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March 17, 2006

Creative information visualization

Every now and then, I run across a site that's so different and so thought-provoking that it becomes a personal favorite for days, weeks, even months at a time. This week, I had the chance to discover Information Aesthetics, written by Andrew Vande Moere, a lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Sydney. In the past week, Information Aesthetics has posted about oil barrel price translations for objects (i.e. how much is that iPod expressed in barrels of crude oil?); news subject heat maps (pictured); social network physics; and weather pattern windows. The images and graphics that accompany the text are the real stars, though.

Anyway, here's a quick blurb from the ABOUT section of the blog:

"Inspired by Manovich's definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as 'creative information visualization'. (...)

This weblog is based on the assertion that information visualization can be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience of users, instead of solely focusing on typical task effectiveness metrics. As information access enters the everyday life of users and becomes increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive, novel approaches are required that take into account considerations of user engagement and visual aesthetics. instead of evaluating such information applications by measuring task performance and comprehension effectiveness, one should consider to determine user interest, attention, focus, enjoyment and curiousity."

To paraphase Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, "You had me at Manovich." (minus the tears, of course. For the Quicktime audio clip of Renee's "You had me at hello," click here)

Tags: creative information visualization

[image: News Subject Heat Maps]

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How to market your product, Cluetrain-style

If you're looking for new ways to market your product or service while embracing some of the most innovative ideas on the Internet, Tara Hunt (aka "Miss Rogue") of the Horse Pig Cow blog has generously made her "Marketing Your Project, Cluetrain-Style" presentation available for download. (Although there are 33 slides, it's sparsely worded and full of Flickr pictures, so the time commitment is minimal.) Apparently, the presentation drew rave reviews at both BarCamp Austin and SXSW 2006, so it's worth checking out. In an earlier post on the Horse Pig Cow blog, Tara explained 10 simple rules for Cluetrain marketers to follow:

(1) A good marketer is a Community Advocate
(2) A good marketer knows today's brands aren't built in boardrooms or ad agencies or brainstorming sessions
(3) A good marketer plans a little, but changes alot
(4) A good marketer doesn't only respond to community needs today, but also knows what needs will arise tomorrow
(5) A good marketer rewards the community members who stand behind him/her
(6) A good marketer gets involved in the community
(7) A good marketer is her/his own client
(8) A good marketer knows when to back off
(9) A good marketer learns to use the tools available to them
(10) A good marketer never takes her/himself to seriously

Tags: cluetrain marketing innovation

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IBM's global innovation outlook

IBM has consistently been able to identify new trends in the world of innovation and then mobilize new resources to put these ideas into motion. In addition to unveiling a new innovation web site and an "Innovation Makes You Special" marketing campaign, IBM also recently released the findings of its second-ever Global Innovation Outlook. A year earlier, IBM produced its first-ever Global Innovation Outlook, which identified three key trends in the world of innovation after extensive consultations with leaders in industry and academia:

(1) The need for standard ways of exchanging information within and across organizations
(2) The need for more open collaboration among ecosystem members, including parties not used to working with each other because they compete or come from different disciplines or industries.
(3) The primacy of the individual as a focal point for innovation.

With that as a basis, IBM coordinated 15 "deep dives" in 2005 and 2006, assembling more than 248 thought leaders from 33 countries representing 178 organizations to follow up on these ideas. Innovation thought leaders met in Beijing, New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Zurich and San Francisco to come up with the key findings of Global Innovation Outlook 2.0. Discussions focused on three broad topics: (1) the future of the enterprise (2) energy and the environment and (3) transportation and mobility. Below, IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger summarizes a few of the lessons and findings from the report:

"We found some very interesting broad patterns. Let me talk about one in particular. While GIO 1.0 focused on the role of individuals in driving innovation, this time the discussions revealed that those individuals are not acting in isolation. Their power comes largely from their ability to tap into and sometimes transform a larger network of people and ideas.

