« October 1, 2006 - October 7, 2006 | Main | October 15, 2006 - October 21, 2006 »

October 13, 2006

October 13 innovation linkage

The future isn't what it used to be [MSNBC]
Lessons from a starfish world [Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom]
The universe is a strange place [MIT World video]
Pruning the product tree [Innovation Weblog]
How to make important decisions [Spooky Action]
When will a new technology break through? [Eirik Solheim]
Animals on the Underground [Information Aesthetics]
The meme-brokers of the 21st century [Pasta and Vinegar]
The Oakland A's are an innovation dynasty [Innoblog]

[image: MSNBC]

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The best business books of 2006

The 1-800-CEO-READ blog highlights the five titles on the shortlist for the 2006 FT/Goldman Sachs book award, which is presented to the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics. In no particular order:

(1) The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - "Anderson argues that the future of business lies in ‘misses’, once seen as the ‘long tail’ of the traditional demand curve"

(2) Small Giants by Bo Burlingham - "A view from inside 14 privately held US companies that chose to be great instead of big"

(3) The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman - "Inside Wal-Mart’s wall of secrecy, with the first in-depth access to former executives"

(4) China Shakes the World by James Kynge - "An analysis of China that recognises the manifold strengths and weaknesses of an industrialising power"

(5) The Box by Marc Levinson - "How entrepreneur Malcolm McLean turned containerisation into a huge industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world."

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The urban super bus

The SCI FI Tech Blog describes a new electric-powered, aerodynamically-designed super bus capable of driving 155 mph and carrying 30 passengers at one time:

"Man, if the busses in New York were a bit more like this I'd probably skip the subway a lot more often. This is the "SuperBus," a 30-passenger electric vehicle that can move along at up to 155 mph. It's so fast because it's aerodynamic — so low to the ground that riders can't stand up inside. How do you get passengers in and out of a bus you can't stand up in? Give them all their own door, of course! Yep, 30 doors for 30 riders. If you want to get a ride on the SuperBus, just send it a text message and it'll pick you up along the special speedways designed just for the fancy vehicle. The researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands plan to have a working model ready to go to serve visitors to Beijing during the 2008 Olympics."

Somehow, I don't see any crosstown bus going 155 mph in Manhattan during rush hour. Even on the FDR Drive or West Side Highway, that would be quite a feat. Anyway, here's a promotional video of the super bus in action: The Dutch Formula One Super Bus.

[image: SCI FI Tech Blog]

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Cities should focus more on innovation and talent

In a new report, Portland-based economist Joseph Cortright argues that cities should stop paying attention to traditional methods for spurring economic development (e.g. cutting taxes, building expensive new arenas) and, instead, start focusing on four dimensions of success: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness. According to Cortright, successful cities must find a way to emphasize the role of innovation and talent:

"For too long, urban decision makers have invested in magic bullet solutions that they hope will spur their city to become the next big thing. As a result we've seen a number of failed copycat economic development strategies over the last decade. CityVitals works because it recognizes that there is no one formula for greatness. But there are key ingredients to success -- the mixtures just tend to vary."

In the City Vitals report, Cortright describes in further detail his notion of an innovative city:

"The ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into reality is a critical source of competitive advantage not just for businesses but for regions, as well. Economies and regions advance by a process of trial and error. Those places that generate many trials of novel products and services are most likely to move ahead. Invisible and weightless, ideas can't be measured directly, but the footprints they leave in the economic landscape can be traced by counting numbers of patents, the dollar value of venture capital investments, the extent of personal entrepreneurship and the number of small businesses."

[image: Joseph Cortright]

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A Blue Ocean wrapped in brown paper

The Creating Blue Oceans blog consistently provides illuminating case studies of companies that are leveraging the power of Blue Ocean Strategy. Recently, Gabor George Burt highlighted the blue ocean thinking at Seattle-based Brown Paper Tickets:

"We were recently tipped to the exploits of Brown Paper Tickets which seems poised to take the event ticketing and distribution world by storm. Brown Paper Tickets enables even the smallest of merchants to become an event producer and ticket distributor. All one needs to do is plug in the event information and then direct people to the Brown Paper Tickets website to purchase a ticket. So if you are having a charity luncheon for ten people, or a concert for ten-thousand, Brown Paper Tickets can handle the entire ticketing and distribution process."

