You can build anything with some junk you find laying around that
is what my Grandfather tells me. After seeing what length some very
cool innovators went to for a little cool air. You just have to love
the spirit behind this. [N
ot your Mom's A/C Unit]
Xytex Marks 30th Year of Creating Families through Innovation
Xytex Marks 30th Year of Creating Families through Innovation02/01/2005 09:20 PM Since 1975 fertility specialists worldwide have turned to Xytex
Corporation to provide donor sperm to help their patients have healthy
babies through assisted reproduction. [PRWEB Jan 26, 2005]
Frost & Sullivan Honors Gaiacomm International with 2004 Wi-Max Technology Innovation of the Year Award
Frost & Sullivan Honors Gaiacomm International with 2004 Wi-Max Technology Innovation of the Year Award09/25/2004 03:39 AM Las Vegas, Nev September 22, 2004 Frost & Sullivan will recognize
Gaiacomm International Corporation, a front-runner in the development
of fourth generation (4G) wireless delivery platform, as the recipient
of 2004 Wi-Max Technology Innovation of the Year Award at tonights
Excellence in Mobile Communications Awards Banquet. Gaiacomm receives
the Award for its determined efforts toward developing the innovative
Global Wireless Communications (GWC) Technology for advanced wireless
applications. [PRWEB Sep 25, 2004]
White roofs cut air-conditioning by 40%
White roofs cut air-conditioning by 40%04/16/2004 05:14 PM Painting our roofs and roads white would substaintially reduce the
cost (both monetary and environmental) of cooling our cities.
Cooler roofs come from changing the color of the material used for
roofing shingles. Most homes have to be re-roofed about every 20
years. Changing from a dark shingle (once traditional because it was
more "wood like") to a light-colored (titanium-based white or terra
cotta red) shingle can cut air conditioning costs by up to 40%.
Georgia has been a leader in pushing cool roofs, passing a state law
encouraging the shift. A few other states and regions also provide
incentives, and the federal government is considering adding heat
reflectivity requirements to housing regulations.
VIR Technologies, Inc. Develops Conditioning Battery Charger Outlets and Adapters
VIR Technologies, Inc. Develops Conditioning Battery Charger Outlets and Adapters05/31/2004 02:13 PM Intuitive Power Management (IPM) TM solutions recognize batteries as
chemical components in an electrical design, and enable conditioning
battery chargers to be designed into electrical outlets and outlet
adapters. [PRWEB May 15, 2004]
Sony's profits slide 23 per cent for year; expects bounce this year
turbulence.org/Works/1year/performancevideo.php track this
site | 4 links
Chinese New Year - 2002 is Year of the Horse
Chinese New Year - 2002 is Year of the Horse01/22/2004 10:20 AM ¨§ § ¨§ § .. Chinese New Year - 2002 is the Year
of the Horse .. Welcome to 4700 .. Monkey ..
4700
"From the shore, they look like tiny dots slowly making
their way out past the breakers. They're the software vendors
positioning themselves to catch the Enterprise RSS wave. My, that's a
lot of tiny dots...." [MoonWatcher]
RSS was big in 2004, but next year is going
to be something else. It's killing me that I can't say more, but I
know of two major library vendors that will make big announcements
about RSS in 2005. It's going to be a fun year!
Innovation and how not to.01/17/2003 12:29 PM I'm not sure what the magic formula for innovation is. I've read books
about it. Thought about it. Kept track of companies that seem to be
good at it. In an effort to assist everyone else who's been trying
to...
They provide program planning and evaluation consulting, training,
and Web-based evaluation tools to nonprofits and
funders across geographic and programmatic boundaries. They want to
make evaluation accessible to all nonprofits, so they have the
knowledge and skills to:
* Manage their internal matters,
programs, and services effectively; * Gain a stronger
understanding of what is happening in their programs, and how those
programs are affecting people and communities; and * Collectively
raise a strong voice in funding and policy decisions.
