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Interesting data on the rise/fall of music delivery - eye-wateringly ugly animated GIF - Tufte would have a field day with this. Small multiples or better, to show trends, sparklines or animated bar charts (reminding of EQ sliders) to make it much more obvious and easy to read.
Agree that looking at the data, in the midst of the rise of the CD, it would've been easy to think, as a music executive, that it would last forever.
But even James Bond knows CDs aren't forever. ;)

infographic FASTcompany music visualization trends innovation

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Maps made of Tyvek - means you don't have to worry about how you fold them, and can also use them as makeshift umbrellas, etc., in an emergency.

That's certainly one way to "Put to Another Use" (out of SCAMPER).

maps tyvek innovation

Great interview with my longtime innovation bud, Steve Shapiro. Really like Chris' interview approach, and great pre-/post-production work.

interview innovation poker chris_taylor actionable_books steve_shapiro personality_poker

Really interesting and relatively inexpensive marketing experiement- mobile "for the dogs" - you have to see the video to understand.

solomo gosolomo foursquare location_based mobile innovation

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Today's organizations operate in what the U.S. Army War College defines as a VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are constant realities in the 21st century. The military seeks to prepare for the challenges it will inevitably face by crafting realistic training scenarios and routinely integrating such activities into its ongoing operations. The goal is not to teach them what to think, but to enhance their ability to think critically and creatively about the myriad of contingencies posed by a fluid environment — in essence to teach them how to think.

In industry, 90% of time is typically devoted to executing business actions, and less than 10% is allocated for increasing organizational and individual capabilities through training. The military, on the other hand, spends as much time training as it does executing — even in the midst of high stress/high risk operations. A unit in Afghanistan or Iraq will not suspend its experiential training program while involved in combat operations, because its ability to cogently and creatively address future challenges is enhanced by an enduring commitment to improving people's competence and adaptability through experiential exercises, as well as actual experiences. But the real lesson for industry leaders is not simply that training is important. What's really valuable is how the military crafts its training opportunities.

The Army defines leadership as both accomplishing the mission and improving the organization. Permanently improving the organization requires the development of its human capital. The military believes you substantively improve people by improving their ability to adroitly address challenges in their environment. Therefore, we do not seek to confine people's thinking by restricting the solutions available to them, unless the proposed action violates any of these criteria: is it immoral, unsafe, unethical, or illegal?

leadership companies harvard ciritical_thinking creative_thinking creative_problem_solving us_army VUCA volatility uncertainty complexity ambiguity bernard_banks innovation

Multi-disciplinary, cross-industry thinking breeds better problem solvers. Interesting points made in this article. As TRIZ says - someone, somewhere, has already solved your problem. It's repackaging the previous solutions in a new application area, that creates innovation.

BTW - the TRIZ course we put together with Dr. Ellen Domb, and offer through IAIUniversity.com, is a great jump-start into TRIZ. If you have anything to do with engineering of any kind, you are missing out on massive opportunities in reducing time to market, driving down costs, eliminating complexity, and leap-frogging your competition, if you aren't aware of and actively using TRIZ.

"Amazon.com (AMZN) Vice-President James Hamilton's schooling in computer data centers started under the hood of a Lamborghini Countach.

Fixing luxury Italian autos in British Columbia while in his 20s taught Hamilton, 51, valuable lessons in problem solving, forcing him to come up with creative ways to repair cars because replacement parts were hard to find. "It's amazing how many things you can pick up in one industry and apply to another," Hamilton, who has also been a distinguished engineer at Amazon since 2009, says in an interview."

amazon cloud AWS james_hamilton multidisciplinary renaissance innovation problem_solving

In partnership with Armstrong Ceiling Systems, Johnson Controls (JCI), and other companies, Savage is demonstrating his vision in 31 locations around the world, including a Ford (F) factory in Detroit. In the pilots, the AC energy coming from the grid is converted to DC by one of Nextek's $1,550 power modules, which resembles a supersized power strip. The partner companies develop the equipment that delivers the DC power to devices throughout the home or business. Savage says he's planning to retrofit several homes in Detroit to run on DC as part of a green energy project run by a local nonprofit. Because DC is safe, some of the demonstration projects feature ceiling tiles with energy constantly coursing through them as if they were wires. They're safe to touch, so lights, ceiling fans, speakers, and other power-hungry items can simply be clipped into place.

Savage estimates that if DC systems take hold, they could cut the amount of energy needed nationally by 8.3 percent. Brian Fortenbery, program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, considers Savage one of the leaders of the DC movement. "There's a pretty sizable push [for DC] from vendors" who sell power supplies, he adds. American Power Conversion, which makes AC power supplies, counters that improvements in AC technology can raise efficiency without having to invest in new DC equipment.

innovation dc_current ac_current alternative_energy sustainability paul_savage nextek_power_systems AoS

A reader mentioned this list of tools - quite the collection. Great to see that iPads and iPhones, as well as other smartphones, and the increasing sophistication of web apps, is driving an explosion of options and competition in the thinking apps world.

