The Business Innovation Insider

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October 20, 2006

A chat with Yahoo! Research's Ricardo Baeza-Yates

ricardo%20baeza%20yates.jpg The Yahoo! Search Blog has posted an interesting Q&A with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of the Yahoo! Research Labs in Barcelona and Santiago. In the Q&A, Ricardo discusses his role in starting Yahoo! Research Labs in Spain and Chile and offers his insights on current developments in the Internet search field. Below, he describes some of his goals for web search and web data mining:

"Web search and web data mining is successfully practiced already among Yahoo! research experts in the U.S., but I hope to add new knowledge, particularly in the latter field. The main three goals for me are to explore the potential of all web-related information – to improve current systems, find new ideas for products or services, and discover new ways to analyze information – for many, many different purposes. Also, to leverage the different backgrounds and expertise here at the Yahoo! Research Center in order to obtain a fresh look, a new perspective and a different angle that will allow us to come up with new breakthroughs around existing problems. And finally, I think utilizing our location as a tie-in to strengthen European search will be important – for example search in non-English languages."

ASIDE: If you're interested in learning more about Chile, Ricardo offers a few tips at the end of the Q&A about Chilean seafood and wine. According to Ricardo, a nice Chilean red is superior to anything you'd find in Napa Valley, especially when considering the price-quality trade-off.

[image: Yahoo! Search blog]

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October 20 innovation linkage

Wal-Mart%20sustainability.jpg

Disruption from above [Nicholas Carr]
Six questions for Patricia Seybold on outside innovation [Principled Innovation]
Japanese workers have an incentive to be creative [American Public Media]
The Department of Doing [Bob Sutton]
Can anyone be a designer? [Fast Company]
Turkey should prioritize innovation [Turkish Daily News]
James G. March: Ideas as Art [Harvard Business Review]
The UK needs to encourage "hidden" innovation [Financial Times]
U.S. shows signs of net addiction [BBC News]

[infographic: Wal-Mart implements sustainable business practices]

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How the X Prize for Genomics will revolutionize medicine and research

Crick%20Watson%20DNA.jpg The X Prize Foundation is teaming with a wealthy Canadian geologist to offer $10 million to any team that can completely decode the genes of 100 people in 10 days. As an encore, the winning team will be paid $1 million more to decode another 100 people's genes, including a number of wealthy donors and celebrities (e.g. Google co-founder Larry Page, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and junk bond king Michael Milken). The idea, of course, is to stimulate public interest in DNA research and usher in the dawn of the era of personalized medicine, in which drugs and diets are expertly tailored to an individual's genes. In short, the Archon X Prize for Genomics hopes to do for DNA research what the Ansari X Prize did for commercial space travel:

"The $10 million cash prize has been created to revolutionize the medical world. The launch was attended by visionaries and entrepreneurs from around the globe who recognize the significance and impact that the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics will have on the fields of medicine and research.

Scientists know that a map of our genome holds boundless potential, ranging from identifying our susceptibility to disease to discovering cures for cancer. But since 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick concluded that DNA contained the "stuff of life," only a handful of human genomes have been mapped. In fact, it still takes many months and millions of dollars to sequence a single genome.

Understanding our genomes may help delay or even prevent disease. For those suffering from genetic illnesses, personal genetic information can determine which medicines will drive their disease into remission without negative side-effects."

[image: Watson and Crick]

A wheelchair powered by the human brain

As Technology Review points out in a fascinating piece about the emerging field of "neural prosthetics," it might be possible one day to pilot a wheelchair with the power of the human brain:

"Paralyzed patients dream of the day when they can once again move their limbs. That dream is making its way to becoming a reality, thanks to a neural implant created by John Donoghue and colleagues at Brown University and Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems.

In 2004, Matthew Nagle, who is paralyzed due to a spinal-cord injury, became the first person to test the device, which translated his brain activity into action. Nagle's experience with the prosthetic was exciting but very preliminary: he could move a cursor on a computer screen and make rough movements with a robotic arm. Now Donoghue and team are pushing ahead with their quest to develop a commercially available product by testing the device in two new patients, one with a neurodegenerative disease and the other suffering the effects of a stroke."

