InnovationCreation

What is this? Is is a tennis ball at the end of a wooden broom handle that is used to quickly buff out scuffs on the floor of the Indianapolis, Indiana airport. The lady working the floors says this things works very well to remove floor scuffs and that all the cleaning staff have one of these. This is truly the implementation of "necessity is the mother of invention".

This week in the Financial Times there was an interview with Sir. James Black on "An acute talent for innovation". Sir. Black made an interesting statement with respect to pharmaceutical companies; “It’s a kind of obscenity. Very few of the drugs classified as blockbusters retrospectively were designed in that way. The people who know about markets can’t even predict what next year will do.”

Also of interest were his comments about small teams (25 people or less), that creativity is "not a method that can be learnt and taught", and there is no shortage of scientific talent, he says. “But [I am] much less optimistic about the managerial vision [of the pharmaceutical industry] to catalyse these talents to deliver the results we all want.”

The pending merger of Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical group, of Wyeth, highlights the focus of the need for "blockbusters", in the vein that a blockbuster is predictable. And yet the real energy in merging Pfizer and Wyeth will be spent on wringing out costs, making the two groups efficient, and corporate politics. One wonders if the real innovation of the Pfizer and Wyeth mereger will create is not within that combined company but outside, by those that can bring together those people "released" due to the merger, into small groups, and flying low under the radar.

My favorite line from the interview is "Anonymous peer review is the enemy of scientific creativity"... When something that is truly unique and market breaking, can you really have a peer review that is meaningful? Imagine the iPhone being reviewed by Motorola or Nokia before it was released. Peer review is great for that research or product improvement that is well known and incremental movement is being done. But in disruptive work there are few peers (hence the disruption).

“Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy...Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth – Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.” said Sir. Black

Labels: business, creativity, culture, deep thought, innovation, invention, pharmaceutical, trends

The end of the year is here and I am, like many of you, looking at the cross over to 2009 and 2010. To help you refresh and upgrade, here are my interesting resource picks to help refresh (re-boot?) (upgrade?).

• Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher S. Penn and John Wall provide insight and usable tools for marketing in the connected digital world. Check out the The Twitter Power Guide eBook and an audio Q&A session from a Seth Godin presentation on his book Tribes.
• Chris Brogan. Chris has insight on the community and social media "space". Hire Chris!. Actually, he said you could hire him or read his blog and get the same info for free!
• Read E-Myth. Michael Gerber wrote about being in your business more than 20 years. Great practical reading and coaching for your business.
• Edward Tufte on design. Edward Tufte, well known professor on design, has a series of books and courses that provide insight on design. He also has a very resourceful forum on his web site; check out the recent conversations on election results/data.
• Trends, everyone wants to be on the front of trends. While by no means the best or first, TrendWatching.com has material that can help provide inspiration and tickle your deep thoughts on the coming future. Good tip: Know why you are tracking trends. "Trend spotting can be fun. Makes you feel in the now and in the know. But that alone is not necessarily going to make you or your company more money. The way we see it, in a nutshell, is that tracking consumer trends is one way (and there are many ways!) to gain inspiration, helping you dream up profitable new goods, services and experiences for (and with) your customers. So trend watching should ultimately lead to profitable innovation."
• Check out Springwise for new business ideas. Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. They ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.
• Folio...Find out what the world of the print media (magazine and newspaper) is doing. Yes, you will see info on layoffs and sell-offs in the print industry. But you will also see what those companies are trying to do. It was via Folio that I discovered the blog post by Jessica DaSilva, at the time an intern at the The Tampa Tribune. She wrote a post about the Tampa Tribune's shift in strategy and the message to the staff “People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” editor in chief Janet Coats said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Have a Happy New Year!

Labels: business, culture, deep thought, design, environment, experience, new media, social media, startup, trends

Just so you don't think I was a bit off on writing something about crumbs, I found these bits of crumb related items:

• From Patent 7,375,141, Soluble carob, The depolymerization may be carried out in a reactor provided with a mixing system suitable for handling fine powder, that is to say powder with a particle size of around 20 to 200 .mu.m, so as to prevent the formation of crumbs. As nonlimiting examples, mention may be made of LODIGE-type reactors, and ribbon mixers.



• Patent 7,353,952, Insulated compartmented lunch bag, Additionally, any crumbs or stains from eating are contained on the interior side or surfaces of the major compartment 120. Thereafter, major compartment 120 may be closed to hide the said crumbs or stains therein and out of sight.
  

and two I thought were interesting:

• Space Station Christmas, She looked at the swarm of crumbs and saw why NASA packaged crumbly foods in bite-sized morsels -- or avoided them altogether.



