InnovationCreation

Christopher Alexander has a set of books, all of which have super info for innovation, especially about learning design patterns and how to bring design elements together.

These three are a set that were written together: The timeless way of building, easy to get through; The Oregon experiment, also easier to get through; A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction... Thick thick book with the really good stuff. Fortunately all the books are written, on purpose, to be read where you want; Christopher suggests reading the header titles/section tiles straight through then go back to where you want to dig deeper.



Karen McGrane recommended these books during a talk at Do It With Drupal (2008 in New Orleans) as a way to learn about design patterns: Creating Usable Websites: Do It With Drupal!

Labels: book, deign patterns, drupal, ideas, innovation

In the past I have mentioned the need to practice brainstorming (The terrible word of "Brainstorming"). It is important to practice, like anything you do, otherwise you will loose skill or never learn any new ones.

So to really get in the habit you need to practice regularly. This means finding opportunities to practice generating (the brainstorming part) ideas. The opportunity can be everyday issues. I recommend finding something simple at first; don't overwhelm yourself with the major things yet ("Increase revenue by 50% in Q4"...:) Also, don't stress out. It is just practice... But do try to push yourself a bit every time you work through a problem/idea generation session.

Here are some working rules:

• State your issue or problem and be clear in the issue/problem statement.



• Number all your ideas as you capture them; this is good to help know where you are in the generation process (have I reached 100 ideas?) and it helps when refering to a specific idea.



• Aim for a specific number of ideas in a set amount of time, just to set a goal. It's like setting your marathon time goal; you need something to target.



• Do not evaluate the ideas as you capture them. Just capture them. Evaluation is a different activity.



• Build on captured ideas to create new ideas.

Fast Company has an article (Seven Secrets to Good Brainstorming) with the rules expanded a bit and with much better copy around why the rules are needed.

Ok, here is my first challenge.

Crumbs on the floor irritate me. It just bugs me. Some foods crumb (is crumb a verb?) more than others. Couscous is a major crumb generating food (by definition!). Those folks with any kids knows the truth about crumbs: kids are super crumb generators! My seven year old son somehow always misses eating over his plate and food crumbs hit the floor like steel to a magnet: fast. So my problem is personal (should I loosen up a bit?). To help define my problem a bit more: The crumbs bug me because I walk around the house in socks and crumbs that collect on my feet feels all wrong to me.

So the problem can be looked at several ways: How can I stop crumbs from happening, How can I prevent them from sticking to my feet, or how do I make the crumbs just "disappear"?

1. Just clean up the crumbs.



2. Serve crumb free food.



3. Have person who make the crumbs clean them up.



4. Have a crumb eating pet.



5. Have a floor with a grate in it to allow crumbs to fall through to the crumb pit.



6. Have vents on floor that suck up crumbs as they fall.



7. Let the crumbs fall on the floor and build up the floor to a solid footing.



8. Have another person clean up the crumbs to remove self from the annoyance.



9. Have a strong suction pull crumbs off the food as it is eaten.



10. Have a plate that has ability to make crumbs stick the the plate.



11. Have a built in sucker on the plate for the crumbs.



12. Buy a Roomba robot cleaner.



13. Have a device worn by person while eating food that sucks crumbs up as food enters mouth.



14. Put down a crumb matt to catch them all up.



15. The fork has the crumb sucking device build in.



16. Waiter comes by after each bite and cleans up (is this what crumb waiter is?).



17. Floor has ability to absorb the crumb due to some fluid / crumb dissolving agent; crumbs disappear when they hit floor.



18. The floor is a conveyor belt that whisks the crumbs away.



19. Slats in the floor rotate every few minutes to dump crumbs in to the crumb pit.



20. Electrostatic crumb attraction device grabs crumbs as they fall.



21. Crumbs are cleaned up with a special "crumb duster", sort of like a feather duster for crumbs.



22. I have special crumb vacuums in my "socks".



23. After reading this list I am sure a few of you have some ideas to pitch! Remember, don't evaluate, just get those ideas flowing.

After reading this list I am sure a few of you have some ideas to pitch! Remember, don't evaluate, just get those ideas flowing.

