about over the next year or so." These aren't always ground-breaking innovations (i.e. the sandwich that never gets soggy) and at least one of them you've probably already heard about somewhere else (i.e. jeans that fit perfectly), but it's worth taking a look at what's on the radar of small company entrepreneurs and their VC backers, such as ways to make ethanol from candy and a Wi-Fi MP3 player that connects to the Internet.

Of these, the standout innovator by far is Xethanol, which is working on ways to distill ethanol from a number of different sources, including stale butterscotch candy:

"Since 2003, Xethanol has operated two Iowa plants that can cheaply distill a gasoline additive called ethanol from bizarre sources such as stale butterscotch candy. When technicians mix the sweets with a special form of yeast, fermentation results, producing ethanol. (Typically producers of ethanol derive the clean-burning, high-octane fuel from corn.) Big oil companies then combine it with unleaded gasoline to reduce the cost of gas and the air pollution it causes."

Tags: ethanol innovation

[image: Energy for Kids via the Department of Energy]

Posted by dominic at 6:29 AM | Comments (1) | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

February 9, 2006

Geoffrey Moore's Top 10 myths of business innovation

Geoffrey Moore, author of business classics such as Crossing the Chasm and Living on the Fault Line, has posted a list of the Top 10 myths about business innovation on his Dealing With Darwin blog. In David Letterman style, Geoff has listed the 10 myths in reverse-order:

10. We don’t innovate around here any more;
9. Product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter;
8. We need a Chief Innovation Officer;
7. We need to be more like Google;
6. R&D investment is a good indicator of innovation commitment;
5. Great innovators are usually egotistical mavericks;
4. Great innovation is inherently disruptive;
3. It is good to innovate;
2. Innovation is hard;
1. When innovation dies, it’s because the antibodies kill it.

Already, a few of these points have stoked some controversy in the blogosphere. On his Silicon Valley Watcher blog, for example, Tom Foremski took issue with Geoff's contention that not all innovation has to be disruptive in nature (point #4 above):

"I think innovation *always* has to have the quality of disruption. It is something which causes everyone affected by it--to adopt it or die. Innovation is always the better way. Because if an innovation is not sufficiently disruptive it will not overcome the inertia of the status quo--and will therefore not be classed as innovative. It's a circular argument, but completely within the nature of the term's meaning, imho... I think that innovation has to be very disruptive and offer a superbly excellent ROI in order to gain attention, and overcome cost of switching barriers. And every Silicon Valley startup had better have some kind of disruptive innovation in its garage otherwise why bother?"

In a quick riposte to Tom's point, Geoff breaks down the notion of "innovation" by arguing that entrenched market leaders do not have any real incentive to search out and develop disruptive innovations. In fact, as Clayton Christensen also pointed out in his classic works about disruptive innovation, most innovation is actually "sustaining" or "incremental" in nature:

"Tom's key point is that innovation needs to be tightly tied to disruption, and that therefore the other forms of innovation I cite should be considered as categorically different, not really belonging to the set labeled innovation. His first supporting point is that non-disruptive innovations will not overcome the inertia of the status quo, and therefore will not be classed as innovative.

My pushback is that, if you are a member of the establishment, you do not want to overcome the inertia of the status quo. It works to your advantage. What you want to do is overcome the force of commoditization, which works to your disadvantage, eroding your margins. But you do not want to disrupt the market, because that creates too much opportunity for new entrants. What you need, therefore, is some kind of innovation that is not disruptive but does create new differentiation--essentially what all the othe forms of innovation I cite are all about."

Tags: innovation disruptive

[image: Geoffrey Moore via Dealing With Darwin]

Posted by dominic at 1:20 PM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

What the customer really needed...

I ran across this product development cartoon on Flickr. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Just in case you can't read the text in the cartoon with your browser, here are the captions for each of the frames [left-to-right]:

(1) How the customer explained it
(2) How the Project Leader understood it
(3) How the Analyst designed it
(4) How the Programmer wrote it
(5) How the Business Consultant described it
(6) How the project was documented
(7) What Operations installed
(8) How the Customer was billed
(9) How it was supported
(10) What the customer really needed

Tags: productdevelopment innovation

[image: tryan/Osilla]

Posted by dominic at 8:24 AM | Comments (3) | Recommend this! (2) | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

The Outstanding Corporate Innovator of the Year

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), in collaboration with Fast Company magazine, is currently soliciting nominations for Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) of the Year. The winner of the OCI Award will be presented by Fast Company at PDMA’s 30th International Conference in Atlanta (October 21-25). Last year's winners included djOrthopedics and Nextel Communications/Sprint. Since the inception of the award in 1988, a number of FORTUNE 500 companies have won the prestigious award, including Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, 3Com/US Robotics, Maytag Corporation, Chrysler, Pepsi-Cola, and Dow Chemical.