[image: BrainGate Neural Interface System]

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Steven Johnson discusses The Ghost Map

In preparation for the launch of his new book The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson (author of Emergence and Everything Bad is Good For You) has put together a brief 6-minute video on YouTube. The book gives a highly contextualized account of the 1854 cholera outbreak on London's Broad Street, offering insights into how the epidemic forever changed science, cities and the modern world. In a recent review, BoingBoing lavished praise on the book, calling it "a magnificent combination of science thriller, cultural history, and celebration of cartography as a powerful tool to help us understand the dynamics of urban life." Anyway, on his personal blog, Steven Johnson offers a brief summary of The Ghost Map:

In many ways, the story of Broad Street is all about the triumph of a certain kind of urbanism in the face of great adversity, the power of dense cities to create solutions to problems that they themselves have brought about. So many of the issues that define the modern world today -- the runaway growth of megacities, environmental crises, fears of apocalyptic epidemics, digital mapping, the need for clean water, urban terror, the rise of amateur expertise -- are there, in embryo, in the Broad Street outbreak.

So The Ghost Map is in part a disease thriller, with some genuinely spooky and unsettling narrative turns. But it also widens its focus to tell the history of London's sewer system, the evolutionary history of bacteria, the biological and cultural roots of the miasma theory, the bizarre waste management techniques of Victorian society, and so on. It is the story of ten days in London in 1854, but it's also an attempt to tell that story at three different scales of experience: from the point of view of the humans living through it, but also from the point of view of the cholera itself, and the city.

Seven ways to light a fire without a match

Fire%20without%20match.jpg In the event that North Korea ever launches nukes against the Western seaboard of the U.S., this article from Field & Stream magazine on Seven Ways to Light a Fire Without a Match may come in handier than you expect. One of the techniques for lighting a fire without a match is a pump drill invented by the Iroquois Indians:

"The Iroquois invented this ingenious pump drill, which uses a flywheel to generate friction. The crossbar and flywheel are made of hardwood; the spindle and fireboard are made from softwoods (as in the hand drill). Step One: Bore a hole in the center of a rounded piece of hardwood and force the spindle in so that it fits tightly. Select wood for the crossbar and bore a larger hole that will slide freely on the spindle. Step Two: Attach the crossbar to the top of the spindle with a leather thong or sturdy shoelace. Step Three: Wind up the flywheel so that the thong twists around the spindle, then press down. The momentum will rewind the crossbar in the opposite direction. Repeat until friction creates a glowing ember."

[image: Field & Stream]

October 19, 2006

The 18 mistakes of start-ups

Paul%20Graham%202.jpg Paul Graham has described in detail the 18 mistakes that start-ups typically make, pointing out that all 18 of these mistakes are emblematic of a greater problem: "In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that."

According to Graham, many start-ups make the mistake of launching with only a single founder. Some choose a sub-optimal location (i.e. some location that is not Silicon Valley or any other entrepreneurial hub) or select a marginal niche for the business. Others fail by attempting to base the business on a "derivative" idea:

"Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified. [...]

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.

So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?"

[image: Paul Graham]

Never make the coffee... and beware the innovation consultants

The%20Office.jpg In a humorous piece for the Guardian Unlimited, Guy Browning highlights 20 tips for succeeding in the modern workplace. Rule #1, of course, is "never make the coffee," A close second is "ignore all e-mails." In the piece, Browning also finds time to skewer consultants:

"A consultant is someone in business with an ego so large it takes more than one company to support it. At a personal level, consultants work either by trying to inspire fear or trying to be friends. It's in trying to be friends with you that they inspire the most fear. The acid test of a consultant is whether they can say, "Everything's fine, we'll be off then." No real consultant can. Instead they will sell you a project that costs just enough to keep your profits suppressed to a level that requires further remedial consultancy."

As well, Browning suggests that, instead of writing a new report, it's often best to recycle an older report:

"Reports are the office equivalent of cones in the road. They are not actually work themselves but they are a big, clear sign that real work might be done at some stage. In the meantime, they slow everything down and cause anger and annoyance all round. The quickest and easiest way to write a report is to change the names in the last report. When you do this, be aware that there will always be one name that escapes your changes and that will be in the sentence,.."

[image: The Office]

Who's afraid of a little ol' meme?

Memetic%20Hazard.jpg On Flickr, Arenamontanus has posted a photoset of 19 warning signs from the future, including a few personal favorites, like Memetic Hazard. Memes, of course, were first written about by Richard Dawkins in his breakthrough 1976 book The Selfish Gene: "The term meme... refers to a unit of cultural information transferrable from one mind to another. Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information)."