Innovation Awards
Innovation Awards01/03/2005 08:04 AM How do you quantify corporate imagination? Meet the top companies on
the first-ever Fast Company/Monitor Group Innovation Scorecard --
firms where new ideas are a competitive advantage.
iTunes Innovation, Please02/11/2004 09:46 PM While I bellyache about how Apple is too busy developing the iTunes
Music Store to add features to iTunes, I also want to point out that
some of the innovations that were added to iTunes as a part of the
Music Store could really improve iTunes as a whole. (Macworld via
MyAppleMenu)
Eric von Hippel has released a PDF version of his
book Democratizing
Innovation under a Creative Commons license. Hippel explores
the growing importance of innovation by users, and sharing of
innovations by users.
The book is dedicated to "all who are
building the information commons." Let's hope that's you!
Who Cares about Innovation?08/21/2004 08:54 PM Technologists are divided in some ways, but united by a common faith.
Stated simply, we worship innovation. Openist, deregulationist,
libertarian, or cyber-anarchist all take innovation as the goal. Our
battles are mostly internecine warfare, fights about how best to
achieve that common goal. But how often do we ask ourselves:...
Gmail innovation
Gmail innovation04/17/2004 04:47 AM Jeremy doesn't see the big deal with Gmail. "Oooh, a whole gigabyte.
Who cares?" he asks. Do you honestly expect to see other large (and
even mid-tier) web mail providers not increasing their offerings to
match or surpass those of Gmail? Without the competition from Gmail,
why would they have? Isn't extra space what their users pay them money
for? So we've got threading (not new) plus virtual folders (not new)
in a single mail interface. Well, stop the presses!...
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.
Being a consultant, the first question I asked them was about their
innovation process.
Specifically, I asked, how were customer needs, complaints and ideas
routed from the front-line customer contacts (the sales and marketing
people) to R&D. I got blank stares. New product ideas were
developed in the laboratory, it seems, and the only customer input was
from surveys and focus groups once the R&D people already had
something to show them.
An interesting discussion ensued. The gist of it was the company's
argument that customers, not being experts in furniture, don't know
what they want until they're shown something. If you were to ask them
what they want, they'd just respond "what can you offer me?" My
response was two-fold:
First, I said, you
shouldn't be asking people what furniture they want, because it's not a piece of
furniture that they're looking for, necessarily, it's the attributes and benefits that the
furniture offers that people want: Comfort, orthopedic support, mobility, prestige,
'workability'.
I described a company I had recently read about that had abolished
chairs. All the work surfaces had been raised to a comfortable
work-level while standing, and each employee had been given a
lightweight, personal 'memory cushion' to stand on that clipped to
their belt, and a pair of personal orthopedically-designed shoes
designed to make standing for long periods comfortable. In this
company, people were constantly on the move and an enormous amount of
time was spent booking meeting rooms. Now, the entire office could be
configured as ad hoc meeting areas, chairs (with their high attendant
cost and floor-space needs) could be eliminated, and mobility was
optimized. People even found that they were more productive standing
up
and constantly moving around. This was a company that understood
furniture was a means to an end, and the end for them was mobility and
flexibility, so they 'invented' tools (furniture, cushions and shoes)
that had those attributes.
Secondly, I added, you
need to use an iterative process to
elicit what people need, want and would use, a process Imperato
and Harari (in their book Jumping
the Curve)
call "Thinking the Customer Ahead". This process entails a combination
of visioning, asking a lot of 'what if' questions, and generally
helping customers imagine the future state of their own organizations
and needs, and how they would react if something new were suddenly
available. This is an inherently collaborati
ve
process, as much as it is an innovative one. Just as asking people
'what would you like to see on the company intranet?' is likely to
produce unimaginative (or no) answers, so would asking customers what
furniture they need. But if you helped them to envision what the
future
of their business would look like, and then worked from that vision to
ask an iterative set of 'what if' questions to elicit the kinds of
furniture they could imagine using effectively in that future
environment, and then collaboratively work with them to 'design' it,
then you'd be getting
somewhere.
