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March 3, 2006
Is there a bozo in charge of your new innovation program?
The ever-colorful Guy Kawasaki has posted several times over the past week or so on how to prevent a bozo explosion at your company: "It's depressing to watch a mean, lean, fighting machine of a company deteriorate into mediocracy. In Silicon Valley we call this process the “bozo explosion.” This downward slide seems inevitable after a company achieves success -- often during the years immediately following an IPO." According to Guy, there are at least 10 signs of a pending bozo explosion:
(1) The two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic.” In addition, “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense.
(2) Management has two-day offsites at places like the Ritz Carlton to foster communication and to craft a company mission statement.
(3) The aforementioned company mission statement contains more than twenty words--two of which are “partner” and “strategic.”
[...]
Anyway, you get the idea.. For the full list of 10 signs of a pending bozo explosion, check out the Guy Kawasaki blog. Guy has also provided a list of 7 ways to prevent this bozo explosion from ever taking place (step #1: insist that managers hire better than themselves). Based on the popularity of this post, Guy has also provided a handy GBAT test (not GMAT! GBAT). GBAT = Guy's Bozofication Aptitude Test.
[image: Sam.Jackson via Flickr]
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The remote-controlled spy shark
Ok, this one was too good to pass up. Quick, what do you get when you combine James Bond, the stealth fighter and Jaws? The Pentagon spy shark. Walter Derzko of the Smart Economy blog points to an article by Roger Highfield of the online daily Telegraph (U.K.) that describes cutting-edge research being carried out by DARPA (i.e. the folks who brought you the Internet):
"Shark brain implants that could turn the fish into "stealth spies" are being studied in a research project funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Pentagon. Swimming in a ship's wake, a remote-controlled shark could track an enemy vessel's movements without being noticed, and under its own power. The navy also hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails left by a vessel."
If it sounds far-fetched, it's not: the innovative research builds on previous developments in brain implant technology that has been tried out on fish, rats and monkeys. More details on the research are available at the New Scientist site: Stealth Sharks to Patrol the High Seas.
Tags: innovation DARPA brainimplant
[image: BBC]
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Are "lead users" the same thing as "lead customers"?
On her Outside Innovation blog, best-selling author and management consultant Patty Seybold engages MIT professor Eric von Hippel (author of Democratizing Innovation) in a lively debate about innovation. It's a long blog post, but it looks like there are several important areas where Seybold and von Hippel disagree. For example, von Hippel specifically points out that lead users are very rarely your lead customers, while Seybold argues the opposite: that lead customers can and should be your lead users. In addition, when it comes to lead customer innovation, Eric apparently labeled Patty's trademarked Customer Scenario Mapping technique as nothing more than a bit of interesting market research, not as "a way to truly tap into lead user innovation."
For some reason, I found the blog posting from Patty a bit confusing. Her blog (Outside Innovation) is one of those blogs-that-will-become-a-book-within-the-next-12-months, so I guess that's to be expected. The blog postings on the Outside Innovation blog are really just a way to work out some of the kinks in her arguments. Just an example of why I found the blog posting a bit confusing: according to Seybold, Apple iTunes is a great example of "lead user innovation." In fact, in one paragraph, Seybold hints that maybe Steve Jobs got the idea for iTunes from one of her books:
"The practices of downloading music by the track, creating digital playlists, swapping both playlists and tracks of music, and creating customized radio programs were all developed and socialized by lead users. These lead user patterns were so obvious that I chronicled them in my book, "The Customer Revolution," which was published in the spring of 2001. Apple’s first iPod wasn’t announced until October 23, 2001. Apple’s iTunes music store wasn’t unveiled until April 28, 2003. I don’t know whether Steve Jobs read my book. But he was certainly tuned into the same patterns that I was seeing."
