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June 30, 2006

June 30 innovation linkage

Watch and listen to the world's most innovative individuals [TED Talks]
How to keep your innovation system alive and well [George Ambler]
How to reply to "Been There, Done That" [Don the Idea Guy]
Mind the Gap [Innovate on Purpose]
Virtual reality in a real lab [CNET News]
An MP3-playing smart mob takes over Central Park [Improv Everywhere]
Brazilian innovation: a waterless car wash [NextBillion.net]
Eight ways to kill someone with an iPod Nano [McSweeney's]
After 35 years, a high-tech basketball [NBA.com]

[image: If Adidas had designed the Sistine Chapel]

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High-stakes creativity at Lockheed Martin

In the June 2006 issue of Industrial Engineer, Rod Pipinich gives an inside account of how the engineering team at Lockheed Martin came up with a creative solution for the design of the new Joint Strike Fighter. Due to the team's ability to challenge convention and devise a superior short take-off and vertical landing design, Lockheed Martin eventually won a lucrative military contract for the production of an aircraft that was able to meet the respective needs of three separate branches of the armed forces. As Pipinich points out, the team at Lockheed Martin had "the satisfaction of knowing that their creativity has been recognized and acknowledged as contributing to Lockheed Martin's major win." Moreover, Lockheed Martin has now made creativity an important linchpin of the design and manufacturing process.

Anyway, the article also includes an interesting sidebar featuring Richard Florida (author of The Flight of the Creative Class) as well as an details of how Lockheed Martin has updated traditional Six Sigma and lean manufacturing principles to incorporate new thinking about creativity and innovation.

Tags: innovation creativity Lockheed Martin

[image: Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter]

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Google and the new hub of Arabic innovation

Search engine giant Google recently opened a sales & marketing office in Cairo (not Dubai, as originally rumored), making it the company's hub for Arabic innovation in the Middle East. The company also recently launched a new version of Google News in Arabic, which enables Arabic-speaking Internet users to view the latest news headlines and related photos, as well as search and browse 500 Arabic news sources in the Middle East. Somehow, it's fitting that Google has picked Cairo as the new hub for its Arabic search engine activities - the city, after all, was the leading intellectual and artistic center in the Middle East and the world for more than 250 years. Dubai may be flashier and wealthier, but Cairo has the innovation street cred.

For those taking a big picture view of things, it's also interesting to point out that Google may have accidentally stumbled upon the solution to world peace: the company already has an R&D operation in Israel, and now it has a beachhead in the Arabic world. It would be interesting to sit in on one of those Monday morning conference calls at Google's Cairo office. It's already tough enough to get the R&D folks to speak the same language as the sales & marketing folks, but this would seem to add an entirely new level of complexity.

Tags: innovation Google Arabic

[image: Cairo]

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Clayton Christensen on innovation

In a Q&A with eWeek, Clayton Christensen discusses disruptive innovation and offers insights into how industry leaders such as Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart and Toyota have successfully used innovation as a way to disrupt traditional business models. As Christensen points out with an example from the global automotive industry, troubled giants such as GM should be thinking about ways they can use disruptive innovation to regain their mojo. GM may have been disrupted by Toyota, but the Japanese carmakers were later disrupted by the Korean carmakers, which are now being disrupted by the Chinese carmakers. It's now time for GM to "disrupt the disrupters from China," explains Christensen:

"That's my prayer. I think my work has influenced them to do what they are doing to set up their operation to sell $3,000 cars. But they've got to be purposeful about that. They can't say, 'We don't play at that end of the market,' and come out with $15,000 cars. The OnStar business is a great business, however...

OnStar has negative net assets. It's really an IT company. Your car can send you an e-mail every week. OnStar collects 1,500 points of data from every one of GM's cars. They'll tell you that you don't need to change your oil yet and, at the rate you're driving, you probably ought to do it on July 1. And your brake pads are 80 percent worn, so you need to get into a dealer within six weeks, and your left rear tire needs 15 pounds of pressure, which is costing you a quarter of a mile per gallon. It's a good business for GM."