Labels: experience, ideas, innovation, innovation tool, practice

When I hear the term "new media" I think of cool and interesting, possibly fun and something I want. Interestingly, the term new media is about media that is new today. In the mid 1990's there was a magazine called "NewMedia" which covered all the things happening on the web. At that time, the new media of the day was what ever was on the web. Any web site could claim to be new media. The ability to put up information on a network that allowed anyone in the world to see it was way different than the current media of the time; print, radio, TV.

Think about how you were informed of events in the agriculture industry in the late 1980's or early 1990's: newspapers, magazine, radio, TV. National Association of Farm Broadcasting, Farm Journal, or Feedstuffs anyone? These networks of media brought to you via snail mail or the airwaves info you needed to manage your agribusiness. Piles of papers and audio reports on the hour required you to pick and choose, pull info together, and make sense of it all manually.

As technology advanced, so did the ability of ag information to get to you in a streamlined fashion. Companies like DTN tapped into early electronic networks to bring all the information you needed straight to your computer (everyone remember those Apple II's?). While this still required some personal effort to integrate the information, electronic services started to remove the barrier to information access and understanding. This became the "new media" of the time. The same types of information yet presented and discovered in a whole different manner.

Today the new media has evolved to include finding and delivery of audio and video. While audio and video on the internet has been around since the mid 1990's, the process by which this type of media reached you has changed. No longer do you need to concern yourself with figuring out what to do with the files and how to listen. Service like DirectTV, Tivo and iTunes make obtaining shows like SwineCast or AgToday simple.

New media has also expanded on how information is presented. A great example is weather information: weather reports used to be static; look on the back page of the paper and see the 5 day forecast. Or, tune into a Brownfield Network radio station to get the recent weather report. Now weather reports come in all sorts of flavors, from old school media (the 5 day forecast in the Indianapolis Star still is handy), to the Weather Underground, the Weather Channel, and the US government's Aviation Weather Center. Each of these are pulling from a standard set of data sources and adding new methods for interpreting, understanding, and using weather information.

There are even services that supply, for a fee, weather information to speciality industries in a form that is delivered faster, provides usable analytics, and expert option on actions to take. Planalytics and Weather Services International are two such weather information service companies, offering to the ag industry tools to help make decisions. These methods of discovery, presentation, and understanding are the "new media" today.

Labels: cool, creativity, ideas, information, innovation, new media, software

There is great interest in Indiana on life sciences. Over the last five (or more?) years there have been many local groups formed (Indiana Health Indutries Forum, BioCrossroads, Indiana Biomedical Entrepreneur's Network, Indiana Life Sciences Initiative ) and some VC / grant money (21st Century Fund, Indiana Seed Fund, more...) raised to capitalize on hidden / latent resources and talent within the state's life sciences hot spots.



As part of the next phase in creating life sciences companies in Indiana there are educational resources being applied to help raise awareness and interest in starting companies within the research community. In Indianapolis this means the Indiana University School of Medicine and other schools/departments at IUPUI.



Recently there was a seminar series on IUPUI's campus on starting a life sciences company. Krieg Devault, an Indianapolis law firm, had a panel present information to IUPUI students, staff, and faculty on company legal structures, intellectual property, and venture capital. Good intentions possibly bored to death the audience... Yes, it is important to know about company structure (LLC vs S Corp vs C corp) and intellectual property. But these are dry topics at best and are not really the core of starting a company.



The real core of starting a company is: what is the product, how do I develop it to a product that can sell, who is going to buy it, and how to I find those people interested in buying my product? With out a product idea and an understandting of how to advance that product then corporate structure and patents on research techniques do not a company make.



How to help those really interested? Gather up a few people really interested in taking an idea to market, coach them regularly, give them some cash to get things done, and work through the idea development to product development.



One great model is Y Combinator. Paul Graham formed Y Combinator after selling Viaweb to Yahoo! His goal was to create a whole new, fresh approach to turning ideas into products by investing in small teams with low dollars and bringing great, smart people together for several months in a campus setting to build out multiple ideas. Sure, there was venture capital and legal structures were setup plus intellectual property was created (and protected). But the core of the Y Combinator purpose is to bring people together to percolate and filter out the ideas to usable products.



Can we create idea teams or idea camps that form around possible marketable ideas to prototype, explore, refine, weed out, and advance ideas to real things? What is needed?

• Space: idea teams need a space to mess around with their ideas and a place to tinker. Nothing big but it needs to be theirs for a few months.



