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September 22, 2006

Earth Day for the Web in New York City

OneWebDay, the first global holiday to celebrate the Web and how it has changed our lives, takes place today. The model and inspiration for the event is Earth Day, making this an "Earth Day for the Web." In New York City, a number of high-profile Internet pioneers - including Craig Newark and Scott Heiferman - are joining New York City Council Member Gale Brewer to celebrate OneWebDay:

"In New York, Craig Newmark of craigslist fame; Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup and Fotolog; Gale Brewer, NYC City Council member; and Drew Schutte, publisher, Wired magazine, will talk about how the Internet is changing people's lives every day. The event, sponsored by Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Union Square Ventures, DFJGotham and Cardozo Law School, will take place on Friday, Sept. 22, Noon to 2 p.m. ET, at The Battery, near Castle Clinton, in the park at the southern tip of Manhattan."

Similar types of events are being planned in Austin, Boston, London, Naples and Tokyo. Anyway, even if you're unable to attend one of these events in person, there are a number of ways to participate. For example, you can post a picture to Webshots.com and tag it with “onewebday”; send a "wacky" story about craigslist to volunteer@onewebday.org; or make a OneWebDay video that Dabble.com will make available for the world to see. For those of you shackled to your desk all day, there's still one other way you can be part of the event: "Encourage users to take one Web-related action that helps someone else."

[image: A bird's eye view of lower Manhattan]

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September 22 innovation linkage

Design thinking and management [Timothy Coote]
Introducing a new blog on idea management and innovation [Innovation Weblog]
Guidelines for successful crowdsourcing [IdeaFlow]
The charms of scale-model cities [Design Observer]
A fireside chat with John Maeda and Diego Rodriguez [37 Signals]
Bigger isn't always better when it comes to growth [Robert Tomasko]
Philips develops emotional clothing prototypes [Putting People First]
The Egokast video belt buckle [Gizmodo]
McDonald's gets all sexy about hamburgers in China [Wall Street Journal]
The Propella Copter [Married to the Sea]
A few thousand science fiction magazines [SF Cover Explorer]

[video: The Perfect ATM Crime]

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Presidential doodling and creativity

A new book on presidential doodles shows off the "random sketches and drawings" of the nation's presidents, including those of Herbert Hoover ("the nation's foremost executive doodler"), Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Anyway, it's interesting to see what insights these doodles offer about the personalities and characters of the various presidents:

"Personalities emerge at a glance: John Adams' hard, straight lines and precise geometrical patterns; Theodore Roosevelt's rugged sketch of two dogs staring across a campfire; Dwight Eisenhower's plain, practical illustrations; Ronald Reagan's childlike portraits, including of himself in a cowboy hat.

President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death give one doodle an unintended chill: A small circle with the numbers "9-11" contained within. Just to the lower left on the page, the word "conspiracy" is underlined...

Hoover's work is the subject of 16 pages, six more than the man who displaced him from office and, for the most part, from history: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Trained as an engineer, Hoover sketched out designs that read like building projects gone awry, or one's own imprisoned thoughts — circles within circles and diamonds inside diamonds, dark spirals reminiscent of spider webs or of wheels turning madly."

[image: Yahoo News]

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September 21, 2006

When selling mainframes is a laughing matter

IBM has been experimenting with YouTube.com recently, as evidenced by this amusing two-minute video on how to sell million-dollar mainframes to large corporate customers. In a piece called "Stop Them Before They Joke Again," Slate explains what the folks in Poughkeepsie have been up to:

"The white-collar temple IBM is usually not a source of pop-cultural memes. But this reputation may be receding, thanks to a trio of comedic videos topping the charts on YouTube. Shot in the mock-doc style of The Office, these parodies of internal training videos feature a group of sales executives as they pump themselves up with canned corporate wisdom and hawk million-dollar servers by cold-calling random names from the phone book. In other words, they make fun of IBM at its stodgy core. And while Steve Carell's job is probably safe, what is interesting about these shorts is that they were made by IBM using actual company executives, not paid actors or comedians."

Just remember, always be closing. Oh yeah, and there's one other thing: in life, there are two types of people -- farmers and ranchers.