Brown Paper Tickets has also been profiled by Springwise, which explained how the company is fast becoming a "consumer- and vendor-friendly alternative to Ticketmaster." For example, Brown Paper Tickets offers buyers low ticketing fees ($0.99 per ticket plus 2.5% of the sale price), thereby enabling individuals, small businesses and nonprofit organizations to sell tickets to their events quickly and cheaply.

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October 12, 2006

The five principles of ubiquitous computing

We Make Money Not Art has published extensive notes from a speech about ubiquitous computing given by Adam Greenfield at the Ci'Num event in Margaux, France. In the speech, Greenfield outlined the five principles of ubiquitous computing:

(1) Default to Harmlessness - In a world where it is possible for a device to broadcast your most intimate details, user's safety (physical, psychic and financial) must be ensured;

(2) Be Self-Disclosing - Ubiquitous systems should be technically and graphically self-disclosing, so that users encountering them are empowered to make informed decisions;

(3) Be Conservative of Face - Ubiquitous systems must not unnecessarily embarass, humiliate, or shame their users;

(4) Be Conservative of Time - Ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations and should ba respectful of our time;

(5) Be Deniable - Ubiquitous systems must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point.

For more on ubiquitous computing and its implications for society and business, be sure to check out Greenfield's new book: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

[image: Adam Greenfield at Ci'Num]

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The geekiest license plates

Geek24.com has put together an amusing visual collection of the geekiest license plates: "We decided to do a little 'geeky license plate' spotting of our own and tag our favorites. So, without any wait, we present our favorite geek license plates starting from the obvious (via Flickr and thanks to all those who spotted them)." As Geek24 points out, there are the obvious ones - like "Mr. Geek" and "HTTP" and "MS DOS". Others are not so obvious, such as "XML" and "Alt F4". And, finally, there are other, more arcane ones, that took awhile to figure out, like "31337."

[image: Geek24.com]

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Piracy is just a business model

BoingBoing points to controversial remarks about intellectual property made by Anne Sweeney, a high-ranking Disney executive who has twice been voted "Hollywood's most powerful woman" by Hollywood Reporter. In a recent keynote address, she hinted that piracy is a business model to be competed with, rather than a war to be fought on behalf of Disney's customers: "Piracy is a business model... It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We we don't like the model but we realize it's competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward."

Over at Paid Content, there's additional coverage of Anne Sweeney's remarks at Mipcom. Apparently, Sweeney's "pragmatic conversion" came after watching - within 15 minutes of the ABC network premiere of "Desperate Housewives" - a high-quality, ad-free version that had appeared on P2P networks. Paid Content also points out that Disney has sold 12.8 million episodes via iTunes . Moreover, 51 of the 272 TV series available on the service are Disney products.

[image: Pirates of the Caribbean]

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Innovation from Spain's Rioja wine region

Here's the latest for international wine enthusiasts: a new $100 million Frank Gehry-designed hotel in the medieval village of Elciego. The hotel is located right smack in the middle of Spain's Rioja wine region and is attached to a local winery dating back to 1858, meaning that guests will have the run of the local vineyard - as well as access to an ancient wine cellar and a wine tasting corner and the opportunity to partake of "wine therapy" massages.

If the building looks familiar, it should - it's from the same celebrity architect who designed Spain's Bilbao museum. According to Alejandro Aznar Sainz, the head of the Marques de Riscal winery, the goal was to build a "21st-century chateau" that fused the best elements of modern innovation and Old World charm. The bigger picture, of course, is that the new Frank Gehry-designed hotel will likely provide a boost to the Spanish tourism industry and stoke demand for locally-produced Spanish wines.

[image: Hotel Marques De Riscal]

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The Good Housekeeping Seal of Innovation

Sarah Ellison of the Wall Street Journal recently profiled the changes afoot at the R&D unit of Good Housekeeping magazine:

"The research arm of Good Housekeeping magazine has been testing products for more than a century and granting advertisers who pass muster its famous seal of approval for almost as long. In its early days, the magazine's "experiment station" was designed to help new brides become better housekeepers.

The Hearst Corp. magazine has evolved since then, but it is its testing lab -- now called the Good Houskeeping Research Institute -- that has undergone the biggest facelift of late as the magazine pushes to maintain its position among traditional women's titles while fending off arriviste like Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple and O, the Oprah Magazine."