This is something I have personally discovered in the last year with the rise of social networks, enabled by the Internet and related tools and platforms which are making it possible for people to connect and work together in unprecedented ways within and outside the boundaries of organizations and countries. GIO participants observed that increasingly the organizing principle for work is no longer the enterprise but the endeavor and that it may soon be time to redefine what we mean by enterprise, employer and employee, as looser aggregations of collaborators form and disband opportunity by opportunity. In GIO discussions people kept coming back to the idea that in such a socially networked, collaborative world, reputation capital and trust are critical to the proper working of businesses and communities, something with which I wholeheartedly concur."

If you're interested, the GIO 2.0 report can be downloaded as a 50-page PDF or ordered online from IBM Research.

Tags: GIO innovation IBM

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Pervasive electronic games: how they're changing your world

Over at We Make Money Not Art, there's a great synopsis of Julian Bleecker's talk at ETech 2006, where he discussed how "pervasive electronic games" are changing the way people interact with their environment and the people around them:

"The main point was to figure out how to describe pervasive games as a way of creating, understanding and researching social interactions and the relationship between we and the worlds we inhabit. Many things in our environment can become playful, the whole city can be a big playboard. How can we play off with the existing infrastructure? Pervasive gaming is all around us, it touches many parts of our everyday life. Its manifestations don't have to be physical either. The networks leak into our world. Pervasive networks pervade our physical space but they also pervade our social space and shape daily social practice."

Julian provides a multitude of different gaming ideas, and the one that really stuck in my head was a game called Twitchr:

"Twitchr: a virtual pet environment in which digital birds visit your mobile phone. An application that resides on your handset gives you a window onto a "virtual garden", into which these birds will fly from time to time. To tempt them, you use an almost childishly simple one-click interface to drop pieces of seed on the ground; minutes or hours later, your handset flashes and tweets as a bird arrives, and you have a short window of opportunity to click again and snap a photo.

If you configure Bluetooth and "pair" your device with that of a Twitchr-playing friend, then birds can fly between your phones. (...) "Once you're online, your phone becomes part of a massive digital environment: numbers of the various species rise and fall over time, new species can be introduced, and old ones become extinct."

Tags: JulianBleecker innovation electronicgames

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Recap and opinions about "American Inventor"

Well, if you're curious about that "American Inventor" TV show, MAKE: Blog has posted a thorough, live blogging review of the show, complete with screen captures. Truth be told, I only watched 20 minutes of the show before giving up on it. When the first contestant was some guy who dreamed up a Dracula-like "bladder buddy," you know you're in for a long night. (see above) The program was, in my opinion, painful to watch. (Of course, I don't like "American Idol" either, so what do you expect? I ended up watching U.S.-Mexico in the World Baseball Classic and - wouldn't you know it? - missed the "edible snow globes" on "American Inventor".) Anyway, thanks to the magic of Technorati, I've collected some quotes from around the blogosphere about the show. Surprisingly enough, people seemed to love it:

"So far, the "inventions" have been lackluster but the television was engaging. Stay tuned next week." - Joyce Wycoff of Good Morning Thinkers!

"I think I enjoyed the show. Some of these inventions were HILARIOUS!!" - Janet's Planet

"Loved it. Shoot. I so didn't need another TV show addiction." - Planet Alien

"This is like American Idol, but so much more WTF-inducing!" - Alryssa: Telly-fission

"The Simon Cowell-produced "American Inventor" TV show will do for backyard tinkerers what "American Idol" did for people who sing in the shower." - xoanaadverti659

"For every inventor of the Crock-Pot, are there at least 1,000 crackpots? ABC's American Inventor makes it seem so, parading its nut balls with the zeal and frequency of American Idol's audition shows." - forgivenessp271

Tags: americaninventor

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March 16, 2006

March 16 innovation linkage

The Attention Economy vs. The Intention Economy [Edge Perspectives]
Innovation in emerging markets [Niti Bhan]
Convert all U.S. prices into the equivalent value in barrels of oil [Oil Standard]
Customer-led innovation at LEGO and National Instruments [Outside Innovation blog]
A Perfect 10 for technology fans [Microsoft's 10]
MySpace for grown-up auto enthusiasts [Carspace.com]
An authenticity curve for consumers [Seth Godin's blog]
Is Ukraine the next global high tech hot spot? [Smart Economy]
The 7 Basic Machines from which All Other Machines Can be Constructed [Uncyclopedia]

[image: iPod Oil Standard, via Information Aesthetics]