Tags: leaduser leadcustomer innovation vonhippel seybold
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George Bush visits India's high-tech hotbed
As part of his grand tour of India, President George Bush visited Hyderabad in order to get a first-hand glimpse of Indian innovation at work. Along the way, the U.S. President is also getting a glimpse of possible snags in the relationship between the U.S. and India in the form of widescale protests by Muslims about his arrival in their country. I wasn't aware of it, but apparently Hyderabad - one of the biggest and most important Indian innovation hubs - is 40% Muslim. (Is that percentage right?) If you read live accounts of his visit, it sounds like Hyderabad was locked down under martial law and heavily fortified.
Anyway, CBS News has the best coverage of Mr. Bush's visit to Hyderabad and what a U.S.-India relationship could mean for global innovation:
"President Bush flew to Hyderabad to see both the city's high-tech activity – which is helping to drive rapid economic growth - and visit the rural areas around it that lag behind. Talks with young entrepreneurs at a business school and a tour of the dusty campus of an agricultural college were meant to showcase ways the United States and India can cooperate to spur innovation and crop yields.
At Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, Mr. Bush watched Indians using sticks and tools to hand-till soil around young peanuts, tomatoes and soybeans. [...] Talking to students at the Indian School of Business, President Bush called them the CEOs of tomorrow and said America must not retrench and pull back - but should embrace the opportunities of selling goods to the billion person market that is India."
The upbeat message from President Bush: globalization is tough, and outsourcing means some pain for Americans who have lost their jobs, but it's worth it if we can crack wide open a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity.
Anyway, I tracked down a few first-hand accounts from Technorati about Mr. Bush's visit to India to get some local flavor:
Mixed reactions about President Bush's high-security visit [Sameer's blog]
Heavy black monstrous helicopters in the sky [Simply Elusive]
100,000 Indians who don't like Bush but do like John Lennon [Walrus Gumboot]
[image: AP]
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Google: we're a $100 billion company
Well, two days after Google CFO George Reyes spooked investors with comments about the difficulties the company was facing in tapping into new growth opportunities each year, the Google guys went on the charm offensive at Google Analyst Day on Thursday. As Reuters reports, the talk was relentlessly upbeat. (In fact, the CFO didn't even mention in passing what happened on Tuesday) CEO Eric Schmidt even went so far as to hint that Google was capable of doing $100 billion in revenue every year:
Top executives outlined plans for far more capital spending and ambitious overseas growth, suggesting they are taking aim at building a $100 billion company. "I'll leave it to you to judge whether that is $100 billion in market capitalization or revenue," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt coyly said as he outlined his 2006 priorities to Wall Street analysts at the annual Google Analyst Day meeting.
As of Wednesday, Google's market capitalization was already more than $100 billion, at $111.5 billion. For all of 2005, Google had revenue of $6.14 billion, up 92.5 percent from 2004's $3.19 billion. "His implication was that it was revenue without it being seen as formal guidance from the company," said Martin Pyykkonen, a financial analyst from Hoefer & Arnett who was present in the audience."
Anyway, it looks like everything is OK in Google-land. Shares of the company bounced more than 3.2%, to $376.45, on the upbeat prognosis. Or is it?
I tuned in to the first 45 minutes or so of the live Google Analyst Day Webcast, and quite frankly, there's a whole back story that wasn't mentioned in the Reuters clip (including the fact that the lights and projector kept experiencing problems during the first 30 minutes or so, at one time even leaving the room in total darkness):
(1) More than a few times, Google's CFO and CEO referenced the "founder's letter" and made sure that Wall Street analysts focused on the fact that Google circa 2006 is the same ol' lovable Google that investors fell in love with five years ago.
TRANSLATION: "Quit hassling us about Google being a 'mature' company. We're the same ol' quirky company that we were several years ago - back when nobody really questioned what we did."
(2) CEO Eric Schmidt devoted several PowerPoint slides to the "Wisdom of Crowds." Last year, Google talked about the "Long Tail" of content.
TRANSLATION: "We're on top of the idea du jour. We're ahead of the curve. Nobody can blindside us."