As it turned out, the new product they had asked me to evaluate was
designed to solve a problem in the professional services industry that
had been widely talked about for a generation. Now they had an answer, but it was
an answer to yesterday's
problem, for which effective work-arounds had been found and were
still
evolving. And they had designed a product that had several critical
inconvenience factors that were show-stoppers, and which they could
have known about by spending more time talking to customers much
earlier in the process.
One of my creative suggestions to them, as a customer, was that if
they
really want to sell their top-of-the-line ergonomic chairs to CEOs,
they should give them away free to hotels and conference centres for
their meeting rooms, where CEOs hang out and where the chairs are
notoriously uncomfortable. The proviso would be that the name of the
chair be conspicuously emblazoned on each chair. I don't think they
ever took me up on the idea. I still think it would work, and pay for
itself in no time.
Specialization has created intellectual and imaginative silos in
organizations, and a recent Wharton
study written up in S+B
Magazine
has found, as I did on that trip, that these silos are a huge obstacle
to innovation: "The most effective product development and
commercialization processes encourage dynamic communication and idea
sharing among engineers, marketers, and customers...Failure to
incorporate the customer’s perspective often seriously limits the
potential financial and competitive value of corporate
innovation...Often, engineers are tucked away so far within a company
that they don’t see firsthand what customers really need."
Other key findings of the study:
over-concentration on technology and under-emphasis of
the emotional appeal of products leads to market
failure
better products result when employees are themselves
customers of the product
'anthropological research' --
visiting customers to see how
they actually use (and mis-use) products can provide huge insights on
need and innovation opportunities
when entering new markets,
having local partners 'on the
ground' can help tweak products to meet needs that are unique to that
new market
using cross-functional teams and having the R&D
people 'get out more' can help reduce 'customer
blindness'
spreading R&D efforts around the world can help
global
companies enhance their 'environmental scan' and tap into ideas and
adaptations that may not be apparent at head office
surveys
that gather data on customer behaviour are insufficient -- it's more
important to know why
customers do what they do, to determine their true wants and needs,
and
this usually requires face-to-face contact and collaborative effort to
determine
it's important to understand customers' aversion to
change, and annoyance with having too many choices, when developing
products
key qualities needed of the facilitators of dialogue
between R&D, sales and customers: humility and curiosity
This study focused mainly on new product innovation, but the same need
for collaboration with all the departments of the company, and with
customers as well, applies equally to other types of business
innovation. I like the Doblin Group's Ten Types of
Innovation, an excellent way of parsing all the innovation
opportunities open to a company:
Business model: How you make money (e.g. Dell's
pay-in-advance for a custom-made PC model).
Networks and
alliances:
How you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit
(e.g. Sara
Lee sticking strictly to branding and outsourcing all
manufacturing)
Enabling process:
How you support the company's core processes and workers (e.g.
Starbucks' premium wage and benefits packages to attract superior
staff)
Core processes: How you create and add value to your
offerings (e.g. Wal-Mart's reinvention of retailing as shelf-space
leasing)
Product performance:
How you design your core offerings (e.g. the Mercedes Smart
Car's
unique and imaginative attributes -- pictured above -- pick up the new
Feb/05 Fast Company for a
fascinating discussion of why you
won't see it in the US)
Product system: How you link and/or
provide a platform for multiple products (e.g. the Microsoft
integrated productivity suite)
Service:
How you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around
your
products (e.g. Singapore Airlines' thoughtful and pampering
extras)
Delivery Channel: How you get your offerings to market
(e.g. Martha Stewart's multi-media ways of getting her 'home' stuff to
your home)
Brand: How you communicate your offerings (e.g. Absolut
vodka's "theme and variations' advertising concept)
Customer
experience<>: How your customers feel when they
interact with your company and its offerings (e.g. the Harley Davidson
owners' community)
Collaboration within company departments and with customers is
absolutely essential to the success of any of these ten types of
innovation. My sense, however, is that in most large organizations
collaboration (as opposed to mere coordination) is antithetical to
corporate culture, modus operandi, and hierarchical structure. That's
why many innovation advisers think innovation is best done in a
business unit separate from the main operating unit, where emphasis is
inevitably on protecting the status quo.