Anyway, the Good Housekeeping Research Institute has a new 20,000-square foot facility in midtown Manhattan, equipped with soundproof rooms, a climatology chamber, and multiple test kitchens and labs. The institute also has the full backing of Rosemary Ellis, the magazine's new editor-in-chief. Already, there are plans to make the institute's R&D services more prominent, such as by using product testing from the institute as the backdrop for regular segments on "Good Morning America" and "Today." The magazine is also giving the testing lab a broader mandate to do original research and to "sniff out" faulty products and potential consumer frauds.

[image: Researchers at Good Housekeeping]

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October 11, 2006

The importance of systematic innovation processes

While they agree that U.S. business needs to embrace innovation in order to remain globally competitive, two B-school professors at Washington University in St. Louis claim that companies should be focusing on setting up systematic innovation processes, rather than just hiring a bunch of creative individuals:

"It's important for Western companies to compete on innovation since they can't successfully compete with the East on price," said Panos Kouvelis, professor of operations and manufacturing management at the Olin School of Business. "The best way to infuse innovation into your company is not by hiring creative people. That's not effective. Organizations need to manage innovation in a systematic way to get employees to think outside the box." There are methods for inspiring non-traditional thinking, Kouvelis said. It starts with encouraging experimentation, which elicits learning. Experimentation means prototyping in product-service developments, and development systems and technologies that maximize learning."

Anyway, the two B-school professors -- Glenn MacDonald (right) and Panos Kouvelis (left) -- are planning to put this theory into practice as part of an all-new course for MBA students at the Olin School of Business: The Theory and Practice of Innovation: From the Creative Process, Through Intrapreneurship, Commercialization, Competition, and Renewal. The course aims to "demystify and systematize the creative process" while giving students real-world organizational problems to solve.

[image: Olin School of Business]

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Creative destruction, through the eyes of Japanese street artists

In this five-minute YouTube video, watch Japanese street artists paint, re-paint, re-re-paint (and re-re-re-paint) a wall with a constantly changing series of beautiful art works over a period of one week. You'll be saying "No!" every time they erase an old painting to start work on a new one...

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Forget creativity and innovation, we want robots and zombies

As Kathy Sierra of the Creating Passionate Users blog explains, there's often a disconnect between the types of employees companies say they will hire and the types of employees they actually hire. Quoting from the Tom Peters book Re-imagine!, Kathy points out that organizations should be "chock-a-block with obstreperous people who are determined to bend the rules at every turn..."

As it turns out, though, "there's a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players)." Instead of cultivating a work environment of conformity, though, companies should be cultivating passion and exuberance in their employees:

"If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up. If we knock out their exuberance, we've also killed their desire to learn, grow, adapt, innovate, and care..."

[graphic: The Zombie Function]

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The economic and business impact of value networks

The Value of Networks event taking place in Boston this week is a two-day "deep dive" into the economic and business impact of value networks, with a focus on how large FORTUNE 500 corporations like Wal-Mart are embracing value networks:

"The principles of value networks are being adopted by the largest and most respected firms in the world. Firms like Wal-Mart have discovered the spectacular business advantages of transforming from a supply chain mentality to a value networks philosophy. "Value Networks aid our understanding and ability to address key issues and opportunities in our business." says the Wal Mart Corporate Website. ERP vendors like Oracle are urging all customers to "evolve their companies' supply chains into value networks..."

The Value of Networks event includes a number of hands-on and workshop activities in addition to presentations from some of the leading thinkers on value networks (e.g. Carol Rozwell, Bill Ives and Verna Allee).

[image: Value Networks Clusters]

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The Ball of Whacks

Chuck Frey of the Innovation Weblog recently blogged about the Ball of Whacks, a new creativity tool for innovators. The Ball of Whacks (not affiliated in any way with Paris Hilton's House of Wax) is designed to stimulate specific parts of the brain and comes with a 96-page handbook:

"Roger von Oech, one of the most popular authors of creativity books and tools (A Whack on the Side of the Head, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, The Creative Whack Pack), has recently launched a new tool called The Ball of Whacks. It is made up of 30 magnetic design blocks, which can be taken apart and rearranged in nearly endless ways. Each individual piece is a rhombic pyramid; when joined together they form a 30-sided rhombic tiacontahedron, one of geometry's most beautiful shapes.

This unique tool doesn't contain any keywords, images or other creative catalysts. Instead, it is designed to stimulate different parts of your brain through manipulative play. The Ball of Whacks includes a 96-page illustrated booklet, which contains creative brainstorming and problem-solving exercises. This puzzle-like tool has such a compelling look and feel that it's hard not to play with it."