(3) CEO Eric Schmidt painted a rosy picture of Google "exporting" its unique business model to the most populous nations of the world - India and China - and included all kinds of PowerPoint slides showing the Google guys in some of the most remote rural locales of India.
TRANSLATION: "What growth problems? Look - the whole world is yet untapped. Our model is so successful, that it will effortlessly move from North America and Europe to the back roads of India."
(4) CEO Schmidt focused on two key facts: (A) serving end users (B) delivering quality advertising. These two factors drive the rest of the Google business model, and lead to billions of dollars in revenue, cash flow and shareholder value.
TRANSLATION: "Keep your eyes transfixed on these two things and ignore everything else. Forget about pesky things like margins and everything else. As long as people believe we have the best search engine, everything else falls into place."
(5) CEO Schmidt mentioned more than a few times the company's world-class software and hardware infrastructure.
TRANSLATION: "Stop thinking about us as an advertising company with top talent that could bolt the door at any minute. We're a real tech company with real assets and real physical things. Value us like a fast-growing tech company and not like a media or advertising company."
Tags: Google GoogleAnalystDay strategy
[image: Google Analyst Day presentation slide]
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March 2, 2006
March 2 innovation linkage
The Next Net 25 [Business 2.0]
Google Analyst Day webcast [Google Investor Relations]
Anagram transit maps [BoingBoing]
Classifying Experiences [Stephen P. Anderson via Putting People First]
Design 2.0 Round Up [Core 77]
A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers [Future Tense]
The new publication of the Stanford d.school [Ambidextrous Magazine]
Newsvine is now live to the world [Mike Davidson]
Is that an RFID chip in your forearm? [MSNBC via Network World]
[image: poetpainter, "Sorting, Classifying and Labeling Experiences"]
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Innovation. That was easy.
Ever since last September, Staples has been selling these "Easy" buttons in their retail stores for $4.99 apiece (with all proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America) as a tie-in to their new "That Was Easy" marketing campaign. Picking up on that idea, Greg Ness of the Sundog blog takes a closer look at what lessons the "Easy Button" advertising campaign might have for the larger world of business. Unfortunately, when it comes to marketing, there is no easy button:
"It’s human nature for people to want the easy button. These days I know plenty of marketing people who would like to have one. There’s all that competition out there. You have CEOs, CFOs and boards of directors asking for accountability in marketing. There are time-crunched, empowered consumers ready and enabled to ignore or avert boring, irrelevant messages. You can hear the marketer’s cry, “Hey, this is tough...let’s just push the easy button.”
Unfortunately, if there is an easy button in marketing, it is difficult to find. It still takes having or building a great brand that stands for something. It still requires finding a Purple Cow to set you apart from the crowd. It will always require compelling targeted messages (like the Easy Button) that break through the cacaphonous marketing noise."
The same thing is true in the world of innovation. As much as a CEO would like to press an "Easy Button" and instantly become more innovative, it's not gonna happen without a lot of employee buy-in and a clear, concise strategic vision. Just ask Ford Motor Company: did coming up with the "Driving American Innovation" campaign instantly make the company more innovative. In a word, no. For companies that do innovation well - like FedEx, Google, P&G and Apple - it looks "easy" to the casual observer. But as Frederick Smith or Alan G. Lafley will tell you, it's not easy at all.
Tags: Staples easy easybutton innovation
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Is Murderball a good example of how to make your company more competitive?
It's almost Oscar Night, and that means a sharp spike in the number of blog posts inspired by Oscar-nominated films. (How many cutesy headlines and tie-ins, though, can we really take about Brokeback Mountain?) Anyway, after watching two Oscar-worthy documentaries (Mad Hot Ballroom and Murderball) in the span of a few days, Mike Neiss (guest-blogging on the Tom Peters! blog) came up with the following observation:
"Because I find it difficult to completely disengage from my love of organizational dynamics, I observed a great lesson for our enterprises in these gems. In both situations, the talent involved had personal, and even physical, challenges to overcome. But what drove the players in each documentary was good-old, plain, in-your-face competition. They wanted to win. Not make this a better world, not meet some greater societal obligation, not satisfy shareholders ... they just wanted to beat their competition. In the case of Murderball, that can be taken literally."