And that's also why I was surprised to see the results of a new
study,
by KPMG and Ipsos-Reid, of Canada's most innovative companies. Only
three of the top 10 are small-to-medium sized businesses (Research in
Motion, Westjet Airlines and Ballard Power Systems). The others
include
four of Canada's five largest telecom and broadcasting firms, its
largest grocery chain, its largest engineering firm and its largest
software distributor. And while this 'bias to big' is less noticeable
in the Innovation category than in the overall Most Admired rankings
(which are top-heavy with banks), it struck me as peculiar -- until I
read how the winners had been selected: Only the CEOs of Canada's
leading (read: biggest) corporations got to vote. It's not surprising,
then, that they picked almost exclusively other large corporations.
I
wonder what the answers would have been if they had asked customers?
Apple is all about innovation
Apple is all about innovation12/03/2003 12:10 PM Analysts are again praising Apple's ability to innovate. "The company
is now shaping the explosive market for digital music and devices.
Apple's innovations are once again changing the face of consumer
electronics and its professional customer base is ripe for an upgrade
cycle," says Forbes. JP Morgan adds that Apple's "innovation has no
bounds," but believes the value of innovation is already reflected in
Apple's stock price. The company has given Apple's stock...
The Innovation Webl0g
The Innovation Webl0g02/16/2004 05:35 AM Innovation Tools weblog .. Check it out! .. Innovation .. Chuck
Frey
innovationtools.com/weblog/innovation-weblog.asp track this
site | 4 links
I try not to fall for Declan's grandstanding, but his piece on why the FCC should
die is spot on.
What it means is returning to bottom-up law rather than
the top-down process that has characterized telecommunications for the
last 80 years.
Maybe it's the programmer in me talking but I think the Internet
and unlicensed wifi spectrum show that unregulated spaces produce the
most innovation and create new markets for technology and information.
In many ways, the FCC has spent the last few decades slowing
technology progress and most recently is now in the censorship game,
which doesn't make any sense at all.
Top UK innovation prize for IBM
Top UK innovation prize for IBM06/11/2004 06:43 AM IBM software described as the oil of e-commerce has won the MacRobert
engineering prize.
I'm at a "Global Innovation Outlook" event organized by IBM in New
York. Lots of great folks here, and -- halleluja! -- open WiFi in the
auditorium at Rockefeller University. It's too early to pass judgment
on the program, but IBM is asking the right questions in exploring the
nature of innovation in today's world.
The space of innovation
The space of innovation09/07/2004 12:15 PM Interesting discussion at slashdot about a blog system written on top
of Google Gmail. Is it permitted? Is it frivolous? Is it in Google's
interest? These are all fair questions, but the main point I think is:
Open up a capability and people will do the unexpected with it....
Adjusting for Innovation
Adjusting for Innovation07/30/2004 05:19 PM If research and development is an investment, why not treat it as
such?
Innovation Contest
Innovation Contest02/12/2003 12:00 AM One of my co-workers, JR, remarks on an innovation contest at work.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who wasn't sure what to make of
the announcement. The initial announcement sounded a bit fishy for
several reasons....
Innovation That Leaves No One Behind
Innovation That Leaves No One Behind05/17/2004 03:00 AM Business Week May 17 2004 6:23AM GMT Grok Description matches for Air Conditioning Innovation of the Year GrokA matches for Air Conditioning Innovation of the Year
Air Conditioning Innovation of the Year
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.