Tags: innovation Clayton Christensen disruptive

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From Sweden, a newsletter on innovation and design

David Carlson, the well-known Swedish design entrepreneur, has launched a new bimonthly newsletter on design trends and the "intersection of culture, business life and global society." The latest issue of the David Report (available here as an 8-page PDF) includes an interview with Viggo Cavling, the editor of a leading Swedish design magazine, as well as insights from a correspondent in Tokyo. There's also a compelling feature called "The Credibility Loop," which basically argues that companies should shift some of their advertising spend into design-focused R&D activities. Instead of building a brand through advertising, companies should be focused on building a brand through design.

Tags: DavidCarlson Sweden design

[image: ScandinavianDesign.com]

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June 29, 2006

Bad design at the World Cup

Germany is known for its world-class engineering and design capabilities, but according to a number of design experts, the various logos and mascots associated with the World Cup in Germany are just plain embarrassing. For example, can anyone really figure out "Mr. No Pants", the lion-like football mascot? Presentation Zen highlights the viewpoints of German design expert Erik Spiekermann, who was recently interviewed about what went wrong at the World Cup:

"Given Germany's history and love of great design, including graphic design, you would think the design for the 2006 World Cup would be remarkable. But is it? At least one German design expert, Erik Spiekermann, thinks otherwise. Spiekermann is one of Germany's most famous designers and typographers and is the founder of MetaDesign, a firm whose clients include such notable brands as Apple, Audi, VW, and Nike. In an interview with Deutche World, Spiekerman says that the whole design concept for the 06 World Cup — including the Mascot and the logo — look to be the result of too many cooks in the design kitchen, a mediocrity resulting from "design by committee."

Take, for example, the official World Cup logo. According to Spiekerman, the logo is a mess of conflicting ideas: "Too many messages...You can look at this and count the elements and it just flies in the face of effective communication..." Goleo, the German football mascot who wanders around without a pair of trousers (see above) is also, well, a bit disturbing:

"Commenting on Goleo, the official lion-like mascot of the World Cup in Germany (who curiously wears a shirt but enjoys parading around sans trousers) Spiekerman says, "This artificial lion is neither cute nor ugly nor relevant; it's just embarrassing." Now, I'm all for presenting naked, and for the naked truth and all that. But in public presentations, wearing pants is still highly recommended. Goleo appears to be a flop; no body loves him and the company which licensed the European rights to the pantsless mascot filed for insolvency."

That being said, we're still looking forward to the quarterfinal match between Germany and Argentina as a great kick-off to the July 4th weekend. Bad design doesn't have to mean bad football.

Tags: WorldCup design

[images: Presentation Zen]

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Ten years later, the Innovator's Dilemma is still perplexing

Is it just me, or does it seem like Clayton Christensen's 1997 business bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma is more relevant than ever? It's been almost ten years since it was originally published in hardcover, yet I keep seeing the book pop up in stories about innovation. For example, at the Venture Forum in San Jose earlier this week, a high-ranking executive from Intel explained the importance of innovation by quoting directly from The Innovator's Dilemma:

"Innovation is not necessarily about new inventions, but is more about finding beneficial applications, an Intel executive told the audience at The Venture Forum conference on Wednesday. Citing examples ranging from Netflix's by-mail DVD rental service to Toyota's Prius hybrid automobile, Renee James, corporate vice president and general manager of the Software & Solutions Group at Intel, stressed the importance of finding ideas to leverage inventions. "First of all, innovation enables a larger population of people to take advantage of something more simply and more conveniently than they have in the past," James said, quoting from The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen.

The disrupting of markets, reshaping of business models, and facilitating of existing patterns of consumer behavior are also key factors in recognizing innovation, she said. Netflix, for example, found a new way to rent DVDs to the marketplace, James noted. "It's really quite amazing because they did not invent anything," she said. Toyota has had the Prius on the market since 1997, but the combination of new technology with a brand promise of environmental correctness has made the car successful, James said. "Their innovation was taking this idea and making it cost-effective," she said."

Anyway, for more insights into how companies are applying concepts from The Innovator's Dilemma to current problems in innovation, check out the free webinar that Clayton Christensen's innovation consulting firm conducted about two weeks ago.