Is it OK, however, to want to put the competition out of business?
"In both films, the players and dancers had to win several qualifying events before they got a chance to go for the championship. Shouldn't the metrics in our organizations mirror this? Might employees be a bit more engaged if they knew how they were doing against the competition? Shouldn't business literacy include understanding the competition and knowing their game? And the big, somewhat ethical, question: Is it okay to want to put your competition out of business by beating them in the game?"
According to Mike, the most obvious place to channel these competitive juices is in a clear, concise and elegant mission statement, such as the one Saturn came up with: "Produce a car that is higher in quality and lower in cost than the Honda Civic." For employees, this mission statement immediately established the two basic metrics (quality, cost) they will be judged on, and firmly established just exactly who the competition is...
Anyway, Mike has apparently stirred up a hornet's nest: over 24 people have commented on the post in the last 24 hours. Here's my $0.02: There's something about Mike's thesis that bothers me. It sounds so retro, circa 1975, describing business as a giant Darwinian clash-of-the-titans, zero-sum, take-no-prisoners, get-them-before-they-get-us type of game. Yo, I don't know of any MBA program that teaches business like that any more. Maybe we've gotten a bit soft around the edges in America, but it seems like there's a lot more recognition of other ways of conducting business than just head-to-head competition. Cooperation and collaboration are emerging as important themes in business, especially for innovative organizations.
So... is Murderball really a good example of how to make your company more innovative?
NOTE: if you're interested in watching Murderball live, check out these Google videos or these photos on Flickr.
Tags: TomPeters management strategy Murderball
[image: Murderball, via Oscars.com]
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Stupid client quotes
Let's face it: clients are not always the smartest people in the room. With that in mind, Clientcopia has assembled close to 4,200 "stupid client quotes" that illustrate this point:
"There's no getting around it. At some point in your career, your patience will be tested with a stupid client who is so clueless that you'll question your sanity, career choice, and the future of mankind.
You may have dealt with one already, one that just stuns you like a deer in headlights. Dumbfounded to utter anything but an "uhhh...". Some clients have no concept of reality. They make up their mind, just to change it again to an even more hideous decision. And will end up blaming you for the mess. Can we honestly blame the client? Sure we can..."
The site reminds me a bit of the immensely popular Overheard in New York blog, especially since it combines the nifty option of contributing your own stupid client quotes and then voting on the best overall quotes. (The quote in the innovation cartoon above is currently #13.) A big hat tip to Optical Poptitude for bringing this site to my attention.
For the management consultants out there: Do you have any especially blogworthy client quotes?
[image: Optical Poptitude]
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March 1, 2006
Wrap-up: Laurence Haughton's "Art of the Follow-Through"
Yesterday, author and management guru Laurence Haughton conducted a one-hour Live Meeting over the Internet as part of the Microsoft Leadership Forum. Close to 1,000 people registered for the event before February 28, and according to a nifty little audience feature on Live Meeting, it looks like approximately 500 people stayed for the full duration of the event. Anyway, Laurence divided his presentation into two thirty-minute halves: the first half looked at the three major obstacles to getting things done within an organization, and the final thirty minutes examined the concrete steps that managers can take to overcome these barriers. It's not so much that companies choose the wrong strategy, according to Laurence, it's that companies don't know how to follow-through on their strategies. Execution is key.
As a key step, says Laurence, you've got to outmaneuver the CAVE people. The CAVE people are not necessarily the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals inhabiting the cubicles next to you. That's the scary part if you're a manager. CAVE people ("Citizens Against Virtually Everything") can be anybody in the organization - people who are averse to change, people who fear change, and people who are unfamiliar with change. It's hard work overcoming their objections and passive resistance, so the first step is to create a WOW! event that will bring them to their knees.
If you're interested, you can read more about the "Art of the Follow-Through" in Laurence's book It's Not What You Say... It's What You Do.
