A pain in the butt

By Jennifer Miller via fastcocreate.com   Article

How To Tell If You’re Creative (Hint: You might be a bit of a jerk

“Forget Myers-Briggs. A study out of BI Norwegian Business School has determined the signposts of a “creative” personality. Conducted by Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen, the study posed 200 questions to 481 people.

The subjects fell into three categories. One group of “baseline” subjects such as lecturers or managers, and two groups of people who are generally considered to be creative, such as students of advertising and performing artists. Martinsen says he found meaningful differences between the creative and non-creative groups.

There are seven elements of a creative personality, so if you’re thinking about quitting your job as a lawyer or stock analyst to go on tour with your band or finally write that novel, you might want to consider the list below.

You’re Creative If: ….”

The new language

By Wayne Simmons and Keary Crawford via Innovation Excellence Blog   Article

Innovation versus Product Development

“Since the inception of the automobile industry, product features and functions were thought to be the primary determinants for customer buying decisions. Indeed, many automobile companies have built their corporate identities around specific product characteristics such as Volvo’s emphasis on safety features, GM’s and Chrysler’s focus on “American horsepower” …

Powerful market forces and changing customer behavior have challenged this dominant interpretation of innovation … factors such as the buyer’s experience at dealerships, the availability of maintenance services, financing options … are outside of the traditional product development arena and now play a significant role in buying decisions. …

Re-conceptualizing Innovation

… companies … must elevate the conversation about innovation to the new language of business innovation. In conjunction with entrepreneurship and growth strategy, the six dimensions of business innovation – service, design, business model, value, customer and strategic innovation – offer multiple pathways for companies to drive growth and enterprise value creation.”

Near death experience

By Drake Baer via fastcompany.com   Article

What You Can Learn From Pandora’s Near-Death Experience

“Great ideas don’t always make it to market. Here’s what it took Tim Westergren to finally get a crucial round of funding for Pandora — on his 348th pitch. …

Between the nannying, database-building, and elevator pitching, it didn’t come easy. Westergren notes that the companies that you see at a conference (or in the pages of a magazine) represent just a part of the long-suffering iceberg. The only thing that held the company together was the “unshakeable belief” that their idea–the Music Genome Project–was a worthy one. And like Paul Graham says, a startup founder is an economic research scientist–so finding where that idea fits takes a lot of investigation.

‘Most (good) ideas are definitely crazy,’ Westergren says, ‘because if they’re a new idea, they’re not part of the existing intellectual structure.’”

Doing It All Wrong

By Drake Baer via fastcompany.com   Article

Image

Einstein’s Problem-Solving Formula, And Why You’re Doing It All Wrong

“Einstein spent nearly all his time thinking, and very little time doing. Today, we do just the opposite–and it’s working against innovation. …

While Einstein said he had no special talent aside from being passionately curious (and being possibly the smartest person ever), he also knew how to make time for insight–a skill that’s scarce in our present cult of stimulation. Innovation consultant and author Jeffrey Phillips tells this tale:

When asked how he would spend his time if he was given an hour to solve a thorny problem, (Einstein) said he’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and alternatives and 5 minutes solving it. Which is exactly opposite of what the vast majority of executives today would do.

Instead, Phillips says, our harried execs default to the slog of defining a solution, hurtling into its implementation, and then taking a sort-of break by thumbing through their email–a pattern of behavior that predicts shallow thinking, rather than depth. Sounding a bit like Thoreau, Phillips makes a strong argument for why our busyness is killing our business–that is, if you’re in the business of creating anything new.”

Like DaVinci

By Brian Sullivan via slideshare.net   Source

Design Like DaVinci — SXSW 2013

Wrong, wrong, wrong … unbelievably right

By Joe McKendrick via SmartPlanet Blog   Article

How to be the ‘disrupter’ and not the ‘disrupted’

“The new breed of disrupters share some common characteristics … :

• Unencumbered development: … the engineers and developers at disruptive companies often are gathering for late-night ‘hackathons,’ and are trying to outdo one another with new products and innovations, which are rolled out in a rapid-fire manner. There’s lots of room for experimentation and failure. …
• Unconstrained growth: The five distinct customer segments—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards — are slashed down to two segments: ‘trial users, who often participate in product development, and everyone else.’
• New product cycles: Traditional companies have months-long and years-long cycles of innovation, in which new ideas are vetted, approved, developed, tested, and brought to market. ‘The innovators collectively get it wrong, wrong, wrong—and then unbelievably right,’ …
• Undisciplined strategy: Traditional companies have carefully laid-out plans and strategies, with different departments handling various phases of R&D, operations and sales …. ‘Big-bang disrupters, however, are thoroughly undisciplined,’ …. ‘They start life with better performance at a lower price and greater customization. They compete with mainstream products right from the start.””