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A manifesto for growth and innovation

This is an oldie but goodie... In 1998, Bruce Mau of Bruce Mau Design drafted an Incomplete Manifesto for Growth that encompassed more than 43 points. Since then, the manifesto has been translated into Spanish and Polish and is still part of the Bruce Mau Design website. In the interest of brevity, I've listed only the top five ideas in the manifesto:

(1) Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

(2) Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

(3) Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

(4) Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

(5) Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

It's surprising how fresh The Incomplete Manifesto still is, eh? Back in 1998, after all, the whole Internet thing was still very much in doubt, no one had ever heard of Google, and He Who Must Not Be Named was not yet lurking in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. People write manifestos all the time, but most of them are disposable. Even worse than that, most manifestos are nothing more than thinly-veiled marketing spiels masquerading as timeless truths. Bruce Mau seems to have written something that's worthy of at least one of those congratulatory chest bumping moves .

Tags: brucemau growth manifesto

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"The greatest age of creativity and innovation the world has ever known"

The cover story in this week's TIME Magazine looks at cutting-edge developments in nearly every sphere of human endeavor, including politics, technology, sports, medicine and, yes, even fashion. There's one unifying theme here: "We are on the verge of the greatest age of creativity and innovation the world has ever known," thanks to revolutionary advances in the way that we approach innovation. Call it "open-source innovation," or "open innovation" or "collaborative innovation" or anything you want, but it's clear that something very interesting is happening in the innovation space:

"Things, broadly speaking, used to be invented by a small, shadowy élite. This mysterious group might be called the People Who Happened to Be in the Room at the Time. These people might have been engineers, or sitcom writers, or chefs. They were probably very nice and might have even been very, very smart. But however smart they were, they're almost certainly no match for a less élite but much, much larger group: All the People Outside the Room.

Historically, that latter group hasn't had much to do with innovation. These people buy and consume whatever gets invented inside the room, but that's it. The arrow points just the one way. Until now it's been kind of awkward getting them involved in the innovation process at all, because they're not getting paid; plus it's a pain to set up the conference call. But that's changing. The authorship of innovation is shifting from the Few to the Many. Take as an example something called the open-source movement..."

Anyway, TIME magazine also includes a look at the gadgets of tomorrow, hot new drugs (the good kind), fantastic architectural creations, the NASCAR of tomorrow, and cutting-edge political campaigns. In addition, TIME has recorded a number of conversations about the future, available as audio files. (There's even one with the ever-controversial Mark Cuban)

Tags: nextbigthing innovation future innovation

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Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen

Wired Magazine takes a fun look at the 10 best-ever accidental discoveries. For example, ever wondered how researchers came up with Viagra? It didn't happen the way you thought it happened. (see answer below) A number of discoveries that we now take for granted are a result of random eureka! moments in the lab:

(1) Viagra
(2) LSD
(3) X-rays
(4) Penicillin
(5) Artificial sweeteners
(6) Microwave ovens
(7) Brandy
(8) Vulcanized rubber
(9) Silly putty
(10) Potato chips

Oh, and here's the answer for how they came up with Viagra: "Men being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh hamlet where, in 1992 trials, the gravity-defying side effects of a new angina drug first popped up. Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron."

Tags: innovation serendipity Viagra

[image: Pfizer's Viagra Tower, Grabthar via Flickr]

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March 15, 2006

10 cool colleges for entrepreneurs

Back in the day, if you were a budding entrepreneur you went to a university like MIT or Stanford, and that was that. The rules of the road have changed since then, with up-and-coming schools now offering specialized courses on creativity (DePaul); entrepreneur boot camps (Howard); and well-funded business plan competitions (UT-Austin). Other schools are specifically addressing the entrepreneurial needs of minorities and women. With that in mind, FORTUNE Small Business recently released a list of "10 cool colleges for entrepreneurs," and some of the names on the list may surprise you:

(1) DePaul University (Chicago)
(2) Florida International University (Miami)
(3) Harvard
(4) Howard University (Washington, DC)
(5) Simmons College (Boston)
(6) Sitting Bull College (North Dakota)
(7) University of Tucson (Arizona)
(8) University of Colorado (Boulder)
(9) University of Texas (Austin)
(10) University of Rochester

The ranking will no doubt come as a real blow to the self-confidence of smug Harvard grads everywhere (What? We ranked between Florida International University and Sitting Bull College in the new FORTUNE survey?).