UPDATE: It's also possible to listen to the Live Meeting from Microsoft's Web Seminar archives (The Art of Follow-Through, 2/28/06) or to download the Live Meeting directly to your PC.
Tags: LaurenceHaughton CAVEpeople
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Notable & Quotable from TED 2006
The official TED blog took an interesting approach to covering the 2006 Technology, Entertainment & Design conference that took place last week. Instead of offering blow-by-blow, speaker-by-analysis analysis of the event, the TED blog offered a day's worth of the best quotes from conference speakers at the end of each day, with occasional links to photos and more in-depth blog posts by guest bloggers attending the event. (somewhat similar, in fact, to the way we handled it last year at the Fortune Innovation Forum). Anyway, here's a snippet of the best quotes from Day 4:
“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original” - Ken Robinson
"Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status." - Ken Robinson
"He was in someone's English class wasn't he? ... How annoying would that be?" - Ken Robinson imagining the challenge of educating William Shakespeare
"You see that the artist had no idea how to use colors, or maybe he was in a hurry" - Ursus Wehrli on “tidying up” Paul Klee’s 1930 colored chalkboard “Farbtafel”
"Live a "carbon neutral" life, it's easier than you think: reduce, and then offset the rest" - Al Gore
Overall, I really liked the TED blog's coverage of the event -- the right-hand-column of the blog included sections for "TED 2006 on Flickr," "Press coverage of TED 2006," and "Blog Coverage of TED 2006." Plus, the guest bloggers rounded up for the event - including Chris Anderson and Diego Rodriguez - were top-notch.
NOTE: Sir Ken Robinson was also a speaker at the Fortune Innovation Forum in New York City in November
Tags: TED KenRobinson
[image: Al Gore at TED 2006 via TED blog]
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Smart mobs and Chinese consumers: the art of tuangou
How do you get a better price for a consumer good? Well, in China, you show up with a team of a dozen other shoppers and start shouting at the bewildered salesperson, "35% off!" In Chinese, the team haggling process is more formally known as tuangou ("team purchase"), and there's even a Web site (51tuangou.com) that gathers together consumer buying power for a specific purchase in Shanghai. From the looks of the Chinese-language-only Web site, consumers can band together to buy anything from Queen-sized beds to kitchen cabinets to wedding dresses (!).
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the link for the Wall Street Journal article by James T. Areddy ("Chinese Consumers Overwhelm Retailers With Team Tactics"), but here's a brief snippet from the print version of the paper:
"Seller beware: some of China's 1.3 billion consumers are angling for group discounts. Chinese shoppers have always been known as hard-nosed bargainers. Now, to the dismay of merchants, some have started shopping in teams to haggle for bigger markdowns.
The practice, called tuangou, or team purchase, began in Internet chat rooms, where like-minded consumers hatch plans to buy appliances, furnishings, food, even cars, in bulk. Next, they show up en masse at stores like Suzhou Zhongyi Kitchen Co. to demand discounts."
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February 28, 2006
Business acronyms every innovative worker should know
BusinessBalls.com, a free learning and development site maintained by Alan Chapman in the U.K., has assembled a great collection of business acronyms (including some that are, ahem, slightly off-color). For example, ever heard of "management by walking around"? Well, apparently, workers got a bit tired of their bosses constantly walking around and keeping tabs on them, so they created the acronym IOWA - "Idiots Out Walking Around." A few other favorites:
ASTRO: Always Stating the Really Obvious
BANANA: Built Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
BANJO: Bang Another Nuisance Job Out
BMW: Bellyache, moan, whine
BUNDY: But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet
FBO: Failing better often
FILTH: Failed in London, Try in Hong Kong
HIP: High involvement project
IDEA: Identify, Design, Execute, Augment
IKIWISI: I'll Know It When I See It
and, finally.... ISDN: Innovations Subscribers Don't Need
Tags: innovation acronyms
[image: The Black Cat Gallery: Corporate Acronyms]
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Two tips for jumpstarting your company's innovation program
It's always fun to hear about the takeaway lessons of innovation conference participants. Months later, what do you remember from that innovation conference you attended? Better yet, months later, what do you actually try to implement within your organization? With that in mind, Adrian Cockcroft shares some insights about innovation that he's picked up from attending a number of different events (including the FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York). Here's one approach called "Poster Lunch":
"We used a few simple techniques last year to kickstart our own innovation program. One method I borrowed from other events is the "Poster Lunch". Get a room near the company cafe, provide flip chart sized pads and pens, email everyone to tell them about it and put up signs in the Cafe to invite them in on the day. Anyone can put anything they like on a poster, stick it up and collect comments on it in person. One thing we found was that there were several posters suggesting eBay site features that already existed or were in development. One suggestion in particular was getting lots of support and comments until someone wrote on it "LTS thursday!", meaning it would be Live To Site and be launched two days later. We also gave attendees voting stickers so that they could indicate their favourite posters.