"From smart phones to iPads to our various personal computers and data managers, we have all kinds of tools at our disposal to help us collect information for school work, business, personal use, and more. But even though it’s easy to find, that information still needs to be stored, saved and even shared in a way that’s also simplified."

innovation tools mindmapping collaboration visualization brainstorming

Now that is some counterintuitive innovation food for thought, eh?

"Try stuff out

A ceramics teacher announced on the opening day of the course that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
- From the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

If you always do things the same way, how are you ever going to find a better way? Try new approaches out and see what happens. Yes, you will fail once in a while, but failing is a great way—sometimes the only way—to learn."

mindset psychology alexander_kjerulf happy_hour_is_9_to_5 innovation mistakes

And now for something completely different - fascinating article on the serious decline of American creativity/innovation. Extending from childhood through to adults.

Absolutely agree with this article - see the same problems and opportunities every time we run an Innovation Workshop. Most adults have been taught specifically to give up on innovation - unless they are "designers" of some sort. That cedes far too much innovation energy to an incredibly small area of any given organization.

"Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way."

creativity education psychology Newsweek innovation crisis learning creative_problem_solving

"What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? They'd brief their agency and let them do it. Sorta. Welcome to corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions help good ideas get executed."

innovation stop groupthink design disaster

I met Geoff at the Front End of Innovation in 2009, when we were speaking on the same track at the event. Sharp guy, and he's definitely going places (such as the new position he accepted with Seek). Nice wrap-up and examination of the major players in the idea management and innovation management space.

innovation innovation_management idea_management tools geoff_zoeckler

Another example of "beyond microblogging" - streams, realtime, archive, etc.. Status is just one component.

"Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., most commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch corporation with 116,000 global employees. In April, 2010, Philips launched Connect Us —an innovative social community that unites tens of thousands of employees across the globe. Philips represents a commitment to innovation in Health and Well-Being for its customers and its employees, and Connect Us will live at the center of this commitment as a place for sharing ideas and improving up on practices to help make this a reality.

Learn more about Philips and its goals, plans and strategy for launching a global employee community below. "

socialcast philips innovation innovation_management

Incredibly brief clips of my presentation on Innovation Management, along with my other colleagues at Swissnex's Corporate Innovation Day. Great content - very enjoyable group.

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"What are the new approaches to Innovation in the areas of Design, Material Technologies, and Disruptive Technologies? What is the best way to make your corporate environment innovation-friendly? What can you learn from a start up innovation model?

To prosper under the difficult and always more competitive economic climate, big corporations need to consider the above questions.



The 2nd Boston Corporate Innovation Forum organized by swissnex Boston along with the Swedish and the Swiss American Chambers of Commerce on April 14 aimed to highlight the most recent trends in Innovation both from an Academic and Industrial perspective. The one-day seminar designed for professionals responsible for innovation within big companies gathered professors, managers, consultants and designers around four different topics:


Industrial Design driving Innovation:

Sebastian Fixson, Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations Management, Babson College.See his presentation

Harry West, CEO, Continuum.See his presentation


Organizing for Innovation (Teams, Culture and Process):

Jay Rao, Professor of Technology and Innovation, Babson College.See his presentation

Dan Keldsen, Principal, InformationArchitected.See his presentation



Materials Technologies Enabling Innovations:

Francesco Stellaci, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT.See his presentation

Per Baverstam, President, Baverstam Associates.See his presentation


Disruptive Technologies Driving Innovations:

Howard Anderson, William Porter Distinguished Lecturer, Behavioral Policy Science, MIT Sloan School of Management.See his presentation

Robyn Bolton, Manager, Innosight.See her presentation"

boston cambridge innovation swissnex dan_keldsen information_architected innovation_management

"We knew that most of P&G's best innovations had come from connecting ideas across internal businesses. And after studying the performance of a small number of products we'd acquired beyond our own labs, we knew that external connections could produce highly profitable innovations, too. Betting that these connections were the key to future growth, Lafley made it our goal to acquire 50 percent of our innovations outside the company. The strategy wasn't to replace the capabilities of our 7,500 researchers and support staff, but to better leverage them. Half of our new products, Lafley said, would come from our own labs, and half would come through them.

It was, and still is, a radical idea. As we studied outside sources of innovation, we estimated that for every P&G researcher there were 200 scientists or engineers elsewhere in the world who were just as good—a total of perhaps 1.5 million people whose talents we could potentially use. But tapping into the creative thinking of inventors and others on the outside would require massive operational changes. We needed to move the company's attitude from resistance to innovations "not invented here" to enthusiasm for those "proudly found elsewhere." And we needed to change how we defined, and perceived, our R&D organization—from 7,500 people inside to 7,500 plus 1.5 million outside, with a permeable boundary between them."

innovation P&G HBS open_innovation crowdsourcing

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Two great tastes that taste great together - Lego meets Renewable. Great to see them branching out.

lego kids energy renewable innovation