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Innovator Swap

In anticipation of the premiere of ABC's new "American Inventor" TV show tomorrow night, I've been thinking about various ways that ABC could really leverage the invention/innovation theme for a brand new hit TV show. How about "Innovator Swap," based on the hit TV show "Wife Swap"?

In other words, what would happen if Google and a boring old manufacturing company swapped innovators for a month? What mayhem would result? In case you're not familiar with the premise of "Wife Swap," here's a brief blurb about the show planned for March 20: "A tanned, toned, fitness-crazed mom from California swaps places with a sensitive, overweight mother of two who hasn't set foot on a treadmill in years." Re-writing the copy for "Innovator Swap," this would become: "A tanned, toned, innovation-crazed business executive from Google swaps places with an executive from a bloated, inefficient manufacturing company struggling with a sagging stock price."

Tags: wifeswap innovator

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For traditional enterprises, the playing field is radically changing

In a recent blog post for ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe has provided a concise, easy-to-follow analysis of three major trends that are influencing the business models of large institutions:

1) Innovation is moving from a top-down to bottom-up model
2) Value is shifting from ownership to experiences
3) Power is moving from institutions to communities

As can be seen from the accompanying chart, the flow of "innovation" has switched direction. No longer does innovation flow from the institution to the community. Now, innovation flows from the community to the institution. While Hinchcliffe does not explicitly refer to "FORTUNE 500 companies" in his analysis, it's safe to say that America's largest corporations need to understand how the very nature of innovation appears to be changing. Collectively, the trends outlined below are part of a broader structural shift that Dion refers to as "social computing." Below, Hinchcliffe explains the impact of this structural shift:

"It appears that the two-way Web is increasingly moving the power out of the hands of trusted institutions and into the hands of everyday users, who decide for themselves what products they should buy, whose information they should consume, what marketing they want. Thus, online communities are increasingly driving the vision of institutions because these technologies put the majority of power into the hands of communities, essentially take it away from existing formal social structures and organizations."

Anyway, be sure to check out Dion Hinchcliffe's thought-provoking Web 2.0 blog for his current thinking on Web 2.0 and social computing as well as his photostream on Flickr.

[image: The Shift to Social Computing]

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What's missing from the world's top B-schools?

On his blog, Tom Peters has added a link to a PowerPoint presentation featuring a list of essentials that are "missing in action" at the world's elite B-schools. Since this is a blog about innovation, it's no surprise that one of the items specifically mentioned by Tom is "innovation." In fact, it looks like Tom has sub-divided "innovation" into a number of complementary disciplines, like design, creativity and "buzz-building." Tom also mentions a handful of other items that are M.I.A. at schools like Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Wharton: giving great presentations, project management, leadership, career creation, wellness and diversity.

Also, be sure to check out the comments to the post. A Wharton Admissions Officer replied directly to Tom Peters with evidence that "creativity" is now part and parcel of a modern business school education:

"Interesting post. We developed a new courses on creativity taught by Jerry Wind, editor of Wharton School Publishing. Once a week, Wind brings creative professionals from industries as broad as art, theater, video gaming, design, and architecture. The idea is to help student develop difficult links and analogies (that would confuse most people). How do you develop commonalities between acting and business or Excel spreadsheets and Beethoven's 9th Symphony? Such unlikely links would require students to be comfortable with expression and ambiguity. The question of course is whether creativity can be learned. We believe it can at least be ignited. We all have some element of creativity within us."

Tags: TomPeters bschool innovation

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The world's first magazine on a bottle

The message in a bottle is so cliche. How about a message on a bottle? Thanks to the innovative thinking of a former college student-turned-entrepreneur in Australia, it's now possible to publish full-color magazines on a bottle of water or just about any other grocery product. Trendwatching site Springwise provides the details:

"Developed in Melbourne by Modern Media Concepts, iLove is a 32-page, full-colour magazine contained within a glossy label on a 600ml bottle of spring water. It's the world's first magazine on a bottle, and is published in four separate editions fortnightly.

iLove's female target audience should love its purse-sized format, which makes it great for reading on the tube or while having lunch, and advertisers will be enamoured by its reach – a weekly circulation reaching 150,000 this month (March 2006) and growing, which will soon make it Australia's largest women's magazine. A magazine for children and one for men (on bottles of iced coffee) will follow later this year.