Another idea, writes Adrian, is to create a wiki:
"To support the collection of ideas, we created a Wiki. This is nice because it is free format, and supports comments and discussion, with very low initial barrier to entering an idea. The problems came when there were several hundred ideas in the Wiki, it became hard to maintain. A more specialized pre-concept tool that feeds into our standard development process is a better solution for incremental innovations, and the Wiki works better for more radical ideas."
Tags: innovation takeawaylesson posterlunch
[image: Scenes from a Poster Lunch, via The University of Edinburgh]
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Dear Economist: Replace the Big Mac Index with the iPod Index
For nearly 20 years, The Economist has taken its gentlemanly jab at American mass culture with the annual rollout of the Big Mac Index. In recent years, The Economist has even created the Tall Latte Index and the Coca-Cola Map to mock Americans and their non-British drinking habits. (Brits, you see, drink tea and not coffee) Granted, the creation of the Big Mac Index in September 1986 was a natural. It gave The Economist the perfect pretext to look down its British nose at those burger-munching, obese Americans while supposedly educating the masses about exchange rate theory. The logic behind "burgernomics" seemed to make sense: after all, McDonald's has sold more than 1 billion burgers worldwide and is firmly entrenched in nearly every major town - not just in America, but in the world.
For years, the slogan "1 billion served" has been firmly associated with McDonald's and the Big Mac. (McDonald's served its 1 billionth burger in 1963, eight years after starting the franchise) Think one billion of anything, and the first thing you think of is burgers. Until now. Something very interesting happened last week - the iTunes Music Store just sold its 1 billionth song. Since the iTunes Music Store only opened for business in April 2003, that amounts to 11.2 downloads per second, 673 downloads per minute, 40,375 downloads per hour, 968,992 downloads per day and 6.78 million per week.
Those stunning sales figures,, of course, leads to the following suggestion: Instead of tabulating each year a Big Mac Index to measure Purchasing Power Parity (which, by the way, most economists now believe is slightly imperfect) why doesn't The Economist create something that truly matters: the iPod Index. (NOTE: Purchasing Power Parity states that exchange rates should adjust to equalize the cost of a basket of goods and services, wherever it is bought around the world. In economics, after all, there is no such thing as a free lunch...) Similar to the Big Mac Index, the iPod Index would measure the cost (in local currency) of an iPod in various countries of the world. The near-ubiquitous iPod, then, would replace the near-ubiquitous burger as the real estimate of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). After all, type in "one billion served" on Google, and the first two pages are dedicated to iPod-related stories.
The bottom line: instead of measuring PPP with burgers, Starbucks coffee and Coca-Cola, why not use a hip gadget like the iPod? Any other ideas of what a hypothetical iPod Index might look like?
To get you started, Mad Dog in the Fog has already scoured through Apple iTunes press releases from the past three years to develop some data points for iTunes sales:
"Apple recently announced 1 billion songs purchased on iTunes. I dug around the Apple press releases and tracked down some of the major iTunes milestones over the last few years. It's amazing that there have been 500 million songs purchased since July 2005. That's 500 million songs purchased in 7 months for an average of 71 million songs purchased per month!"