[video: YouTube.com]

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Yahoo! builds a brick house for its talent

Max Goldman of the Performance & Talent Management blog points out that Yahoo! is following in the footsteps of Google by allowing its employees to spend more of their time on innovative new projects: "Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether different from the Google 20% – wherein Googlers get to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing – it is both a way to satisfy the innate desire to create as well as a method for harnessing that creativity."

As GigaOm suggests, Project Brickhouse is designed to give superstar employees a chance to fool around with new ideas on the side, while at the same time preventing them from jumping ship to start-up Web 2.0 companies. At Yahoo!, there's a realization that the Web 2.0 boom has changed the playing field for technology companies looking to recruit the best and the brightest:

"Big companies are no longer the safe havens they were during the tech bust. Self-styled “startup people” - especially those like Caterina Fake, who were brought in through acquisitions - long for the bureaucracy-free feeling of going up against the Man, not being the Man. With funding so easily available, Yahoo’s stock treading water, and most of their options vested, it’s tempting to jump ship... SideStep CEO Rob Solomon, who was employeee 2,100 or so at Yahoo, told me earlier this year there were perhaps 300 or 400 left of the employees who were at Yahoo when he started."

Maybe it's just me, but I think Yahoo! could have chosen a better name than Brickhouse. I suppose there are two ways of thinking about "brickhouse" - as a cute, one-story house that the big bad wolf can't blow down or as a battle-scarred building in a charred out urban area. If I'm walking the streets of New York, and I see a building with a bricked up window, yo, I stay away. Every company needs to hold on to its top talent, but building a brick wall around that talent - is that the best solution?

[images: Urban Brickhouse and Wolf Blowing at Brick House]

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Korean innovation is rock hard

This Korean innovation gives new meaning to the phrase "I slept like a rock last night." According to Furniture Today, a Korean bed manufacturer has entered the U.S. market with a rock-hard, heated bed that appeals to the consumer who likes a very firm mattress:

"JangSoo Industry Co. has begun selling stone beds to U.S. consumers. Koreans, it seems, already are sold on the benefits of stone beds, which have found a niche here in Korean communities. And we thought firm bedding was on its way out.

These stone beds are more sophisticated than you might think. The surface of the mattress is made of a smooth layer of stone, anything from quartz to topaz to jade. The heat comes from coils under the stone. This concept of heating a large stone is not new for Koreans, my research indicates. An article in The Korea Times informed me that "ondol" is a system of heating a stone underneath the floor, thereby giving Koreans a warm floor to sit on, something they like to do. That same technology, the article said, gave rise to the development of stone beds, filled with either carbon film or copper coils that are electrically heated. Those beds became "a hot seller" in the late 1990s,..

[image: Korean stonebed]

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Tech Museum of Innovation Awards

The Tech Museum of Innovation has named 25 innovators from around the world as winners of this year's Tech Museum Awards for their application of technology to benefit humanity in areas ranging from education to health to economic development. The winners were selected from a global applicant pool that consisted of 951 entries from 98 different countries:

"Established in 2001, The Tech Museum Awards, presented by Applied Materials, recognizes 25 Laureates in five categories -- Environment, Economic Development, Education, Health, and Equality. These 25 Laureates have developed, or are currently developing, innovative ways to use technology in solving global challenges. All 25 Laureates will be showcased at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, and will be featured on the Tech Museum Award's official website. One Laureate in each category will receive a $50,000 cash prize, announced at a November 15 gala dinner to be held at the museum... In addition to the 25 Laureates being honored, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be presented with the 2006 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, sponsored by Applied Materials."

There were 14 winners from the United States; two from Brazil, the U.K. and Nigeria; and one each from Japan, India, Ghana, Eritrea, and Canada. A full list of this year's winners is available here.

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The National Book Festival in Washington

Just a reminder that the Library of Congress is organizing and sponsoring its annual National Book Festival in Washington, DC on Saturday, September 30. There will be over 70 authors appearing live at the National Book Festival, including one of my personal favorites, Jim Cramer, the market pundit and creative genius behind CNBC's "Mad Money." Booyah! Anyway, if manic investing is not your thing, then maybe one of these books from authors appearing at the event will get the ol' innovation juices flowing:

(1) American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)

(2) Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)

(3) The Right Attitude to Rain (Alexander McCall Smith)

(4) The Last Apocalypse (James Reston, Jr.)