Here's a quick blurb about the OCI Award from the PDMA site:

"For the past eighteen years, The Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award selection process has provided an excellent mechanism for identifying companies which excel at creating and sustaining value across the value chain through innovation and new product development. The OCI award has also provide the venue for sharing these companies’ best practices with an international audience of conference attendees. Past OCI Award winners have proven themselves exceptionally capable of integrating strategy, people, process, and technology in order to consistently transfer their creative ideas into successful new products."

Nominations are due by April 1, 2006. Oh, and just in case your customers and partners don't love you, the PDMA notes that "self nominations by firms are also highly encouraged."

Posted by dominic at 8:15 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Invasion of the alien idea snatchers

In its daily scan of interesting innovation stories, Innovation Weblog points to a blog post from Oren Harari, co-author of the book Jumping the Curve. In an essay called Team Up With Aliens, Harari points out that sometimes the best way to "out-innovate your competitors and delight your customers" is to look outside your industry and collaborate with outsiders (i.e. "aliens"):

"If you want to break from the pack, doesn’t it make sense to seek ideas and energies from outside the pack? One of the best ways to do that is to learn from people and organizations who have thrived outside your industry, particularly those who are doing things that would be considered unthinkable and insane in your industry.

If you want to improve assembly line conversion in your factories, for example, you could benchmark fellow manufacturers in your industry and get some marginally useful, conventional ideas. Or you could do what General Mills did a few years ago, which is send a number of its factory teams to NASCAR races to benchmark pit crews in action. The teams came back and ultimately reduced the time to switch an assembly line from 5 hours to 25 minutes.

If you run a cement company and want to show quantum improvement in speed and on-time delivery, you could visit fellow cement manufacturers and get a familiar lesson in accepted industry practices. Or you could do what Cemex, the most profitable cement company in the world, did a few years ago to turbo-charge speed and delivery . CEO Lorenzo Zambrano sent a number of teams to Houston, to figure out how Houston’s emergency 911 crews does it, and to Memphis, to figure out how how FedEx does it."

Tags: collaboration strategy innovation

[image: Awoleba, via Flickr]

Posted by dominic at 7:02 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

The problem, Mr. CEO, is you

While the World Economic Forum came to a close last week, the World Economic Forum Weblog is still active. As part of a longer post (Innovation is an Attitude) about the difficulty that British telecom firm BT Group has had in bringing innovative ideas to market, CEO Ben Verwaayen writes about a recent exchange that he had with a young 25-year-old whippersnapper at the company:

Ben Verwaayen: "What is the greatest obstacle to getting your ideas heard?"

25-year-old at the back of the room: “You. [pause] You don’t understand what is going on in my head and you don’t understand what I’m saying when I try to tell you.”

The takeaway lesson,writes Verwaayen, is that "innovation is an attitude. As a CEO you need to allow people, young and old, room to speak their ideas. The status quo stifles innovation. There is no lack of people with ideas, but there is a lack of access to the people who have the resources to put them into action."

Anyway, this amusing anecdote reminds me of the "sticking it to the man" commercials from Sprint (as profiled here on Guerilla News in a post called Talking the Talk). You know, the Sprint commercial that has an upper-class white executive talking about getting a particular Sprint phone, and talking about “sticking it to The Man.” And his subordinate says, “Uh, sir, you are The Man.” The executive nods and says, “I know.”

Tags: innovation BT

[image: Time.com]

Posted by dominic at 6:48 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

February 8, 2006

February 8 innovation linkage

A loose confederation of skunk works (cartoon) [Gaping Void]
The manipulation of images related to the human form [The Art of DeTouch]
2006: The Year of Consumer-Generated Content [The House of Innovation via iMedia Connection]
Idea management and the fuzzy front end [Michael Osofsky]
Asteroid mining operations begin in 2025 [Payton Innovations LLC]
Bill Gates: "The Road Ahead" 10 years later [Bit-Tech.net]
Enforced innovation: surrogate advertising [Read between the P's]
The making of African innovation systems [Africa Unchained]
An Internet disruptor in the real estate industry [Money magazine]

[image: Asteroid Mining Station, via ArtBot.com]

Posted by dominic at 3:25 PM | Comments (1) | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Is popularity a good thing when it comes to innovation?