As an aside: are there any other oldie-but-goodie business bestsellers that are enjoying a resurgence in popularity for their insights about innovation?

Tags: innovation innovatorsdilemma ClaytonChristensen

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Does Bill Gates think you're innovative?

Call it the World Cup of innovation. On the Microsoft campus in Redmond, seven teams from around the world - including teams from Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea, Japan, Britain and the U.S. - showed off their prototypes for innovative new products to Bill Gates. While Gates is not an official judge of Microsoft's $25,000 Imagine Cup competition, it never hurts to impress the world's richest man with your revolutionary designs and concepts. Anyway, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer does a great job of covering the event:

"Naturally, under the circumstances, none of the projects used the Linux operating system or ran on an Apple Mac. But they all sought to apply Windows and other Microsoft technologies to an issue of major global significance -- improving health care. The seven projects, on display Wednesday at Microsoft's Redmond campus, are finalists in the software design segment of the company's annual Imagine Cup competition... Examples included technology that emits specific tones from the PC speakers as the cursor moves, helping a sight-impaired person navigate the screen. The prototype, from students at India's Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, also reads program names when the cursor passes over icons."

In case you're wondering, the U.S. team from Virginia Commonwealth University incorporated one of Gates' favorite technologies -- the Tablet PC -- into their project. The team's project, dubbed Pocketdoc, lets doctors put reminders, survey questions, instructions and other information on patients' mobile devices.

Tags: innovation Microsoft Bill Gates Imagine Cup

[image: Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

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The plug-and-play office

A company's physical work environment can sometimes make all the difference when it comes to creating a culture of creativity and innovation. Over at We Make Money Not Art, there's an inside look at the new office digs of Copenhagen's Innovation Lab. The "world's first plug-and-play office" is courtesy of design company Bosch & Fjord (a collaboration between the visual artists Rosan Bosch and Rune Fjord Jensen). The overall layout and design is meant to encourage innovation and creativity, while being responsive to the unique personality and identity of each 'agent':

"It enables an organization to refurnish, move to another site or grow and shrink without difficulty. Premised on the condition of moving, the system considers possibilities for rearranging rooms and combining elements and is intended for an innovative organizational structure in constant change. It consists of big shipping crates that work as modules with different things on the inside, e.g. a workstation, part of a conference room or a kitchen. The crates are designed to fit into any standard building. When the crates are brought into the building from the truck, they are placed in a room and opened. Each function has its own crate with its own explicit identity and design.

The crates include three different kinds of workstations, enabling individual Lab Agents to choose their own place according to character, need or mood. There is a small, intimate meeting room with a green lounge sofa and a video-conference room built as a light green ‘blue-screen film studio’, enabling choices between backgrounds for video conferences. There is also a pink kitchen box, as well as a big biomorphic worktable with a palm tree in the centre. The crates can be combined into rooms with closed doors or left open."

Tags: innovationlab innovation design

[image: Bosch & Fjord]

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June 28, 2006

Winners of the Apple Imagination contest

After the completion of a rigorous judging process that emphasized three different factors - originality, creative presentation and "desirability" - Apple-Discounts.com has announced the winner of the Apple Imagination contest: the iVault. This (fictional) product sports a compelling tagline ("All your music, photos, TV and movies. Anywhere. Wirelessly") and functions much like an all-purpose digital entertainment center. Users can stream movies & music wirelessly with Airport Ultra, record their favorite TV shows with MacTV and store over 500 full-length movies or 100,000 songs.

Anyway, some of the honorable mentions posted on the site also are worth checking out - like the iPhone, the iPod PDA, and the iWatch high-definition TV. For additional details on the contest, check out this earlier blog entry: The Apple Imagination Contest.