With this as context, I suppose you can interpret the black lightbulb in various ways, perhaps as a warning that particularly powerful ideas and thoughts have the potential to be passed on to others in the immediate area. Or, the sign might be a warning about memetic drift (the tendency for memes to mutate as they propagate from person to person), memetic inertia (the tendency for memes to propagate in coordination with particularly annoying mnemonic devices), or even memetic association (the tendency for memes to herd together).

[image: Memetic Hazard]

The Cleopatra Effect

If you can picture Elizabath Taylor as Cleopatra and Richard Burton as Marc Antony from the 1963 Hollywood film Cleopatra, then you'll enjoy the following... Hugh Macleod of the always-entertaining Gaping Void blog introduces his readers to the Cleopatra Effect:

"I remember when I was a kid watching this old black & white movie about Cleopatra. I can't remember the name of the movie, but one scene always stuck with me:

Cleopatra is walking through the palace, when she's suddenly stopped by the sound of pretty music, being played off in the distance. She follows the sound of the music through the palace, till eventually she finds one of her courtiers in the garden, playing the harp.

"What pretty music," she says to the courtier. "You play beautifully."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," says the courtier, obviously flattered.

"I would love to play music like that," says Cleopatra. "Do you think you could teach me?"

The courtier, now that he's feeling flattered, tries to win even more of her favor.

"Well, yes," he gushes. "I'm sure a Queen as talented as you in so many things, would be talented at this as well."

"Oh, good," says Cleopatra, obviously delighted. "Here's the deal. You teach me to play the harp. If I cannot play as well as you within one month, I will have you flogged. If I cannot play as well as you within three months, I will have you executed."

The courtier's face turns white. Cleopatra gives the courtier an evil smirk and then turns and walks off.

Anyway, the next time the boss happens to be passing by your office or cubicle, notices you engaged in a particularly innovative undertaking, and asks you to design an innovation strategy for the entire company, maybe you'll think of The Cleopatra Effect.

[image: Cleopatra]

The first full-color animated holograms

XYZ Imaging has developed the world ’s first full-color animated hologram, that not only appears in full vivid color, but also has a very realistic 3D effect. (If you check out the company's website, there's a realistic hologram of the head of a Terminator T-800 on the home page) Apparently, the hologram can even be made to playback up to 6 seconds of real-time video or animation as you walk past it.

[video: YouTube.com]

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With this innovation, you'll be a baseball fan forever

Eternal%20image%20coffin.jpg With hype around this year's World Series starting to build, it's only logical that various stories of baseball innovation are finding their way into the blogosphere. (At the end of September, for example, Clayton Christensen's Innoblog posted about the Oakland A's as an innovation dynasty.) Yesterday, Yahoo! News posted a story about the efforts of Eternal Image, a public company engaged in the design, manufacturing, and marketing of customized designer caskets and urns, to create customized coffins and urns with official Major League Baseball logos on them:

"Baseball fanatics won't have to leave behind their beloved teams when they finally go to that big stadium in the sky. Instead, they'll soon be able to rest in peace inside a coffin with team colors and insignia. Major League Baseball has a marketing deal with a company called Eternal Image. It'll put team logos on caskets and urns. The effort begins next season with the Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, Phillies, Cubs and Dodgers. It could eventually include all 30 teams.

Each urn will be stamped with a message saying Major League Baseball officially recognizes the deceased as a lifelong fan of that team. After starting with baseball, Eternal Image hopes to branch out by making similar deals with the NFL, the NHL and NASCAR."

What die-hard [insert name of team here] fan wouldn't want to be buried in a coffin with his or her favorite team's logo on it? If the Egyptian pharoahs could be buried with all kinds of trinkets for the after-life, there's no reason why a Yankees fan can't go to the grave immortalized forever in Yankee pinstripes. In the first 12 hours after the Yahoo! News article appeared, I wasn't able to access the Eternal Image website - perhaps a sign of overwhelming customer demand?

[image: The Phillies funeral urn]

The Society to Protect Malcolm Gladwell

About a week ago, Tom Scocca of the New York Observer posted a searing anti-Malcolm Gladwell piece, accusing the "nimbus-haired reporter" and author of The Tipping Point and Blink of shoddy research, self-referential commentary, over-generalizations, and amateurish stereotyping. In fact, writes Mr. Scocca, "at times, lately, Mr. Gladwell sounds like someone trying to tell other people about something he read once in a Malcolm Gladwell piece, after a few rounds of drinks."

What do you think? Have we passed The Gladwell Point? Or is this just a case of media schadenfreude, given Mr. Gladwell's tremendous success? After all, The Tipping Point is still the #1 paperback business bestseller in America after nearly six years in print. I think it's time to form a society for the protection of Malcolm Gladwell.