You can learn more about The Ball of Whacks by visiting The Creative Whack Company or (if you're not feeling like getting a whack upside the head) simply ordering it from Amazon.

[image: A Buddhist monk examines the Ball of Whacks]

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October 10, 2006

October 10 innovation linkage

10 questions with the co-author of Mavericks at Work [Guy Kawasaki]
A Firefox crop circle and infectious action [metacool]
Yahoo, time capsules and Mexican pyramids [Reuters]
Misconceptions about economic growth in China [John Hagel]
Prepare for consumer-led IT [Gartner]
Should we kill the albino moose? [Neatorama]
Who will be the 300 millionth American? [New York Times]
UC-Berkeley teaches China about innovation [Ascribe Newswire]

[image: The $1 million Skycar]

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The co-creation tipping point

Pointing to the growing popularity of the customer co-creation concept at innovation heavyweights like Yahoo, P&G and Burger King, John Winsor suggests that we are experiencing a co-creation tipping point. For example, A.G. Lafley of P&G recently commented on the rapidly-changing marketing landscape at the Association of National Advertisers annual conference:

"Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation... We need to learn to begin to let go and embrace trends like commercials created by consumers and online communities built around favorite products."

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A new design environment with 3-D effects

In a five-minute video called MIT Sketching, an MIT professor demonstrates how a computerized whiteboard design environment can be used to enable 3-D visualization of various effects (e.g. gravity). In part one of the video, the graphical sketch of a car on an incline rolls downhill, thanks to an implied gravitational effect. There are also a number of other effects, such as the wobbling produced by unevenly-placed axles and the impact of hitting a speed bump while rolling downhill. In part two of the video, there's a pinball-inspired sketch that enables a designer to produce an amalgam of different pinball effects. Already, the video has already been viewed more than 314,000 times on YouTube and commented on nearly 100 times. One viewer gave the MIT video perhaps the highest praise possible: "Whoa! I'd take physics over again just to watch this!"

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How the Business Innovation Factory manufactures innovation

Last week, the Corante Innovation Hub coordinated a live blogjam from BIF-2, the Collaborative Innovation Summit hosted by the Business Innovation Factory in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the past few days, a team of Corante bloggers have posted about Peter Durand's amazing doodles from the event; linked to live podcast interviews with four of the event's guest speakers; engaged in a broad discussion of The Medici Effect; and taken a closer look at how Dean Kamen is using robotics competitions to inspire engineering passion. There are also extensive highlights and pics from Brian Jepson's Weblog if you're interested in catching up with a particular speaker at the event. In addition, Chris Flanagan of the Business Innovation Factory Weblog also posted extensive commentary from the event over a two-day period.

UPDATE: It looks like the Business Innovation Factory is also making available video transcripts from the event.

[image: The stage at the Business Innovation Factory event]

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45 different ways to build a submarine

Over at Heiszwolf.com, there are 45 different designs for building a submarine, arranged in chronological order. As might be surmised, the earliest plans to build a submarine were fairly primitive (i.e. check out the glass diving bells developed by Alexander the Great in 400 B.C.) Submarine design really seemed to take off after about 1800, when Robert Fulton designed The Nautilus.

Anyway, the series of submarine design drawings extend through the 1990s, including a design drawing of the Oscar class submarine from Cold War-era Russia. If you enjoyed Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, or any of the other great films involving submarines, it's worth taking a look at these submarine sketches. Plus, there are extensive footnotes and links, so that the next time you're vacationing off the Turkish coast, you'll know what to do when a Turkish Preveze class submarine surfaces.

[images: Brandtaucher submarine and The Turtle]

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Jeneanne Rae hosts a service innovation webinar

If you're interested in finding out more about the emerging field of services innovation, check out the free Service Innovation Webinar that was recently co-sponsored by Penn State's Smeal College of Business. On September 19, Jeneanne Rae, the co-founder and president of Peer Insight, hosted a live Webinar presenting many of the findings from the consulting firm's service innovation research. Jeneanne is a nationally-recognized thought leader on innovation management and design strategy, and was recently named as one of the "Magnificent Seven Gurus of Innovation.” The service innovation webinar covers four primary topics:

(1) Why Six Sigma is over, and what is replacing it (i.e. a revolution in customer experience design and innovation);

(2) How new product development methods fail to meet the challenge of inventing new services ;

(3) Proven protocols for developing high-impact innovation in mature organizations;

(4) How to implement the three keys to creating a sustainable service innovation engine (passion, permission, and protocols).