Tags: innovation Apple

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June 28 innovation linkage

Visionary awards for innovation pioneers [Irving Wladawsky-Berger]
Some viewpoints on Indian innovation [Gautam Ghosh]
Honey, I Shrank the Laptop! [Digital Journal]
Edward Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" book now available [Infosthetics]
Grassroots innovation and new products [Niti Bhan]
How to read a business book [Innovation Weblog]
Intel discovers innovation in China [Wall Street Journal]
The latest trends in electronic toys and games [Putting People First]

[video: GM's car of the future]

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Innovation inside

Treehugger offers a fascinating peek at the way that some companies are getting customers to recognize the innovative processes or materials utilized within an otherwise commoditized product or service. Once customers understand how these processes are aligned with their values or beliefs, they are more willing to use that product or service. The whole notion, of course, can be traced back to Intel, which launched its phenomenally successful "Intel Inside" marketing campaign to get consumers thinking about what's inside a PC. Before Intel came up with this concept, people had a hard time visualizing what's actually inside a PC and why it matters.

In a similar way, companies are highlighting the "innovation inside" their products and demonstrating why consumers should care. Many times, the "innovation inside" has a strong emotional appeal. For example, check out how Tricycle has driven innovation within the carpet sampling and carpet manufacturing businesses by focusing on environmental sustainability:

"Tricycle offers simulated carpet sampling to the interior design market using paper instead of carpet, which significantly reduces the cost, resource usage and waste of carpet sampling. They use a digital tufting software that simulates the actual placement of yarn in a tufting machine to create realistic, fully textured paper prototypes which use 5% of the energy and water as real samples and can be immediately recycled. They also have product simulation technology (SIM), which does such a good job at digitally replicating carpet and will make sampling obsolete altogether.

What was interesting to hear, listening to Tricycle President and CEO Jonathan Bragdon talk at the Cleantech Companies in Mainstream Markets CEO panel discussion, is that Tricycle, through dematerializing a commodity industry, is emerging as a powerful brand. A bit like “Intel Inside”, carpet manufacturers are now stipulating that the Tricycle marque is ‘inside’ (or on) their manufactured carpets as a way of encouraging designers to use the Tricycle process to sample their products and to disassociate themselves with environmental waste and landfill. Or, more to the point, as Tricycle become synonymous with revolutionising the carpet sampling process and demonstrating its values through what is does, manufacturers want a piece of the action. They want to be associated with this very modern and worldchanging brand."

Skeptics might sit back and say something like, "But isn't that the same thing as buying fruits and vegetables because they have an ORGANIC sticker on them? What's so innovative about that?" I think it goes a bit deeper than that. As far as I know, the process of picking regular apples is no different than the process of picking organic apples. Thus, the innovation is much more about the process than the actual materials utilized. (For example, specifying that "no immigrant laborers were used" during the process might be one way of focusing on the process, rather than the underlying materials) Moreover, the process has to be something that is unclear or hidden from the human eye. Anyone can visualize the process of picking an apple, but what about the process of manufacturing a carpet? Whoever thought that the process of selecting a carpet might have enormous consequences for your value system? That's where the innovation comes in.

Tags: innovation Tricycle

[image: Treehugger]

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Innovation can be taught

The conventional wisdom suggests that innovation is the province of the super-creative, who magically come up with new ideas as they walk along the street. In a brief interview with India's Business Standard, Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, offers an alternative explanation. As Tina explains, subjects like entrepreneurship and innovation can be taught in a classroom:

"Innovation is like any other subject. Just as science, music, art and other subjects can be taught, so can innovation be. While teaching we also pay attention to imparting a set of soft skills and tools which increases the probability of success. The entrepreneurial spirit exists in everyone and with the right education, opportunities will increase a hundredfold."

This notion - that innovation can be de-constructed into a number of component parts and then taught as part of a broader curriculum - obviously has major implications, especially for emerging nations such as India. In fact, during the interview, Tina hints that India needs to de-emphasize its focus on technical knowledge and, instead, focus on teaching the types of skills and approaches required to be innovative and creative.