(5) The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Douglas Brinkley)

(6) American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country (Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison)

[image: 2006 National Book Festival]

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September 20, 2006

10 Radically Innovative College Programs

Popular Mechanics has published a survey of 10 radically innovative college programs that could shape the next 20 years of U.S. higher education. For example, consider what's happening at Olin College in Massachusetts, which is experimenting with project-based curricula that go way beyond traditional book learning:

"The Needham, Massachusetts college opened its doors in 2002, thanks to a $460 million grant from the F.W. Olin Foundation. Its mission: Revamp engineering education, which critics say has become more academic and less practical in recent decades. “Instead of spending two years learning the theory, you start using it in projects right away,” says Katerina Blazek, a student from the inaugural class. Olin has an enrollment of fewer than 300, allowing the school to offer a full-tuition scholarship to every successful applicant.

Last year, through the school’s Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE), 13 companies paid $50,000 each to hire teams of Olin seniors. SCOPE projects included a model solar-powered house and a tractor which sprays orchards automatically. [...] Olin’s project-based curriculum is as real-world as it gets. As technological innovation and problem solving become increasingly precious commodities, Olin grads may lead the way in transforming how engineering gets taught--and practiced.

Other universities mentioned in the Popular Mechanics report include: University of California-Irvine, Florida State University (Panama City), Carnegie Mellon, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Tufts University, MIT, LSU, Art Center College of Design and Ohio State.

[image: Olin College's SCOPE Engineering Program]

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Extreme innovation within the energy drink industry

This is either a cynical publicity trick or moral depravity masquerading as hipster marketing, but it looks like there's an innovative new energy drink on the market: Cocaine. That's right, cocaine. It's been featured on at least two different blogs - Las Vegas Blog and PopSugar - and seems to be legit:

"A new energy drink claiming to be 350% more potent than Red Bull has landed in Las Vegas and shares the namesake of a certain illegal drug, mirror optional. Cocaine, billed as "the legal alternative," claims to bring a high in five minutes, with a caffeine after-boost 15 minutes later. Effects last five hours and are cheaper than the regular lowercased cocaine. From their website, "it tastes like a fireball, a carbonated atomic fireball."

Las Vegas-based Redux Beverages says its new drink is a combined physical and psychological high. Physical, with increased sugar and vitamin B12, and psychological, the mindset people get into when they hear mention of the name. An additional secret ingredient was added to slightly numb the throat, just to give that added sensation that regular cocaine does.

Oh, and the distributors of the new drink are called "dealers." This isn't some secret underground drink either - check out this pic of a "Cocaine event" at a family-friendly TGI Fridays in San Diego. Anyway, if you wanna get down, down on the ground, here's Eric Clapton singing "Cocaine" live in concert.

[video: Eric Clapton]

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Highlights from IBM Innovation Week

Eline Kwantes of the Next Level weblog has provided comprehensive coverage of the IBM Innovation Week 2006 event that took place in Europe last week (September 12-15). Event sessions were spread out over four different locations (Halloy, Brussels, Eindhoven and Amsterdam) and concentrated on innovation trends within the retail, finance, government, marketing and healthcare sectors. The Next Level blog contains a number of live-blogging reports from the Marketing, Healthcare, Government and Finance sessions, as well as behind-the-scenes commentary about European innovation.

For additional event photos, be sure to check out the Next Level photo album.

[image: IBM Innovation Week]

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How political red tape is stifling U.S. innovation

The American Competitiveness Initiative that President Bush outlined in his State of the Union speech in January is having a tough slog of it in Washington, thanks to election year politicking and the political red tape of bureaucratic inertia. Since outlining the initiative on January 31, President Bush has given at least seven other speeches highlighting the importance of boosting American competitiveness and encouraging innovation. Moreover, the idea seemed to have bilateral support from both parties as well as broad-based support from executives throughout Silicon Valley. So what went wrong? As the LA Times explains, the plan to boost the competitiveness of high-tech firms has been dragged into the political muck by wrangling over the estate tax and illegal immigration:

"The experience has provided another lesson in Silicon Valley's political education: how the crosscurrents of a high-stakes election can derail even broadly popular legislation. The 10-year, $136-billion plan would combine increased federal science and education spending with tax breaks for research and easier access to highly skilled foreigners. Leading lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who had already made or were drafting similar proposals enthusiastically vowed their support.