• Astronauts wrap up space station work, Reisman, meanwhile, can’t wait to get back to his wife, Simone Francis, and, to a lesser degree, their cat Fuzzy. He’s also looking forward to “a good slice of pizza” and some bread, banned from the space station because of crumbs. He’s had to settle for tortillas in orbit.
  

And if you really want to learn more, NASA Facts: Space Food, has some info on crumbs.

Thanks to Kim Williams, Amy Stark, and Lorraine Ball for their additions to the crumb list.

Ok, brainstorming, the kids way...

I spent last week at Camp Invention at Pike Township's Fishback Elementary School. This is a program by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, run all over the country, to provide kids age 7 to 12 with hands-on activities, brainstorming, experimentation, and unbelievable action. My involvement was to help the kids during the invention time.

All the kids (and parents) were told to bring a "take apart" item, from which they would, over the course of the week, build an invention. The younger kids (ages 7 to 10) were to think about some job or activity that really bugged them and come up with an invention to do the job or make the activity fun. The invention did not have to actually work, they just had to build a concept.

The older kids had to build a Rube Goldberg device, in a team setting, that would break a water ballon on a target, using at least four steps, two simple machines, a part from each of the team member's take apart item, and once the machine was started its process no additional human assistance could be given.

Some interesting observations about the kids:

• Kids will try anything. One boy insisted on using white glue to hold together material (LOTS of glue:) even though nothing was sticking (the items were too heavy for the glue. So he used more glue! One team of older kids found some foam tubing to make a marble launching system as part of their balloon breaking system, even though the foam tubing was not originally part of the supply kit.



• Older kids start to get constrained by implied teacher direction but younger kids don't let directions get in the way. Some of the direction by teachers and coaches seemed to bind the teams in a design direction they may or may not have realized was needed. I found my self imposing my view of design on the kids works by the way I responded to how a kid would build something.



• Scope creep occurs even in kids projects! The older kids rules received a few implied rules: the balloon had to go through the air (fly) and the target could be horizontal or vertical. These new implied rules came out during a discussion on what is to happen. When one kid asked about if the balloon has to fly through the air, a teacher said "yes" even though it was not stated on the rules.

It was a fun week and the kids learned some things. Hopefully they will get to practice their abilities to make things as school starts up in the next few weeks.

Pics and video of inventions.

Labels: creativity, deep thought, innovation, innovation tool, invention, thinking

After my post on spaces to think, do design, and innovate, Mark Henson, chief imagination officer for sparkspace, sent me a note with info on other design/innovation/thinking spaces in the USA and a few outside the USA that I had not mentioned.

What makes a great space? The space certainly has to be inviting, big enough for your team, not be too distracting yet inspiring for you to want to be there. Some adjectives from personal observation: open, light, fun, inviting, playful, colorful, surprising, wants to be utilized, supportive.

• open: This means open space, freedom to move, not confined by a barrier (desks, walls, etc).
  
• light/colorful: Colors do play an important part in the way you feel and act within an environment. Having light from the outside helps people feel better.
  
• playful/fun: When people get together to design and think requires an element of fun. The space has to help support and even generate the opportunity for fun.
  
• wants to be utilized/inviting: The space must beg you to step in and participate.
  
• surprising: Spaces that surprise can help generate ideas or off shoots to ideas that might not have occurred in other settings. Surprise can come from what the space has (food, toys, gadgets, oxygen bars) or the way the space operates (super staff, space lay out, space reconfiguration).
  
• supportive: All spaces must have the basics that when they don't exist become annoying or inconveniences. Pen, paper, bathrooms, food, drink, ability to park, lunch / dinner spots away from the space, etc.
  

Labels: deep thought, design, innovation, space, thinking

About ten years ago I worked in the law division of a large company helping on the technology side of managing millions (millions and millions) of documents electronically and physically for legal discovery . The technology at the time used optical platters that each held about 6GB total and utilized a juke box to keep immediately available on line about 50 platters. There was a library of about 150 of these platters total, making this system have about 1TB of images and data taking up the space of several refrigerators and two tall book cabinets.

At some point a new company general counsel, Bob, started and he was inspecting the issues. He was a tech savvy guy and when he saw the platters and such, he was appalled. He said the data needs to get to hard drives and a better system. He said "in a few years I will be able to hold a 1TB hard drive in my hands".

Well it took about ten years: Bob now has that 1TB drive in his hands. Unfortunately, today the scale and scope of data within such a large organization means the a 1TB drive is no longer the vision it once was ("one place to hold ALL my data"); it is now the place all those emails and movie files get stored from one month for one person's activity.

Labels: deep thought, future, technology