Tags: innovation India Stanford

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Kraft and the innovative CEO

The news that Kraft hired a new CEO yesterday had a lot of tongues wagging about the role of innovation at the company. In fact, the Wall Street Journal led off with an attention-grabbing headline: "Kraft, hungry for innovation, taps new CEO." The basic premise is that the incoming CEO, Irene Rosenfeld, is someone who will be able to spot new trends and come up with hot-selling new products: "Analysts say her task will be to launch innovative products that appeal to consumers who have tired of the mass-market offerings Kraft has relied on for decades, such as American cheese Singles, Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Oreo cookies." As part of this innovation push, Kraft has also launched an open innovation strategy, in which the company is actively soliciting ideas from consumers about how to package and sell new products.

Tags: IreneRosenfeld Kraft CEO

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June 27, 2006

Innovative ways to save planet Earth

You can thank Al Gore and his new film (An Inconvenient Truth) for this one. Escalating concerns about global warming and worries about the pace of energy consumption have led to a renewed focus on innovation within the emerging field of geoengineering - "rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability." Some of the ideas are creative, to say the least. As the New York Times points out, these ideas have included installing giant sunshades in orbit around the planet, tinkering with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space, and tricking oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases. These were once "fringe" ideas - but now they're increasingly mainstream:

Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.

But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming. Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.

My favorite idea involves the giant sunglasses. It's an intuitive idea that you can explain to someone eight years old - or eighty years old. Plus, think of the branding opportunities for companies like Ray-Ban or any other maker of sunglasses. Every day, billions of people on the planet would look up to the sky and see a huge pair of sunglasses. Maybe these companies would even find a way to place giant logos on clouds.

Tags: global warming innovation

[images: New York Times]

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A framework for understanding innovation

Harm Joosse of the Mastering Knowledge Management blog has published a four-stage framework for understanding innovation:

"In the past weeks I have combined my four-stage model of Knowledge Identification, Knowledge Interpretation, Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Application with a model from Rodney McAdam (a professor in Innovation Management), which described how technology and market knowledge can be incorporated effectively with the goal of innovating. The process of outside - inside learning is pictured in four stages... The arrows on the left hand side of the image indicate that the four stages are not part of a linear, but an iterative process. It is possible to jump back and forth in the stages. The (open)arrows in the model are indicators of innovation opportunities."

Anyway, it looks like Harm Joosse is an up-and-coming innovator in Europe. He is currently a graduate student at the RSM Erasmus University in the Netherlands, studying Business Administration. He has also worked on projects at a number of global corporations, including PriceWaterhouseCoopers, ABN Amro and Hewlett-Packard.

Tags: innovation knowledge management

[graphic: Harm Joosse]

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The idea surfers

Why do some management fads - like TQM, business process re-engineering and the "learning organization" - seem to fade away only a few years after taking the business world by storm? In Monday's "Theory & Practice" column for the Wall Street Journal, Phred Dvorak explained that many management fads (including, let's be honest, innovation) are driven by over-eager consultants who attempt to ride the wave as early as possible in order to rake in their consulting fees. Since many of these consultants are only marginally qualified, the final results are easy to predict -- within a few years, companies are disgruntled with the results of bringing in all this high-priced talent and move on to the next big idea. At least, that's the dismal picture painted by a new study appearing in a recent edition of the Academy of Management Journal, which details the phenomenon of the "idea surfer." Phred Dvorak explains:

"A recent academic study suggests management consultants may be partly to blame. That is because of what the study calls "fashion surfers" - consultants who rush to offer services when an idea is hot, even though they don't have expertise in the area. Those "marginally competent" surfers tend to be most numerous while a management craze is booming - when demand is highest and managers need the most help, says McGill University management studies professor Robert David, a co-author of the study. The authors suggest that the surge of less-qualified consultants contributes to ensuing frustration as businesses struggle to implement the idea. Eventually, interest falls off and the boom ends."

Ouch. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to the innovation trend. In all fairness, it's not just aggressive consultants who are to blame. Desperate executives, eager to latch on to anything that'll work, are also part of the problem. So, too, are the management gurus, who adopt key themes and ideas for their latest books and speaking gigs.