An important benefit of publishing on a grocery product is the opportunity to bypass traditional distribution systems for periodical publishing, which are infamous for their slow sales data reports, in contrast to distribution via supermarkets, where every sale can be tracked daily."

Anyway, it's worth checking out Springwise, which used to be a monthly online newsletter on cool new business ideas. Recently, though, Springwise converted itself into a daily blog, making it easier and more convenient to catch up with emerging trends in the consumer space.

Tags: Springwise trends productinnovation innovation

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March 14, 2006

China is turning into an R&D powerhouse

Well, it looks like the "China is to India as Wal-Mart is to Target" argument is under pressure from the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday, the print version of the paper published a front page article ("Low Costs, Plentiful Talent Make China a Global Magnet for R&D") that strongly suggested that China is passing India in the innovation/creativity sphere. In fact, it looks like China is rapidly turning itself into a global R&D hub that will soon rival anything found in North America or Western Europe.

According to a recent report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the three most frequently cited destinations for R&D expansion are China (#1), the U.S. (#2), and India (#3). What's more, important FORTUNE 500 companies ranging from P&G to IBM to Motorola are expanding their Chinese R&D operations at a rapid clip at the same time that the Chinese government is re-doubling its efforts to encourage home-grown R&D. The Chinese central government has pledged to increase spending on science and technology by nearly 20% this year and is working on a number of tax breaks to encourage private sector R&D.

Currently, China spends about 1.5% of its GDP on R&D, compared to 2.7% for the U.S. However, the near-term goal for the Chinese is to boost that percentage to 2% of GDP by 2010 and 2.5% by 2020. I couldn't find a hyperlink for the story on the WSJ site, but if there's a copy of the newspaper sitting around the office, it's worth a quick read. It looks the Chinese are moving aggressively into areas like nanotech, biotech and genetically modified crops - in addition to more traditional areas (i.e. new grease-fighting laundry detergents, anyone?).

NOTE: If anyone can translate the text of this accompanying chart, I'd be most grateful. It looks like a chart mapping R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. I found it via Baidu.com, the "Chinese Google."

Tags: China India R&D innovation

[image: Baidu.com]

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Unfortunately, hyper-specialization doesn't lead to hyper-innovation

In a post called "Broaden Your Experience," Olivier Blanchard of the BrandBuilder blog makes the case that innovative companies should be looking to hire highly-skilled generalists, not specialists. In fact, as Francois Gossieaux pointed out recently, hyper-specialization actually stands in the way of breakthrough innovation. Olivier takes the argument one step further, explaining that companies on the cutting-edge of innovation - all other things being equal - prefer to hire specialists with a broad range of experiences:

...It pays to broaden your horizons. Take IDEO's hiring practices, for example: IDEO is careful to hire mostly people with one very deep skill and a dozen or more broader skills. Why? Because the powers that be understand that having the ability to think outside of your contextual silo is crucial to fostering functional innovation.

So... an accountant with twenty years experience is a lot more likely to help her company develop successful financial programs if she's also a writer, an athlete, a mom, a gardener, a photographer, a world traveler, and somewhat of an expert when it comes to architecture and design than just... a really knowledgeable accountant.

Perhaps more interestingly, she may be one of the instigators of her company's next marketing campaign or web-based initiative. Bear in mind that I am not talking about an accountant with one serious hobby (like building model airplanes out of toothpicks or growing Alain Blanchard roses). I am talking about folks blessed with a pretty high degree of intellectual curiosity. These people draw inspiration from a variety of sources and apply some of their observations and insights cross-contextually on a regular basis."