But little of the multifaceted initiative has been approved. And two key components are on their deathbeds. A proposal to increase the number of specialized visas for technically trained foreign workers has been held up by the partisan stalemate over illegal immigration. Legislation to extend and expand an expired tax credit for research and development costs was derailed this summer, when Republican leaders included it in a contentious plan to cut the estate tax.

Tech executives thought the whole package would be wrapped up in months, but now it appears that it will take more than a year to pass all of the legislation. As lawmakers rush to hit the campaign trail, there's little chance that much will happen until 2007. Privately, many supporters of the competitiveness initiative have reconciled themselves to starting over next year.

[image: Red Tape by InfoMofo on Flickr]

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A French Revolution in innovation

As Navi Radjou of Forrester Research points out in a new report called A French Revolution in Innovation is Unfolding, French firms are boosting their overall economic competitiveness by participating in global innovation networks:

"France is currently engulfed in a gloomy sociopolitical climate and suffers from economic stasis. Yet, innovative French firms such as France Telecom and CNP Assurances are scoring big by radically reinventing their products, services, and business models. To win, these pioneers abandoned market-blind, insular innovation approaches in favor of customer-focused, global partner ecosystems. French CIOs must respond to their firms' sophisticated innovation needs by investing in partner-friendly and customer-engaging processes and technologies, as well as by honing their global innovation brokering skills."

The 22-page report is available as a PDF document from the Forrester Research website. Among the companies covered in the report: Renault-Nissan, Air Liquide, France Telecom, Société Générale, CNP Assurances, Banque de France and BNP Paribas.

[image: The French Revolution]

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September 19, 2006

The Honda Tetris commercial

This Honda "Tetris" commercial is in German, but has already been viewed more than 36,000 times by viewers around the world on YouTube.com. On Digg, the commercial is being cited as an example of "awesome geek commercial goodness." Apparently, the inspiration for the Honda "Tetris" commercial came from an episode of "The Simpsons."

[video: YouTube]

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Survival is the mother of innovation

As part of a comprehensive explanation of how IBM rallied from a "near-death experience" in the early 1990s, Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM suggests that survival is the mother of innovation for FORTUNE 500 companies:

"For a business, our rapidly changing times are full of opportunities, but they are equally full of competitive challenges and dangers. In fact, these are two sides of a coin - the same technological, market and societal forces that are democratizing competition and opening up all kinds of opportunities for new businesses around the world often represent big threats to existing businesses, large and small, that have been leaders in their industries.

In fact, given enough time, it seems almost inevitable in our brutally competitive, Darwinian IT industry that leaders will ultimately get in trouble in the marketplace. Sometimes they will be able to reinvent themselves and overcome their troubles, but more often than not, their problems will prove lethal... And things have only gotten tougher in the last five years, given the additional competitive pressures brought about by the forces of globalization.

“Survival as the mother of innovation” may appear overly dramatic to some, perhaps a bit academic to others. But anyone who has lived through the very painful process of having one’s company decline from a position of leadership to a serious survival crisis knows it is an indelible experience that stays with you forever."

With that in mind, here's a theme song from Destiny's Child for all those struggling FORTUNE 500 companies out there.

Tags: IBM innovation survivor

[image: Survivor Borneo]

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Seth Godin: What went wrong at Ford Motor Company

Marketing guru Seth Godin offers a quick take on the problems at Ford Motor Company, arguing that the company is facing financial distress as the result of monumental management blunders that could have been avoided. Instead of innovating and paying attention to its customers, the company ignored the market and regularly chose short-term expediency over long-term change:

"A couple of decades ago, Ford had everything. Cash, brand, distribution, political influence, a trained workforce... Then, through nothing but management hubris and arrogance, they destroyed the company. Making cars is not an unprofitable undertaking, unless you insist on making it one. At just about every turn the company ignored the market, alienated their workforce, distanced themselves from their distribution network, vilified their customers and chose short-term expediency ahead of long-term change. They lobbied to keep gas mileage standards high (doing the opposite would have increased the market for cars). They lobbied to keep SUVs unregulated (and got addicted to a short-term high-profit alternative to cars) and they bought remarkable brands and made them average.