Interestingly, during the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, the average managment idea took more than a decade to peak in popularity. By the 1990s, though, that cycle time had shrunk to fewer than three years. Now, presumably, the cycle time for any management fad is less than two years. Anyway, the study by Robert David (McGill) and David Strang (Cornell) was based, in large part, on their research about TQM consultants. At any given time during the TQM craze, only 12% of the consultants offering TQM services had any kind of significant quality control expertise. Yet, the other 88% were "more than willing to peddle their various insights about quality-conscious manufacturing." Without naming names, let's just say that two big-time consulting firms come under withering criticism for their willingness to "surf" from one management fad to the next.

If there's a message here, I guess it's this: If you're trying to catch a gnarly idea wave, dude, don't go too aggro. Super rad ideas are righteous, but only a few companies are ever going to be able to hang ten.

Tags: management innovation idea fad

[image: Surfer from Yano's photostream]

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The Innovation Circus is coming to town

Swedish innovation firm Idelaboratoriet is in the process of creating a European "innovation awareness project" called Innovation Circus. This touring innovation event will make stops in Scandinavia, the Baltics, the central region of Europe (i.e. Germany), and the southern region of Europe (i.e. Italy). The goal of the Innovation Circus is to serve as a dynamic focal point for European Innovation Day. As it travels throughout Europe, the circus will motivate, drive and coordinate events "to make everyone think innovation."

According to Idelaboratoriet, the Innovation Circus will have three different operational levels:

(1) A full-day conference held on European Innovation Day, intended as a way to foster discussion about the drivers of the “innovative human”;

(2) A mobile exhibition and event platform that will “land” in a region or city a month or so before the kick-off of European Innovation Day;

(3) Grass root events coordinated via the Web, where schools, companies and institutions present innovation-related activities.

Anyway, the Innovation Circus is part of a master plan by the European Union to create "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth" by 2010. As a result, the EU is sponsoring projects like the Innovation Circus that celebrate the "innovative human," the "creative mastermind," and the "Renaissance human being." I'm still having a bit of trouble visualizing all the specifics, but it seems like the U.S. doesn't have anything even close to this...

Tags: innovation innovation circus

[image: "Cirque Du Soleil," BBC]

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Shiny Happy People

Ugh!!'s GreyMatter HoneyPot points to a post called Why Being Happy at Work Matters for Business, which explains why happy people at work will give a business many competitive advantages. (The blog entry is also a chapter of the forthcoming Happy at Work book from Alexander Kjerulf.) According to Kjerulf, a happy employee is not only more productive and harder working - a happy employee is also more innovative and creative. Part of the reason for this, says Kjerulf, is that happy people are much more adaptive and open to change.

Not everybody agrees with this line of thought, though. Check out this "Creativity Graph" from LightsOutFilms - it shows that creativity varies inversely with happiness. If I'm interpreting this correctly, it's the classic argument that resource-starved companies ultimately are more efficient at cranking out innovative new ideas than their "happy" competitors.

What do you think? Are happy or unhappy employees more creative?

Tags: happiness creativity happy

[image: R.E.M.'s Shiny Happy People]

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June 26, 2006

June 26 innovation linkage, A.M. edition

Warren Buffett gives away his fortune [FORTUNE]
A random walk down the long tails of innovation [Prompt Criticality]
A 13-minute IQ test [Simple-IQ.com]
Net neutrality would stifle innovation [Arizona Republic]
The Top 10 inventions of the U.S. Army [Defense Industry Daily]
Is centralized IT killing tech innovation? [Information Week]
The latest in insurgent technology [Telegraph.co.uk]
Google's not-so-secret plan to crush eBay [ZDNet]
Top 10 strangest Japanese gadgets and accessories [TechEBlog]
Lopsided brains can help with multi-tasking [ScienceNOW]

[images: Warren Buffett gives it away]

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How do ideas travel throughout an organization?

At Wharton, a number of business school researchers are exploring ways of applying social networking theory to everyday business problems, such as how employees and board members interact and how relationships can be better understood to improve productivity and the propagation of ideas. For example, every organization has its share of "cosmopolitans" - people who are critical to information flow within the company. Organizations that are able to understand this flow of innovation can improve communication between employees and, hopefully, harness innovation and creativity. As Wharton's Lori Rosenkopf explains, social networking theory can be a powerful tool for understanding how ideas travel throughout an organization:

"Companies have known about social networks casually for a while, but it's been hard to collect data," Rosenkopf says. "Traditionally, you'd find a graduate student in sociology who would write up a questionnaire asking people how frequently they talked with so and so. That costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time, and people may or may not give good responses. But now the ability to see what sites your employees access on the Internet and who they send e-mails to is becoming important."