So what recourse do you have if you happen to be a knowledge worker burdened with too much knowledge and specialization in one area? There are small things you can do each day, writes Olivier, to make yourself more innovative:

"My advice to you if you're in a rut (or if you're looking for your next big idea) is to just relax and go outside. Take a road trip. Take the afternoon off and go ride a bike. Go into a computer store and find out everything there is to know about inkjet printers. Go pick up a graphic design magazine and hang out at a tea bar. Take a stroll through an antique shop or your town's hippest interior decorator's gallery. Read a book about something you've never read about before. Go have a drink with a friend or a colleague or a competitor."

Tags: hyperspecialization innovation

[image: Francois Gossieaux]

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"American Inventor": Just like "American Idol," but for smart people

This could be interesting - or might just be so cheesy that you'll never want to invent anything in your whole life. The premiere of American Inventor takes place on Thursday, March 16 at 8pm ET. It's from Simon Cowell and the same folks who brought you "American Idol." The host of the show, Matt Gallant, is the host of the blooper-filled show "The Planet's Funniest Animals" as well as the former host of a show called "Pranks" (which sounds very Ashton Kutcher-ish) so you have an idea of what to expect. With Simon Cowell involved, look for at least one of the judges to be snarky and British. Here's a quick blurb from the American Inventor Website:

"American Inventor, the embodiment of the ultimate American dream, will uncover the hottest new product and make one struggling inventor's dream come true. With one million dollars at stake, American Inventor will celebrate the best in homespun American ingenuity... Thousands of inventors, tinkerers and entrepreneurs of all ages applied. Viewers will see inventors all of all ages present their most prized inventions, featuring everything from the wacky to the heart warming.

American Inventor is the biggest search for the next great invention with wide consumer appeal� Envision the Cabbage Patch Kids�, George Foreman Grill�, Post-It� or Rubik's Cube�. A panel of expert judges will narrow down the initial entries to a group of finalists, who will each be given $50,000 to develop their product, refine it and take it to the next level. This is a show that's going to make the American dream come true for one person -- taking his/her idea, vision and creativity and helping to turn it into a mass produced product that will be in every American home -- but in the end it will be up to America to call in and vote on which invention is worthy of the one million dollar prize."

Over at Think Smart, there's a profile of one of the judges - Doug Hall - who also happens to be an inventor, best-selling author and radio host. Joyce Wycoff of the Think Smart blog will be among the millions of Americans who tune in to watch the show on Thursday:

"Many of us have had the opportunity to meet Doug when he shared his thoughts with us at Convergence or at his remarkable Eureka Ranch! where he helps clients develop new products and services. It will be great fun to watch "one of our own" light up a new reality series ... plus we might even learn more about the invention process which is a close cousin to innovation."

If this show does well in the all-important Thursday night time slot, look for the sequel on ABC: "Dancing with the Inventors."

Tags: AmericanInventor ABC SimonCowell inventor invention

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March 13, 2006

Is the U.S. suffering from Propeller Head Syndrome?

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Steve Burrell warns that traditional thinking about innovation may lead nations down the wrong path when it comes to serious thinking about a national innovation initiative. After summarizing the findings of a new Business Council of Australia report, Burrell points out that innovation should be about more than just spending additional money on R&D and thinking up new tax credits to encourage companies to hire scientists in white lab coats. In a worst case scenario, this type of narrow thinking about innovation inevitably leads to Propeller Head Syndrome:

"The word "innovation" conjures up images of people in white lab coats and dreams of Australia as a sort of high-tech antipodean Finland, with Nokia factories springing up across the land. And the policies put forward to nurture it have also tended to be seen as an extension of science and technology policy.

But as a new Business Council of Australia study points out, misconceptions and narrow thinking about what innovation actually is have led to confusion about what the policies needed to encourage it really involve. It suggests that creating an Innovation Nation is more about getting right the basics of education, infrastructure, tax, workplace relations, competition policy and business regulation than just thinking up new research and development (R&D) tax breaks. Innovation is not just about computers and people in lab coats. Sure, advanced technology and invention are important aspects of it, and should be encouraged, but it goes far beyond this."

In other words, stop thinking solely in terms of technological innovation. Instead, start thinking about business model innovation and business process innovation:

"[Innovation] can involve the use of any sort of knowledge within businesses to add value, create wealth and serve the consumer better. It does not even need to be new knowledge. It can involve applying or recombining existing knowledge or technology in new ways, to improve production processes, make distribution more efficient or recast products or services to take advantage of market openings. It can mean better management or work practices or the creative use of information technology or other capital equipment. (The transformation in the design, production, distribution and selling of goods and services in the last decade brought about by the spread of the internet is good example of this "non-invention" innovation.)"