[image: Malcolm Gladwell]

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October 18, 2006

Innovation inspired by nature

In a special thought leader interview for strategy + business magazine, Janine Benyus discusses her groundbreaking work in the emerging field of biomimicry. According to Benyus and other adherents of biomimicry, corporations can become more profitable and more innovative simply by following the example of Mother Nature:

"By emulating the patterns and designs and strategies in plants, animals, and ecosystems, they argue, corporations can become cleaner, leaner, and more consistently innovative. For the past decade, one of the most influential voices in this school of thought has been that of Janine Benyus.

Ms. Benyus was the first to identify the nascent discipline, which she dubbed “biomimicry” and galvanized with her groundbreaking 1997 book of the same name. Biomimicry, writes Ms. Benyus, is “the conscious emulation of life’s genius.” To practice biomimicry, a technologist must turn away from conventional “heat, beat, and treat” industrial processes, and study “what works in the natural world, and more important, what lasts.”

As Benyus explains in the interview, the biomimicry movement has already caught on with designers, engineers and architects. Now, senior executives are warming to the idea of growing sustainable businesses that are in sync with the surrounding environment. In fact, a Biomimicry Guild established in 1998 now has more than 200 clients, including many FORTUNE 500 companies.

[image: Janine Benyus at PopTech]

October 18 Innovation Linkage

IBM%20Blue%20Brain.gif

The art of commercialization [Guy Kawasaki]
Do you believe in innovation magic? [Idea Flow]
The new Business 2.0 blog ecosystem [Erick Schonfeld]
James Bond drives a Ford in "Casino Royale'' [Commander Bond]
Reducing fear is the killer app [Creating Passionate Users]
Thoughts on to-do lists [metacool]
Chinese B-school students must learn golf [AP]
The good news about GooTube [Wired]
Russia gets serious about innovation [RIA Novosti]
Bunny Fight Club [Starz.com]

[image: The Blue Brain Project]

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A tribute to men and women who design

Tribute%20to%20design.jpg A Tribute to the Men and Women Who Design is a 28-minute film highlighting the importance in America of design and aesthetics in everyday life. Somewhat surprisingly, the film was made nearly 50 years ago, way back in 1958. The rise of the modern design aesthetic, apparently, had its roots in the 1950s.

The 10 principles of innovation

Langdon%20Morris.jpg Permanent Innovation, the new book from innovation guru Langdon Morris, documents in comprehensive detail how to set up a permanent innovation program within any organization. As Morris explains, permanent innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value on a continuous basis. This is only possible, though, by making innovation a matter of strategy, method and habit. Along the way, the book offers a detailed look at 10 key innovation principles:

(1) Innovation is essential to survival, and all innovation is strategic;

(2) There are four types of innovation (e.g. incremental, breakthrough);

(3) The longer you wait to begin innovating, the worse things will get;

(4) Innovation is a social art - it happens when people interact with one another;

(5) Innovation without methodology is just luck;

(6) All four strategic innovation viewpoints are critical to success;

(7) Great innovations begin with great ideas;

(8) Ready, aim, aim, aim, fire;

(9) Prototype rapidly to accelerate learning;

(10) There is no innovation without leadership.

Permanent%20Innovation%20book.jpg The book has already picked up some glowing reviews, such as this one from Amy Rowell of Innovate Forum:

"Not quite sure how this one managed to slip by me – but it sure looks like a winner! Released last month, Permanent Innovation: The Essential Guide to the Strategies, Principles and Practices of Successful Innovators, is a new book that explores the innovation strategies employed by the likes of Toyota, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart. It also includes dozens of specific ideas that can help people to make their own organizations more innovative."

The book is available as a free PDF download from the Permanent Innovation website.

[image: Langdon Morris]

The new Chinese entrepreneurs

China%20entrepreneurs.jpg

Over the summer, a group of fifteen Harvard Business School researchers and faculty members visited China to get a better sense of the country's entrepreneurial climate and to understand some of the fundamental changes taking place within the Chinese economy. The changes taking place in China are impressive, to say the least:

"First of all, it is impossible to grasp the scale of the transformation without seeing it with one's own eyes. The physical, economic, and social immensity of the change is impressive to say the least. A second conclusion is that it is impossible to comprehend the vibrancy, energy, and enthusiasm without experiencing it firsthand."