Of late, there appears to be more online chatter about prediction markets and their ability to help corporations predict the future. In New York, for example, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and a host of other companies recently attended the Prediction Markets Summit, where participants discussed real-world examples of how informed masses, acting in collaboration, are able to out-perform a small group of experts. At some level, creating Web 2.0 buzz is predicated around the idea of the wisdom of crowds, so it's easy to see why "predictions markets" have taken off in popularity. The best-known predictions markets, of course, are the Iowa Elecronic Markets, which claim, among other things, to predict the outcome of U.S. presidential elections with unerring exactitude.

As an example of a predictions market for innovation, consider the technology futures market that was developed by Yahoo! Research and O'Reilly Media last March. According to Yahoo!Research, the Tech Buzz Game is a "fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends":

"Predict the technologies people will be searching the web for in the future. Put your (fantasy) money where your mouth is by buying stock in the technologies you believe will be popular and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. (Example: You're bullish on podcasting; you buy shares of PODCAST stock) Markets in the Tech Buzz Game reflect a mix of companies, products, and technologies on O'Reilly's radar. Follow the Tech Buzz Game for a view into community sentiment about the future of technology."

While the idea of predictions markets for innovation is noteworthy and perhaps even useful for Yahoo! R&D internal purposes, is it really practical? In my opinion, there are at least five different reasons why a technology futures market is not a useful tool when it comes to predicting the future of innovation:

(1) There's no real money at stake. Remember, this is a game. Therefore, the cost of performing badly is not measured in real dollars and cents, only in reputation. If you don't have to come home to the wife (or husband) with empty pockets after gambling away the mortgage money, there's less of an incentive to become an informed, professional investor.

(2) Truly innovative product offerings are not always the most popular (at least in the beginning). If you read Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, it's easy to see why "sustaining" technologies and "incremental" technologies are much more popular than "disruptive" technologies. What innovation will be more popular: a device that clips on to your gas tank and gives you additional MPG? Or a hybrid, fuel-efficient vehicle?

(3) There's too much temptation to "pump-and-dump" a technology. (Watch the film Boiler Room with Vin Diesel to see how this works on Wall Street.) If you consider that many of the early technology adopters participating in the game are probably also start-up founders - or friends of start-up founders - or venture capitalists who back start-up founders - it's easy to see the motivation for talking up a new technology. Wouldn't these individuals have a natural inclination to create hype and buzz around their products and services?

(4) Instead of being rewarded for trading on fundamentals, market participants are rewarded for being momentum players. There's a big difference between a speculator and an investor, and guess which one wins in the end? How savvy, really, are speculators trying to make some money on a momentum play? If they're playing the fantasy market, this "retail money' (as compared to professional, "institutional money") is more likely to be affected by news about Paris Hilton's Sidekick than by true market fundamentals. As Gordon Gekko once asked: "Ever wonder why fund managers can't beat the S&P 500? 'Cause they're sheep, and sheep get slaughtered."

(5) Most types of predictions markets are not efficient. Efficient predictions markets are based on many of the same ideas as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis on Wall Street. (For more on this, check out Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street). There's a strong form of the EMH, a semi-strong version of the EMH, and a weak form of the EMH. Predictions markets follow, at best, a weak form of the EMH.

For these reasons above, I'm not really sure if there's a link between "popularity" and "innovation." With apologies to Kelly Clarkson, is the winner of a popularity-fueled contest like "American Idol" really the most talented or innovative? (Clothes, hair color and attitude matter much more than the underlying ability to sing a song) Popularity often means re-packaging highbrow ideas into a format that appeals to lowbrow tastes. Thus, the most popular technologies or innovations will not necessarily be the best innovations. Does it really take a predictions market to tell you that the Apple iPod is the most-buzzed-about product in the portable media device marketplace?

Tags: Yahoo predictions innovation

[image: Yahoo! pressroom]

Posted by dominic at 12:02 PM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Inside the box, outside the box, or at the edge of the box?