Taking this argument one step further, I wonder how much of the current "innovation policy" debate in the U.S. is really part of the Propeller Head Syndrome that Steve Burrell mentions? In the U.S., the answer to the innovation question thus far has been to focus on R&D spending, R&D tax credits, and lots o' new spending for math, science, engineering and computers. But, at a certain point, is it possible to equate additional R&D spending with true innovation? Do we as a nation need to be doing something different?

Tags: Australia innovation innovationpolicy

[image: Hasketh Design]

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Google's men are from Mars, Google's women are from... Venus?

According to the Googlist blog, Google has gone live with Google Mars, a Google Maps-like exploration of the surface of the red planet. No word yet on whether Google actually plans to monetize the product (AdWords for Martians?)... After that, it's on to Google Galaxy! Googlist reports:

"Google is one step closer to announcing a Google Galaxy (Universe/Solar System) product. Today Google introduced Google Mars, its Maps-like exploration of the surface of Mars. (This is likely an extension of Keyhole's Mars exploration that was quietly forgotten once Google acquired the company.) But forget Earth or Mars, Google is going to the outer limits! Between July 19 and 21, 2005, Google, Inc. registered the .com/net/org/info domains for Google's name plus all of the planets and words like galaxy, universe, and solar system."

Innovation is all about thinking big and, well, this is thinking big!

Tags: Google innovation

[image: Google Mars]

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The intersection between creativity and business

Luke Wroblewski of the Functioning Form blog has been following some of the interesting discussions that are taking place at the SXSW 2006 event in Austin. For example, there was James Surowiecki discussing the Wisdom of Crowds and opening remarks by Jim Coudal and Jason Fried on the intersection between creative individuals and business:

"Jim had a few interesting observations about the position of creative talent relative to the business and operations of a company. Traditionally, organizations relied on outside creative agencies to provide “out of the box” thinking and develop new communication and product solutions. The idea was that talent outside the company would be less biased by the internal processes and structure within a company.

The adoption of sales, marketing, and distribution functions by creative groups making products twists this relationship on its head. Now the design shop is the business and potentially marred by the same business and technology constraints that it’s clients were trying to escape when they engaged the design shop’s services.

There are a few attributes of creative professionals, however, that prepare them for this transition. Most notable is the ability to be curious and learn quickly. When designers engage with clients they have to quickly learn about their client’s business, their process, and their customers. They need to become experts very quickly. This craft and enjoyment of learning (shared by curious people) is a key advantage when it comes time to start your own business because “design entrepreneurs” have to quickly learn sales, operations, distribution, and more. If you don’t like to learn and learn fast, the transition from creative talent to a business can be hard."

At the end of the post by Luke, there's a list of steps provided by Jason Fried (of 37Signals fame) to help companies think about the innovation process, including some that appear at first to be counter-intuitive: "Underdo your competition" and "embrace constraints." It looks like SXSW is providing extensive podcast coverage of most of the major panels at the event, so be sure to check out the site over the next few days for more updates.

Tags: design innovation creativity strategy

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IBM: innovation makes you special

Last week, IBM unveiled what appears to be a major new marketing campaign for innovation in the Wall Street Journal: a multi-page, full-color spread showing how "innovation can make you special." According to IBM, "the world wants to be flat. You want to be special. Welcome to the next era of business. The innovation era - where staying special is paramount to growth." On its new innovation Web site, IBM provides a list of six potential doorways to innovation within a company:

(1) Consider your business model
(2) Examine your processes
(3) Challenge your management culture
(4) Make your products special
(5) Make your services special
(6) Respond to changing conditions

IBM, of course, is positioning itself as the key ingredient in making a company "special." Anyway, there are a lot of different links on the IBM Innovation site worth checking out - like the "Innovation Revolution Will be Podcasted" link. There's also a story of how studying llamas in the U.K. led to a new form of auto insurance.

Tags: IBM innovation special

[image: IBM]

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