The visiting Harvard Business School delegation also learned about Chinese "sea turtles":

"We heard the phrase "sea turtle" a few times. These are the Chinese who spend significant time abroad and then come back to China to "lay eggs," that is, start new ventures. In addition to bringing with them insights, skills, attitudes, tangible assets, and contacts that are useful to their ventures, the government has created incentives to attract them back to China, and is more lenient or flexible regarding new venture formation."

[image: HBS Working Knowledge]

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The Enviga Innovation

Enviga%20cans.jpg Coca-Cola and Nestlé plan to launch an innovative new drink called Enviga in test markets in the Northeast US starting November 6. The carbonated green tea-based beverage is supposed to be able to burn as many as 50-100 calories per 12-ounce can, making it a potential "miracle drink" for men and women trying to lose weight. Until the product actually appears on supermarket shelves, though, beverage analysts are skeptical whether Enviga actually works as well as it claims to work. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the R&D for the product was conducted in a super-stealth environment:

"The science behind Coke’s claims — a study funded by the Coke-Nestle partnership and led by a researcher at the University of Lausanne, near Nestle’s Swiss headquarters — depends partly on research that hasn’t been publicly released or formally reviewed by other scientists. But Coke says the study, along with similar research in recent years, supports its assertion about calories burned as a result of drinking Enviga.

The study included only healthy, normal-weight men and women from the ages of 18 to 35 — people who, by definition, don’t need to lose weight. The researchers measured the energy expenditure of the 32 participants by putting them in a metabolic chamber, a small room where scientists can determine subjects’ metabolic rate by measuring the heat released from their bodies. The subjects drank a placebo and then drank Enviga, along with eating a healthy diet and doing some exercise, Coke said. Coke says it didn’t measure the drink’s effects on overweight people."

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what the combined heft of the Coke and Nestle marketing machine can do to make this drink as tantalizing as possible to the average consumer. (If Oprah loves it, Coke could have a blockbuster new hit on its hands) The raft of new drink offerings from Coke - like Coke Blak and now Enviga - shows that Coke is finally getting serious about innovation as a way to keep up with current market darling Pepsi.

[image: The Enviga cans]

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Microsoft to spend $7.5 billion on R&D next year

steve%20ballmer%202.jpg

The innovation arms race is on. According to CNNMoney.com, Microsoft will spend close to $7.5 billion on R&D in fiscal year 2007, $1.3 billion more than previously committed, in order to keep up with competitors like Google:

"The $7.5 billion figure is a significant increase on the investment Ballmer announced in May of $6.2 billion, a figure which came as a surprise to the market.Microsoft is under pressure to show investors it can compete with Google and Yahoo in the Internet search business. Ballmer said for years Microsoft had faced no competition to recruit staff. "Finally, we have some competition [from Google] for talent," he said.

Ballmer, who was invited to talk on the subject of business innovation, said over half the staff Microsoft hired to work in research and development in the United States were recruited from abroad and included 1,000 Russian speakers. The company was also committed to research laboratories abroad and its centers in India and China would be particularly important for recruiting talent in the future."

[image: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer]

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October 17, 2006

Total recall

CNN reports that a number of researchers - including the MyLifeBits team at Microsoft and a group of former MIT doctoral students - are working to develop a back-up brain:

"Have you ever wished for a backup brain -- a device that could remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments? Computer engineer Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, is working on just such a mechanism. He's trying to devise what amounts to a digital diary, a searchable database that contains digitized versions of nearly everything in his life. "As a research project, the idea is being obsessed with recording everything I can," said Bell, the head researcher in a project called MyLifeBits for nearly five years at Microsoft."

Total%20Recall.jpg Imagine having total memory recall:

"The quest is to essentially build a surrogate memory. Something that's as good as my own memory, that I can use it as a supplement, and will remember everything that I should have remembered, that came to my ears, eyes, whatever," Bell said of his experiment. "The interim objective is to make this kind of system available, to gradually put these kind of capabilities in all of our PCs." Conceivably you could someday be able to rehear every conversation you had when you were 20 and search for all photographs of your cousin John."

[image: MyLifeBits]

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The future of medicine

future%20medicine.jpg

Innovation guru and futurist Jim Carroll has posted an excellent 2-page PDF (Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Healthcare) that highlights the major innovation trends within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries:

"Get ready for bio-connectivity, skills wars, knowledge obsolesence and bio-informatics, not to forget healthcare stores. Those are just of the few trends I've been covering in some recent health care keynotes, both within the health care, medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

I find that a lot of people simply don't understand the massive depth of change that is set to sweep the industry; people are focused on the current big issues (and there are big issues); but they aren't really thinking just how far more challenging things are set to become."