[image: Jeneanne Rae]

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October 9, 2006

FORTUNE Innovation Webinar

In coordination with the upcoming FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York City, futurethink and the American Management Association are co-sponsoring a special innovation webinar on Wednesday, October 11 at 12:00 noon ET. The two hosts of the webinar will be Lisa Bodell, founder and CEO of futurethink, and Heather Schultz, Senior VP of Program Acquisition and Management at the American Management Association. (Heather is also the former President and COO of Tom Peters Company). Anyway, if you're already signed up for the FORTUNE Innovation Forum, you have probably already received an e-mail invitation to the webinar. If not, here are the details:

"Innovation. Everybody's talking about it. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find an organization or CEO who wouldn't say it's a top strategic priority. So if innovation is such an obvious answer to today's business challenges, why is it still so elusive? The truth is there are significant challenges to overcome in order to make innovation part of an organization's everyday life and DNA.

True innovation requires shifting how businesses treat innovation in order to make it a normal and repeatable business process; moving from the mystical and intangible to the measurable and manageable; and developing a clear framework for understanding innovation and a clear path for driving results. Attend our free web event and learn about the four capabilities organizations need to become truly innovative - ideas, strategy, process and climate. Uncover an effective approach to drive innovation, discover real-life examples of other innovators, and learn how to jumpstart innovation in your organization."

To sign up for the webinar, visit the official site for the FORTUNE Innovation Forum and then scroll down the page to the "Free Innovation Webinar" link.

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Master of Design: Jochen Zeitz of Puma

In a feature called Masters of Design, Fast Company magazine takes a closer look at the "creative businesspeople dialing in to the power of design," such as Jochen Zeitz (the CEO of Puma); Clive Wilkinson (the architect who designed Google's new offices); and Paula Scher (the graphic artist behind some of American's best-known brands). In 1993, Zeitz took over Puma and infused the legendary German company, then on the verge of bankruptcy, with a strong appreciation for the principles of design. The results were nothing less than extraordinary: "Puma has since become the fourth-largest athletic apparel company in the world, a transformation that testifies to Zeitz's vision and willingness to roll the dice." As the feature on Zeitz explains, it all started with a 21-year-old skateboarder with a fondness for "experimental fashion projects" and a growing realization within the company that Puma had to transform its soccer brand into a "fashion lifestyle" if it hoped to survive.

[image: Jochen Zeitz of Puma]

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What outrageous Parisian fashion can teach you about innovation

Ever wondered who bought those outrageous outfits that the major European fashion houses trot out every year - you know, those outfits in ridiculous fabrics and utterly impractical shapes that you never seem to see anywhere except on the glossy pages of fashion magazines? As Rachel Dodes and Teri Agins of the Wall Street Journal explain, in most cases, nobody actually buys these "outlandish looks." They're simply loss-leaders that create hype and buzz around a certain fashion line. In the best case, this hype and publicity may lead to sales of perfumes, cheap-chic clothes and accessories (in other words, reasonably-priced goods that people actually buy):

"Fashion week in the French capital, more so than in other cities, is a showcase for the world's most creative fashion trends, especially those that will never translate directly into clothing sales. During this week's shows, which end Monday, the innovative looks have included Jean Paul Gaultier's racer-striped fishnet leggings, Karl Lagerfeld's boxy black dress with bubble sleeves, crystal-encrusted leggings at Balenciaga and Comme des Garçons' patchwork-plaid pants and white tutus with a red circle, reminiscent of the Japanese flag.

For fashion's big guns -- Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior -- the Paris shows are an elaborate publicity vehicle for the pricey handbags and shoes that make up the bulk of their sales. The Louis Vuitton label, for example, gets only a tiny fraction of its annual sales of $5 billion plus from the ready-to-wear clothing items that its creative director, Marc Jacobs, sends down the runway Sunday. But making a big splash in Paris is still a critical element of every elite designer's marketing plan, keeping the brand visible and exciting in front of editors and A-list fashionistas.

In many ways, I wonder whether big FORTUNE 500 companies tend to view innovative product and service offerings as exactly that - as something to generate buzz and publicity (look! aren't we innovative!) rather than something that is part and parcel of the business model. For example, a lot of companies have latched on to the notion of "cool design" as a key selling point for their products. Is this just a relatively cheap way of appearing to be innovative - or does it reflect a fundamentally new way of thinking about business?

[image: Outrageous fashion from Viktor & Rolf]

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