Citing sociology professor Gerald Gordon, Blogrium postulates that there are "two major abilities that are complementary to a person’s propensity to innovate: the ability to see the differences between things that seem similar and the ability to see the similarities between things that seem different." According to Blogrium, these two abilities are best thought of as problem formulating and problem solving."

As more companies are realizing these days, innovation needs to be as much about problem solving as it is about problem formulating:

"The ability to innovate does not mean you have superior real-world value. There are plenty of people who qualify as creatively smart but don’t get things done. In fact, many companies have started to use that as their mantra for hiring: smart and get things done. People who get things done understand constraints. Without constraints you can just keep thinking of endless conceptual possibilities. Consider the idea that outside-the-box thinking doesn’t actually foster practical innovation as much as what could be considered inside-the-box thinking..."

That's where it gets tricky, though. Is it best to think inside-the-box or outside-the-box?

"Put abstractly, think outside the box, as long as you can think inside the box. Fortunately, very little in reality is truly dichotomous. You can do both. In fact, if you model thinking inside the box as looking for differences in seemingly similar things, and thinking outside the box as looking for similarities in seeminly different things… well, you get something that looks like the graph at the top... Think at the edge of the box."

Aside: I'm not sure if this is the same Gerald Gordon that Blogrium references, but there's a Gerald Gordon at Boston University's College of Engineering who is investigating innovation and creativity within organizations: "How does an organization harness its employees' creativity and turn it into technological innovations? Gerald Gordon, CAS sociology professor and department chair, is investigating just that question in nine corporations..."

Tags: innovation creativity

[image: Blogrium]

Posted by dominic at 7:57 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

The company that plays together, innovates together

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a doctoral researcher from Helsinki, has provided a number of insights and commentary from the LIFT06 conference in Switzerland on her Hobby Princess blog. One of the most interesting speakers at LIFT06 was Matt Blackbelt Jones of Nokia, who explained why the concept of "play" is so important in the development of innovative mobile devices:

"In Vygotskian psychology, play (in children) is the principal process of learning. Play links with improvising and exploring new things. Currently big corporations are realizing that in order to make their customers play, they have to start playing themselves. Those who are interested in innovation, should also be interested in play."

Interestingly, this concept of play is starting to gain currency with corporate executives. Check out an earlier guest blog post (Work as Play) from Douglas Rushkoff, who explains the difficulty of creating a playful, innovative work environment:

Establishing a playful career or company isn’t as easy as it looks. It doesn’t require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company’s culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival—not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative mini-societies, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

Tags: Nokia LIFT06 Finland innovation

[image: Matt Blackbelt Jones of Nokia, via Hobby Princess]

Posted by dominic at 6:05 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Open source innovation, explained with the help of Clayton Christensen

Dave Rosenberg of InfoWorld's Open Resource blog has posted an interesting discussion of open source innovation. Curious as to why open source applications are not yet as innovative as their proprietary application counterparts, Dave turns to Clayton Christensen's Seeing What's Next for "a bit of theory on how innovation in open source is affecting the market." Before discussing the relationship of Christensen's Overshot and Undershot consumer frameworks to open source software applications, Dave takes a moment to discuss what's missing from open source innovation:

One key theme that I think gets lost about open source versus proprietary is the non-market context for innovation--the notion that you need both motivation and ability to be truly innovative. It seems like proprietary vendors take this for granted because open source projects are often benevolent, providing their code and projects for a greater good. This innovation altruism contains both motivation (the desire for code freedom) and ability (good developers and community). But these projects are not innovative in a tradition roadmap way which confuses the market. On the other hand, most for-profit open source companies have the motivation but are just now developing the ability to compete on features and move to a model of differentiation rather than based strictly on low-cost.

[image: Open Resource, via Clayton Christensen]

Posted by dominic at 5:45 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

The critical path of breakthrough medical innovation

As part of a plan to accelerate the time to market for new treatments and medical products, the FDA has set up the Critical Path Institute in Arizona. The ribbon-cutting ceremony only took place in December, but it looks like C-Path is already starting to generate some media buzz (it was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal on Monday). C-Path is a publicly funded, non-profit institute that seeks out and develops "innovative collaborations in education and research" between the government, academia and private sector pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies are willing to partner with the government since they view this collaboration as a way to minimize the bottlenecks in the FDA approval process:

"There is a growing recognition that a major factor contributing to the bottleneck in drug development is the time-consuming and less than optimal processes for preclinical and clinical testing of drugs. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) estimates that on average the industry must spend $0.8 - $1.7 billion and 12-15 years of research and development to bring a product to market. This leaves only 2-5 years of patent life and market exclusivity before generic competition results in lower prices and profits. With such a limited time to recoup its investment, industry is forced to charge increasingly higher prices."