The result was a graph that looks like this:
[iTunes graph: Mad Dog in the Fog]
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One super jump for man, one incredible jump for mankind
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal (link via Die Welt) had an absolutely fantastic story about the 61-year-old French daredevil Michel Fournier, who is planning to jump from 25 miles up in outer space (approximately 40 kilometers or 131,200 feet). Check out the attached graphic to see exactly how high 25 miles is - the French call it Le Grand Saut, or The Super Jump. (If you have trouble reading the graphic - the guy will break through the sound barrier in free fall, traveling faster than 700 miles per hour while he does it) Let's just put it this way - at that jump altitude (literally, on the edge of outer space), a lot of bad things start happening to the human body:
"Belly-flopping from the edge of space isn't just an incredibly long parachute ride. At that altitude, conditions quickly turn deadly. Above 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is so thin that unprotected people lose consciousness in around 12 seconds. Even with an air supply, nitrogen bubbles may form in the blood and soft tissue if the jumper hasn't prepared by inhaling pure oxygen for several hours. If the jumper is unprotected above 50,000 feet or so, saliva boils off the tongue, and body parts begin swelling painfully. Lungs may hemorrhage as they and the skull fill with liquid."
As the current record holder (a retired U.S. Air Force colonel) puts it: "Space is hostile." With that in mind, the French daredevil/parachutist/adventurer has put together a lethal training regimen that blows away any kind of "boot camp workout" the local fitness chains put together:
"To prepare, Mr. Fournier has checked his equipment by spending hours locked in a pressure chamber at near-vacuum conditions. In another test, he donned his three-layer suit, which consists of a thermal skin that can keep him warm for 10 minutes at minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Over that he put on a pressure suit shielded by a windproof shell that remains pliable at low temperature. Then he stood in a wind tunnel as minus 22 degree air blasted him at 100 mph, producing an effective temperature of -238 degrees.
Mr. Fournier undergoes batteries of medical tests and avoids salt and sugar, in part because nitrogen bubbles form quickly in fat cells. He wakes daily around 5 a.m. for two hours of jogging in the ravines near his house, followed by an hour-long workout and yoga."
Other linkage about Michel Fournier and The Super Jump:
The Super Jump [Le Grand Saut homepage]
Frenchman ready for daredevil dive [BBC News]
A French daredevil hopes to live to tell tale of 25 mile jump [Die Welt]
Jump! Jump! [Popular Science]
[image: BBC News]
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February 27, 2006
February 27 innovation linkage
Avoid creating innovation "scree" [Creating Positive Context]
Incentives for innovation [Maksimovich's Outside the Cube blog]
The innovation decision tree [Customer Experience Crossroads blog]
High-tech tools for future MBA grads [Rod Boothby's Innovation Creators]
NASA "History of Space Flight" videos [Google Video via CNET]
The know-it-all butler has disappeared [Ask.com]
Innovation at Toyota [Curious Cat Management Improvement]
Wipro embraces innovation aggressively [Gagan Kaul blog]
A mashup of Google Maps and "The Sopranos" [New York Times]
Photo gallery: the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci [Reuteler]
[image: Da Vinci's Flying Machine]
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11 innovation trends to watch
Victor Hwang of The Next Wave of Innovation blog has listed the Top 11 Trends in the world of innovation. These trends, when taken together, comprise the next wave of innovation:
1. The playing field for innovation has shifted. (Winning the race requires not just innovating better and faster, but “innovating how we innovate” better and faster)
2. Venture capital will nationalize and ultimately globalize.
3. The next wave of innovation will be much more decentralized. (Silicon Valley and Route 128 will have diminishing geographical influence)
4. There will be no new successful Silicon Valley copycats in the United States anymore.
5. Regional clustering will diminish in importance and efficacy.
6. Universities in general are bad at technology transfer because they have inefficient feedback loops.
7. Resources to grow innovative businesses in the United States as a whole (versus within individual regions) are not being allocated nearly as efficiently as many believe.