• Small funds (initially $1,000 to $5,000). Money to help get stupid stuff, things to get ideas moving, prototyping tools, etc. More on money below.



• Coaches to poke and prod. Cheerleaders to encourage. There is always a need for optimists and idealists. And people that are able to bring out the left turn of an idea.



• Carrots to pull people out of their shell of research. Indiana is a conservative state when it comes to "risk" and "taking a chance". Y Combinator lives in communities where starting a company on a whim of an idea is normal. Indiana is not that place so there is a need to intice the hesitant.



• Action and speed. Take idea, prototype it, experiment on product, and get to a decision point (kill or move on) as quick as possible. Not every idea will work and not everyone is cutout to start companies. This needs to be discovered soonest and move on.

Small note on money: Yes, VC money is needed at some point but within a university research environment there is a need for small dollar funding to help move lab research to a possibility of a viable product. Examples include spending small dollars on market research and business plans, product development, mock-ups, prototypes, etc. Not all ideas are suited to being commercial products but there is no need to seek large scale dollars to discover this.

Labels: ideas, innovation, pipeline, startup

Got your attention didn't I? Yes, I have about 800+ mouse balls. Not real mice balls but those balls in computer mice that roll and tell the computer where to point the cursor. I just have the balls, not the whole mouse.

Huh? Why do I have them? I started collecting them in 2005 as part of an experiment on tapping the wisdom of the crowds (see James Surowiecki book ref). I worked in an innovation disruption group at large company and wanted to demonstrate some of what Surowiecki talked about.

Over the course of 12 months I accumulated from the corporate salvage area these computer mice balls, 20 or so at a time. I used them in much the same way James Surowiecki did with jelly beans except with, uh, mice balls. The balls worked, I got the point across, and the experiment helped refine the discussion on tapping the crowds (for more info on this group see crowd sourcing interview).

So here I am with all these balls... And I need to give them a new life. This new life focus is being driven by the fact that I now have two sons needing space for their things. Priorities ... :)

I am looking for ideas. What should I do with them? What worthy cause would benefit from these mouse balls?

Labels: balls, ideas, innovation

I love going to office supply stores. I think of Staples and Office Max as great places to browse for ideas and sparks of innovation. Why?

Close your eyes.

Think about paper.

Think about pens, pencils, envelopes, paper clip. If what you initially thought in your mind's eye was just paper, pens, pencils, envelopes, and paper clips then you most likely thought about bland items. Would you want to go shopping for these items if these were bland? No.

So to get people to want to come in to buy, papers, and other office stuff, designers take the pen and make it a PEN. Or paper turns into cool paper with fun pictures and colors. What about note pads? Note pads of interesting sizes, covers, and shapes. Just last week I found these cool little notepads from myndology.

The office supply industry has to take a common product and make it so remarkable that you just want to buy that neat little note pad right then and there. And they have to frequently create new designs of "old" things so that every time you visit there are new pens, pads, and paper.

Addendum: Sharpie is one of those common products. How do you take this mature common product and make it interesting and remarkable that makes you want to buy more every time you are in Staples? Here are some their tactics:

• Customized personalized Sharpies=> "Put this back where you found it!" or "Happy Halloween 2007" or your name can be printed on the side of each Sharpie. This is made interactive by the Sharpie website which shows you the custom pen before you say yes.
• Sharpie line extensions with new colors, pen sizes, pen point sizes, and function. You can get metallic colors, chisel pen tips, and markers for autographs or china.
• Co-branding: Dale Earnhardt, Jr's signature style Sharpie!
• Sharpie name product placement: Getting Sharpie on TLC :: Clean Sweep and other media places.
  

So, take an afternoon off and visit the office supply place. Take a note book (buy one there!) and note how many items that you take for granted are actually interesting products.

Labels: generators, ideas, innovation

Quick note to highlight some podcasts/blog posts that have been discussing communities.

• Doc Searls discusses the "Giant Zero": a statement to describe the hollow sphere as a "giant zero” that it puts every point at virtually zero distance from every other point. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1747.html
• HBR IdeaCast discusses "What Is Wikinomics?". http://media.libsyn.com/media/hbsp2/HBR_IdeaCast_31_1.mp3
• Chris Brogan's very interesting statement Meet People NOT Business Cards!

Labels: community, ideas, innovation, podcast