There were hard things they could have chosen to do, things that would have meant change. There were short-term hardships they could have endured to fix their dealer network or reinvent the way they designed and built cars. Instead, they stayed inside the Detroit beltway, played the car game, managed the stock price and paid themselves a fortune."

The situation at Ford, argues Seth, offers lessons for other companies dealing with a rapidly changing competitive marketplace. As Seth points out, "When you sit down with your organization to plan the next decade, perhaps you could ask, "What would the top people at Ford do?" and then do precisely the opposite." [Ouch!]

While Ford may have a huge financial hole to dig itself out of, it also has a stable of brands that are the envy of the world (i.e. Jaguar, Aston Martin) and a sizable cash position (nearly $20 billion) that can be used to buy time until the Wall Street investment bankers go to work on the company. Plus, the company just hired a long-time Boeing executive (Alan Mulally) to become the CEO of the company. The buzz on the street is that Mulally is the right type of person to fix the company - he knows how to cut costs, manage innovative projects (the 787 Dreamliner), and deal with entrenched market competition (he took on Airbus at a difficult time for Boeing). Plus, as an aviation expert, he's an "outsider" to the automobile industry who can take a hard look at the problems facing Ford.

[image: Bill Ford on Innovation]

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The MacArthur "Genius" Grants

Yesterday, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 25 winners of this year's "Genius" grants. The winners of the $500,000 prizes (officially known as the MacArthur Fellowships) included a top stem cell researcher at Harvard, a deep-sea explorer, a cosmologist, a naturalist and a "master of the improvisational jazz violin." Since 1981, the nonprofit foundation has awarded more than 700 genius grants to some of the most innovative individuals in the country. What's interesting is that there is no application process for the awards -- the winners are chosen by a secret committee based on their "creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future." Moreover, the awards come with no strings attached. For a full list of the winners, click here.

Tags: MacArthur genius grants innovation

[image: MacArthur Foundation]

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September 18, 2006

Feature creep extreme

Even the marketing director for Wenger admits that the new Swiss Army Giant Knife is "a little over the top." The knife retails for $1,200 and includes 85 different tools, including a 300-foot-range laser pointer, a cigar cutter, a bike-chain rivet setter, 25 different screwdrivers and, presumably, a miniature kitchen sink. What's interesting is that even grizzled outdoorsmen - the type of people you might expect to fall in love with this kind of product - are none too impressed. After Outdoor Life ran a feature on "the Most Incredible Knife," a number of skeptical readers wrote in with their opinions:

That is the stupidest knife I have ever seen. How can you even hold it to perform the "hundreds of tasks"?

I suppose you could carry it in one of those thick wool socks, and use it to club baby seals. I mean seriously, that ain't gonna fit in your pocket, and if you can imagine it hanging by a belt loop, you can imagine that belt loop tearing loose of its stitching and that knife falling onto your foot and breaking some of your metacarpals on the top of you foot, which will leave you walking with a limp for the rest of your life...

This isn't a tool. It's a novelty, albeit and expensive one, like the giant rapala lure. Pretty much of interest to the chosen few who own hotel chains and the like. A $1,200 conversation piece.

[image: The Most Incredible Knife]

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Eighteen pounds and twenty inches of pure innovation power

When it comes to technology, sometimes bigger really is better. Brian Heater of LAPTOP Magazine decided to test the limits of this idea by walking around Manhattan with a new plus-sized computer from Dell that blurs the line between desktop and notebook:

"Since we happened to have a Dell XPS M2010 lying around the office, we figured it an opportune time to take the 20.1-inch system for a spin in the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan. Despite its prominent handle, the 18.3-pound system isn't designed for carrying around crowded city streets. It's also not designed for tiny coffee shop tables, nor the human lap-even as a 5'11" male, I had a fair bit of trouble keeping the thing steady on mine, a situation not improved by the fact that the keyboard detaches automatically...

The XPS M2010 managed to turn some heads and elicit comments from subway dwellers accustomed to ignoring the absurd goings on of a big city on a regular basis. Hands down, the most popular question was people asking whether the thing was a laptop, some in admiration, some in disgust, and most in genuine puzzlement. The question of "why?" naturally followed soon after. One young lady seated across from me was genuinely shocked to discover that the XPS closed."