If you're looking for a big-picture overview of what's happening in the world of healthcare and medicine, it's worth taking a look.

[image: Future Medicine]

What is the link between leadership and innovation?

Michael%20Useem.jpg At a recent Wharton roundtable discussion on leadership and innovation, Wharton management professor Michael Useem moderated a broad-ranging discussion on the link between leadership and innovation. Panelists included C. Robert Henrikson, chairman and CEO of global insurer MetLife; Alex Gorsky, head of Pharma North America and CEO of Novartis North America; Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas; Connie K. Duckworth, retired partner and managing director at Goldman Sachs; and New York City developer Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Sherwood Equities. While some of the panelists chose to focus on a particular industry, others offered insights that are applicable to a wide range of different industries and markets. For example, Seth Waugh explained why it's important to embed innovation into the DNA of any company:

"Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas, cited culture as a critical factor in promoting innovation. Business leaders, he said, create this environment by offering incentives for workers who innovate and by making it clear that innovation is expected. "You must have people with that hunger to always learn, who are always open and who think about things in a different way. You always have to reinvent yourself tomorrow."

In addition to exploring the link between leadership and innovation, the panelists also weighed in on the pace of innovation in India and China and shared a few insights on how to make innovation an integral part of a management career. At the Knowledge @ Wharton site, it's possible to download audio from the panel discussion or play audio directly from your PC.

[image: Wharton professor Michael Useem]

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The Googleplex will now be powered by the sun

Google%20solar%20power%20HQ.jpg

The folks at Google continue to surprise us in strange and wondrous ways. The latest announcement is that the company plans to use solar power for up to 30% of its energy needs at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley. Gizmodo has the details:

"Googleplex is going solar. Well, part of it is. The Mountain View-based company announced its plans to power part of its HQ using solar panels. 9,200 solar panels to be exact. The search engine giant hopes to set an example for corporate America and said it will power up to 30% of its facilities using the good ol' sun. Google wouldn't go into detail as to how much the project will cost them, but we do know it's being headed by Pasadena-based El Solutions."

The full story of Google's conversion to solar power is available from The Official Google Blog:

"Soon we plan to begin installation of 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels at our Mountain View campus. This project will be the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S., and we think it's one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. The panels will cover the roofs of the four main buildings of the Googleplex, and also those of two additional buildings across the street. There will also be a portion of this installation on new solar panel support structures in a few parking lots. The amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about 1,000 average California homes. We’ll use that electricity to power several of our Mountain View office facilities, offsetting approximately 30% of our peak electricity consumption at those buildings."

[image: Gizmodo]

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Practical advice for the new CEO

Advice%20for%20the%20new%20CEO.gif

Tom McMahon of 4-Block World has provided a highly entertaining visual diagram of the strategic options available to any new CEO. If your organization is decentralized, then decentralize everything! If your organization has outsourced a number of key functions, then bring them back in-house!

[graphic: 4-Block World]

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China hosts social innovation conference

Chinese%20social%20innovation.jpg

Not only is China attempting to catch up to the West in terms of technological innovation, now it looks like China is taking the lead when it comes to social innovation as well:

"One of the world's first-ever conferences on social innovation opened Tuesday [October 17] in Beijing. The theme of the conference is how societies can hasten the innovation of new solutions to problems such as ageing, climate change, unemployment and ill health... It brings together representatives from over 15 countries, including Brazil, India, Italy, Denmark, the US and Mexico. In addition, four senior ministers from China and senior officials from the UK and the mayors of many British and Chinese cities from Beijing to Sheffield also take part."

For more on the conference, check out the social innovation website created by the British Council, which is helping to co-sponsor the event.

[image: International Conference of Social Innovation]

A Q&A with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad%20Yunus.jpg

Time.com has posted a brief Q&A with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who helped to pioneer a system of microcredit financing for the world's poorest nations. In the TIME magazine interview, the Bangladeshi economist explains how he came up with the microcredit idea, discusses why the program has met significant opposition in the Muslim world, and shares a few insights into the innovative nature of the microcredit program:

"I would say that I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out. [...] 58% of the poor who borrowed from Grameen [the bank established by Yunus] are now out of poverty. There are over 100 million people now involved with microcredit schemes. At the rate we're heading, we'll halve total poverty by 2015. We'll create a poverty museum in 2030."

[image: Muhammad Yunus]

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