It sounds like a win-win for both the public and private sector pharma companies: the public gets safer, more timely drugs, while pharma companies get to make money earlier than ever before possible. Since C-Path is based in Tucson, does this mean that Arizona is making a serious run at becoming a hub of medical innovation in the United States?

Other Critical Path linkage:

FDA eases way to test new drugs at less cost [Boston Globe]
Drug companies may use new lab tools to speed product approvals [Bloomberg]
C-Path to spur medical innovation [KOLD News]
$6 million for Critical Path [DrugWonks.com]
Drug research institute adds liaison from U. Arizona [Arizona Daily Star]

Posted by dominic at 5:25 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

February 7, 2006

Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works: attack of the drones

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great story about the legendary Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin, which has developed some of the most innovative fighter planes in the history of modern warfare (e.g. the U-2 spy plane, the F-117 Stealth fighter, the SR-71 supersonic spy plane). Now Lockheed Martin is getting into the unmanned aircraft business:

"As unmanned aircraft prove to be essential to modern warfare in Iraq and elsewhere, Lockheed is shedding its ambivalence and busily developing concepts for newfangled drones. One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.

Lockheed is drawing its drones from the same well that produced its stealth fighters: the company's secretive Skunk Works unit. And the unmanned craft are just as radical as some of the unit's past creations. "You have to throw out conventional aerodynamics," Skunk Works head Frank Cappuccio says of the so-called morphing drone, with the folding wings."

The bottom line is that it's too expensive and costly to develop conventional warplanes anymore. Developing drones, however, is relatively expensive. Plus, Uncle Sam is showing an increasing appetite for planes like the Predator drone: in FY07, the Pentagon plans to spend upwards of $1.7 billion on unmanned drones. There's also the matter of keeping up with aerospace competitors:

Lockheed's focus on drones comes after years of wrestling over developing unmanned planes for fear of undermining its franchise business in fighter jets. The company now feels both more secure about funding for its fighter programs and more compelled to jump on the multibillion-dollar drone bandwagon. The country's biggest defense contractor by sales, Lockheed is perceived as playing catchup in drones to Northrop and Boeing Co., and small firms such as closely held General Atomics, whose Predator -- armed with a Lockheed-made missile -- has been used to hunt down al-Qaeda figures.

Random innovation trivia: Skunk Works is a registered Lockheed trademark, derived from Skonk Works, a mysterious locale in the "Li'l Abner" comic strip where they distilled Kickapoo Joy Juice.

Tags: LockheedMartin SkunkWorks drones airplane innovation

[image: Predator drone, BBC News]

Posted by dominic at 12:54 PM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

The FT Business School Online: online education + online journalism

This week, the Financial Times, in partnership with Professor Don Sull of London Business School, is offering the first in a series of online executive education programs. For the next few days, Sull will be delivering a 5-part video lecture called “How to Manage in an Unpredictable World." At the end of the video lecture series, Sull will participate in a live Q&A. To accompany the videos, the Financial Times is providing lecture notes, reading lists and worksheets.The goal of the project is "to bring the best of what’s going on in academia to a wider business audience."

It sounds like a great idea, and not just because Don Sull is one of Tom Peter's cool friends. This innovative project hosted at FT.com - combining serious journalism with a business school curriculum - could become part of the answer to the question: What is the future of newspapers?

Maybe the answer to what ails newspapers is some kind of journalism/online education hybrid. No doubt, part of the reason why the FT.com is part of this project is due to the influence of its parent company, Pearson PLC, which is one of the biggest educational content providers in the world. While the first of these educational programs is free, it's easy to see how this could become a paid feature sometime in the near future for the Financial Times. Marry together a huge online audience, a top-notch reputation for excellence in journalism, and the best in online education and you get the FT Business School Online. As Tom Peters would say, Don Sull is one cool friend.