[image: LAPTOP magazine]

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Black Ops innovation at Area 51

Speculation persists that the Air Force could be developing a new generation of black ops airplanes in the Nevada desert at the mythical location known as Area 51. In the October issue of Popular Science magazine, veteran aviation journalist Bill Sweetman writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at test facilities in Nevada. It's mostly "guesswork" and "speculation" -- but it does appear that new construction of some sort has started at the Groom Lake test facility (discovered via Google Earth satellite imaging). In addition, there's an unexplained multi-billion-dollar gap in the defense budget that might be allocated to a super-secret new warplane. To top it off, there have been at least six unexplained sonic booms since 2003 in the California-Nevada region.

So what types of planes might the U.S. Air Force be developing? How about an all-weather attack jet capable of carrying significant bomb loads? Or the wedge-shaped, hypersonic Aurora spyplane (a.k.a. "the Bigfoot of aviation journalism"), capable of deploying anywhere in the world in a matter of hours?

At the end of the day, however, Defense Tech discounts the validity of these rumors: "What seems to be happening here is a recycling of some of aviation's favorite ghost stories ... followed by a retroactive identification of the military roles they might fill and claims that urgent needs in these areas proves the secret airplanes' existences."

Tags: blackops Area51 defense innovation

[image: Defense Tech and Area 51 map]

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12 ways to encourage user-led innovation

Patty Seybold, author of Outside Innovation, recently attended a meeting of Professor Eric von Hippel’s MIT Innovation Lab and walked away impressed with the level and quality of user-led innovation initiatives across a broad range of sectors and industries. Below, Patty highlights 12 "best practices" from companies that have been successful in encouraging various forms of "outside innovation":

(1) Foment organizational transformation from the outside in -- invite lead users to create derivative works out of your intellectual property, to share their creative ideas with one another, and to build their own “solutions” (gadgets, mash ups, applications, etc.) leveraging your company’s branded IP;

(2) Host co-design sessions with lead users;

(3) Encourage customers to contribute ideas and content, to pose and solve problems, and to interact with one another in public online community spaces;

(4) Encourage your own employees to leverage customer-contributed content, ideas, and deliverables;

(5) Provide tools -- like high-level programming languages and toolkits to promote lead user innovation -- and offer training on those tools;

(6) Get all your stakeholders aligned around customers’ desired outcomes;

(7) Create expert networks and link customers to networks of experts;

(8) Empower local community-based problem solving;

(9) Provide tools to end users/customers to manage their own complex situations rather than trying to do things for them;

(10) Provide electronic design tools to interested end users/customers to design their own products and to design your company’s products in open design communities;

(11) Encourage customer designers to critique and vote on each others’ work;

(12) Harvest user-generated ideas from across the Internet.

Tags: outside innovation MIT innovation Patty Seybold

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Become an innovation advisor for the U.S. Commerce Department

Industry Week points out that it is still possible to submit an application to become an innovation advisor to U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez: "Dubbed the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee, the panel of not more than 15 members is slated to counsel Gutierrez on new or improved measures of innovation that will help explain how innovation occurs, its extent across the economy and how innovation affects economic growth and productivity."

The final day to submit an application is September 29.

Tags: innovation government commerce Carlos Gutierrez

[image: Carlos Gutierrez]

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A peek at some worldchanging innovations

Worldchanging.com highlights some of the interesting innovations recently profiled in an issue of International Design (I.D.) Magazine. Many of the innovations are "forward-thinking and socially relevant" in addition to being technologically sophisticated. For example, there's the Grasshopper, a tractor that runs on any type of organic matter or agricultural waste: "It minimizes operating costs and reduces excessive farm waste, freeing up space for productive land." There's also a pressure-sensitive floor tile that can convert footsteps into energy stored in a high-capacity battery cell; an intravenous fusion pump for dispensing medication which can be worn on the upper arm almost like a jogging walkman; and the Hot Fridge, which makes use of the thermal energy produced during refrigeration to warm another compartment.

Tags: worldchanging design innovation

[image: The Grasshopper]

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