8. The trendlines point to a world in which economic well-being is based less and less on geography.
9. One of the biggest economic bottlenecks in the United States is the mismatch between dollars invested in scientific research and dollars invested in developing innovative businesses.
10. More centralized foreign governments are proving to be quite fast at adopting the methods for successful technology-based economic development.
11. The successful venture capital firms (indeed, all innovative enterprises) of the future, all things being equal, will be those that are fastest to access global resources including scientific research, human talent, and market understanding and access more efficiently to grow successful enterprises.
A quick read through seems to indicate a decline in the popularity of the "regional hub" model of innovation. Anyway, it's worth checking out the homepage for the Larta Institute, which sponsors The Next Wave of Innovation blog. The Larta Institute is a professional services firm providing entrepreneur training, commercialization, and technology transfer services for governments, companies, and universities (a fact that perhaps explains Trend #6 above).
Tags: innovation trends larta
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Will the patent trolls soon be feeding on more than BlackBerries?
Patent trolls ("companies that exist neither to build nor market a product but solely to cash in on someone else's hard work") are the bane of any R&D-intensive industry, as Tim Wu of Columbia University points out in a recent Slate article. Not surprisingly, patent troll detractors call them "parasites" and deplore their business practices as "immoral." At the very least, the presence of patent trolls within an industry acts as a potential brake on innovation.
The best-known example of a case involving a patent troll, of course, involves Research in Motion (makers of the BlackBerry) and tiny patent holder NTP, Inc. For four years, RIM has been engaged in an all-out war over the patent rights to its BlackBerry wireless device, facing the very real possibility that BlackBerry users across the nation could soon be losing access to their mobile e-mail devices. (If you haven't been following this case carefully, CNET has a great overview of the developments in the case in a feature called BlackBerry Getting Squeezed?)
As Canada's Financial Post points out, patent trolls will become increasingly aggressive as they forage for intellectual property if it becomes clear that they can wring huge settlements from cash-rich technology companies. In all likelihood, patent trolls will soon be feeding on more than BlackBerries, especially as "patent auctions" and other forms of acquiring the rights to intellectual property become more mainstream.
For example, check out Ocean Tomo's site, which showcases its spring patent auction at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on April 5-6. According to Ocean Tomo, these auctions represent a win-win for both buyers and sellers of intellectual property. For buyers, these auctions can be "the most time efficient and economical place to acquire that core patent or strategic patent portfolio," while IP sellers can also count on the auctions to achieve "world record prices.”
However, there is a danger that these IP auctions could be hijacked by patent trolls. If you're interested in what types of patents are now selling for cold, hard cash on the open market, hard copy catalogs are available at $500 a pop from the Ocean Tomo site. You can also view the "featured lots of the day" as a PDF document. For example, Lot #6 is a bundle of barcode/RFID technology patents from a Motorola engineer expected to fetch anywhere between $2 million and $5 million. According to Barron's ("Corporate Garage Sale"), other lots featured for sale have included a patent for four-wheel steering from Ford and a fat substitute from Unilever.
Tags: patenttroll patents auctions IP
[image: Norwegian troll, via Reinhard Pantke on Flickr]
Posted by dominic at 10:47 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig | TrackBack
Wharton: inside the art and craft of innovation
Knowledge @ Wharton, in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group, has assembled a number of resources from the Ben Franklin Forum on Innovation in Philadelphia (including audio interviews with participants) into a handy online report called "The Art and Craft of Innovation."
"This report presents a summary of the discussions as well as audio interviews with experts from Wharton, BCG and some of those companies. In addition, Knowledge@Wharton interviews Garrett Brown, whose innovations with camera technology have transformed cinematography. Finally, authors of the Wharton School Publishing book, Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It, discuss how companies can manage innovation and benefit from it."
Tags: Wharton innovation BCG strategy
[image: Ben Franklin at the University of Pennsylvania]
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