Mapping social networks can be useful in many ways, but Rosenkopf says there are at least two reasons why corporate interest in the subject is growing: Companies want to be able to identify key performers and get a better understanding of the nature of the interaction among employees.

"Hopefully, you have organized your company the best way to get the job done," she says. "But mapping out a network will give you a sense of whether actual work flow and communication flow match what you hope to achieve. Maybe there are bottlenecks where one person is managing all interactions. If you expect two groups to work together closely, and you don't see them doing this, you might want to create liaison roles or other relationships to make information flow better. On the other hand, you may see groups talking to each other too much. When managers see network diagrams, they often realize they need to reconfigure their organizational chart."

Tags: social networking ideas innovation Wharton

[image: Lori Rosenkopf]

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Meet the next Malcolm Gladwell

In a glowing review of What Sticks: Why Some Ideas Work, Stanford professor Bob Sutton (author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense) informally nominates Chip Heath, who co-authored the book with his brother, as "the next Malcolm Gladwell." The book will not be published until January 2007, but after reading this ecstatic review on Bob Sutton's blog, it looks like it's definitely worth pre-ordering on Amazon.com:

"I just read the pre-publication version of this book for the second time, and just like the first time, my reaction was “This is one of the most important business books ever written.” What Sticks is written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, who are brothers, and will be published by Random House early next year. Chip is a professor at the Stanford Business School, a social psychologist by training, and a broad intellectual who is interested in everything and really cares about using his work to make life better. He is also the most engaging speakers I’ve seen, mesmerizing in a no-nonsense sort of way. IDEO’s Tom Kelley is the only person I’ve seen in recent years who is similarly engaging and inspiring...

What Sticks is just as useful and just as evidence-based as great books including Robert Cialdini’s Influence, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. I love how the Heath brothers dissect false stories and myths, (like “you only use 10% of your brain”) to show what kinds ideas spread and persist, and what kinds don’t. The book focuses squarely on using this research to help you design your own messages that will stick and affect what people actually do.

And it isn’t just that the Heath brothers tell such great stories, they show how you – as a manager, a marketer, an organizational change agent, or a politician – can craft new messages, and evaluate and alter your current messages to have the greatest impact. What Sticks is an example of evidence-based management at its finest, as it draws on the best knowledge that behavioral scientists have generated and then goes the difficult extra step of showing all of us how to apply it.

This book deserves to be on the best-seller list all next year and, as an added bonus, Chip Heath is my candidate for the next Malcolm Gladwell. Of course, the future is impossible to predict, but you really owe to yourself to buy the book and to hear Chip talk about it."

If you're interested in what Chip Heath has to say and can't wait until January 2007, check out this $95 DVD available from Kantola Productions: How to Make Your Ideas Stick: 7 Lessons from Urban Legends.

Tags: Malcolm Gladwell Chip Heath What Sticks

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The future of Korean innovation

The Institute for the Future blog points to a 7-day tour itinerary of a "digital Korea" for anyone wanting to get up-to-speed on South Korea's emerging broadband/digital culture. The tour kicks off with a full day at a sauna featuring the best in digital entertainment (to combat the jet lag, one presumes), and proceeds with excursions to places like the Ubiquitous Dream Exhibition Hall, a cyber lounge sponsored by the Korea National Tourism Organization, and the u-Zone at Incheon International Airport.

Of course, for those of you put off by the saber-rattling from North Korea but still intrigued by the innovation potential of South Korea, it might be easier just to visit the Samsung Experience store at the Time Warner Center in New York City. The threat of a subway mugging pales in comparison to the threat of a nuclear warhead landing next to your hotel.

[image: Ubiquitous Dream Exhibition Hall]

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