Tags: FinancialTimes LBS Pearson

Posted by dominic at 11:22 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Think tank + theme park = innovation lab

Bruno Giussani, the producer of the TEDGLOBAL conference and an Affiliated Fellow at Stanford's Institute for International Studies, has been posting insights from the LIFT06 conference in Switzerland on his Lunch over IP blog. In addition to posting about Robert Scoble and naked business conversations and the difference between creation and innovation, Bruno also live-blogged the presentation of one company (Arthesia), which is attempting to combine think tanks and theme parks into three-month "innovation labs":

"Themeparks are a unity of space design, content, and experience. Think tanks are one of the fastest-growing tools for science, publishing, spin, media, communication... So what [Thomas Sevcik of Arthesia] suggests is: Innovation Labs.

These are temporarily installed environments where people from different areas, backgrounds, companies and divisions come together for a limited time (3 months?) in a dedicated space to work on specific ideas (these are not only for corporates). Characteristics of InnoLabs: temporary physical space; guerrilla approach ("probably has a budget but it's often not really official"); instant; open to people from very different horizons; allows playfulness. Methods of InnoLabs: in these contexts people collaborate and co-ompete and work in an open-source format. Output of InnoLabs: new ideas, new products, new friends. Outlook on InnoLabs: it's early-stage; it's an idea on how to come up with innovation; it can come up with bullshit but it could also develop a killer app; there are more and more around; and they function at the interface between innovation and communication."

It's worth checking out the LIFT06 conference site: there are audio and video clips from the event, including clips from Internet A-listers like Cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod. Also, check out the LIFT06 tag on Flickr for photos from the event.

Tags: lift06 innovationlab innovation

[image: Innovation Lab from LIFT06]

Posted by dominic at 8:32 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Indian innovation: fast and getting faster

Over at DailyIndia.com, there's evidence that top Indian innovators and thinkers are uniting behind an effort to speed up the pace of Indian innovation. At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Indian innovators - including the head of the Indian National Knowledge Commission - stated their case to an American audience: "It is time we structure our institutions of knowledge to be a global player in the 21st century... Whatever we do will have long term implications -- if we are going to be a global player, we must focus on strengthening infrastructure,"

India's National Knowledge Commission was established by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in mid-2005 to explore ways of "creating, disseminating and applying knowledge for public benefit... to make India more competitive and increase prosperity." The commission has a three-year time window to make recommendations in areas such as science, education and technology. The overarching goal, of course, is to make India more innovative.

Tags: India innovation

[image: Sam Pitroda, Chairman of Indian National Knowledge Commission]

Posted by dominic at 7:56 AM | Comments (1409) | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Ray Kurzweil: rapid innovation and The Singularity

When Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near last year, it quickly became the 13th-most-blogged-about book of the year, according to the New York Times. For over 20 years, Kurzweil has been considered one of the world's top futurists and thinkers, and has even been described as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison" by one influential business magazine. As Kurzweil defines it, The Singularity is "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power—the knowledge, skills, and personality quirks that make us human—with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today."

That may be a bit much to buy into, but it's an interesting idea: What happens when the pace of technological innovation is so breathtakingly fast that thousands of years of human progress are collapsed into a single moment?

Anyway, Ray Kurzweil has posted the full text of Reinventing Humanity: The Future of Human-Machine Intelligence over at KurzweilAI.net, where he shares his vision of The Singularity:

"There will be a radical evolution of the human species in the next 40 years. The merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality."

Tags: singularity Kurzweil innovation

Posted by dominic at 7:05 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

February 6, 2006

February 6 Innovation Linkage

The unmanned spacesuit that's actually a radio satellite [CNN]
Manufacturing Gets Absolutely Fabulous [BBC News]
U.S. universities compete globally for scarce R&D resources [Information Week]
Innovation is dead: the history of copycats [Noah Kagan's OKDork.com]
The Wal-Marting of Google [Bubble Generation]
Turn your bright ideas into reality [Ten Thousand Bright Ideas]
The individual is the new group [Get Real via Innovation Creators]
Green ketchup innovations [Ruminations and Tantrums]
High-performance computing solutions for research and innovation [SHARCNET]
Not-so-innovative Super Bowl XL commercials [Google Video]

[image: SuitSat, via MSNBC]

Posted by dominic at 11:15 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack

Dartmouth's extreme innovator takes on corruption

Amit Sharma of the Extreme Innovation blog recently won an essay contest on business