Vast wasteland

By Randy Mayeux via First Friday Book Synopsis   Article

“Imagination, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity”

– Newton N. Minow, 1961

Sledgehammer to the forehead

By Mike Shipulski via Innovation Excellence   Article

Error Doesn’t Matter, Trial Does

“If you want to learn, to really learn, experiment. But I’m not talking about elaborate experiments; I’m talking about crude ones. Not simple ones, crude ones.

We were taught the best experiments maximize learning, but that’s dead wrong. The best experiments are fast, and the best way to be fast is to minimize the investment. In the name of speed, don’t maximize learning, minimize the investment. …

Define learning narrowly, design the minimum experiment, and run the trial. Learning per trial is low, but learning per month skyrockets because the number of trials per month skyrockets. … The first trial informs the second which shapes the third. But instead of three units of learning, it’s cubic. …

Another way to minimize investment is to minimize resolution. Don’t think nanometers, think thumbs up, thumbs down. Design the trial so the coarsest measuring stick gives an immediate and unambiguous response. … Think sledgehammer to the forehead.”

 

Tolstoy on innovation

By Andrew Hargadon via Innovation and Choice blog   Article

“For every great idea, many other people will have had ‘exactly similar, perfectly good ideas.’ But something happens around the time those ideas enter the larger organization and social context that prevents them from be carried out. …

Individuals act in organizations acting in industries — at particular moments in time.

Pity the young visionary working in a rigid bureaucracy, the brilliant scientist solving a problem outside her firm’s markets, or the entrepeneur that shows up a few years too soon, or too late, to launch a new industry.

Ideas alone are nice and sometimes even necessary, but they are not what puts the epic in innovation. Innovation happens when good ideas emerge in companies ready to change, in industries ready to be changed. The more clearly we see this, the better was can focus our own best efforts.”

Braincalming

Via The Heart of Innovation by Mitch Ditkoff   Article

Brainstorming vs. Braincalming

“If you work in a big organization, small business, freelance, or eat cheese, there’s a good chance you’ve participated in at least a few brainstorming sessions in your life. You’ve noodled, conjured, envisioned, ideated, piggybacked, and endured overly enthusiastic facilitators doing their facilitator thing.  …

For the moment, I invite you to consider the possibility that the origination of great, new ideas doesn’t take place in the storm, but in the calm before the storm… or the calm after the storm…

Every wonder why so many people get their best ideas during “down time” — the time just before they go to sleep… or just after waking… or in dreams… or in the shower… or in the car on the way home from work? Those aren’t brainstorming sessions, folks. Those are braincalming sessions.  …

“The best thinking has been done in solitude,” said Thomas Edison. “The worst has been done in turmoil.”

I’m not suggesting that you stop brainstorming (um… that’s 20% of our business). All I’m suggesting is you balance it out with some braincalming. The combination of the two can be very, very powerful.”

“it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy”

By Matthew E. May in Fast Company   Article

The Rules Of Successful Skunk Works Projects

“When Germany’s first jet fighter planes appeared in the skies over Europe in 1943, the U.S. War Department hired Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to build a working jet fighter prototype, giving it just 180 days to do so. … Challenging constraints shaped the project: build a jet fighter prototype that would fly at 600 miles per hour–the edge of the speed of sound and 200 miles per hour faster than the current Lockheed P-38 propeller plane–in 180 days. …

He [Kelly Johnson] broke away from the Lockheed main operation, taking 23 of the best design engineers and 30 mechanics with him, and set up camp in a rented circus tent next to a foul-smelling plastics factory, figuring the odor would help keep nosy parkers away. … Perhaps it was the stink that drove Kelly’s secret team to design and build the prototype for the P-80 Shooting Star–nicknamed Lulu Belle–in a mere 143 days. That’s 37 days ahead of schedule. …

Thus was born the de facto standard for running top secret projects among the world’s most innovative companies, and the model [Steve Jobs] used in launching the Macintosh division of Apple. In his biography of [Steve Jobs], [Walter Isaacson] tells how Jobs cherry-picked a team of about 20 “pirates,” as he referred to them, and seceded from the Apple main campus. He relocated the team to a small building three blocks away, next to a Texaco station. The two-story brown-shingled building became known as Texaco Towers. Jobs kept the renegade spirit alive with his maxim “it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” Jobs actively recruited rebels and swashbucklers–talented but audacious individuals who could move fast and get things done.

Over the years, the term Skunk Works has come to refer to any effort involving an elite special team that breaks away from the larger organization to work autonomously on an advanced or secret project, usually tasked with breakthrough innovation on limited budgets and under aggressive timelines.”

 

Rock pile or cathedral

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

–Antoine de Saint Exupéry,
French poet, writer and aviator

Rock Pile Image   Cathedral Image

“… paradox to be a teacher and guide”

From The Heart of Innovation   Article

“”Now that we have met with paradox, we have some hope of making progress.” - Nobel Prize winner, Niels Boh

“Innovation is full of it — paradox, that is. On one hand, organizations want structures, maps, models, guidelines, and systems. On the other hand, that’s all too often the stuff that squelches innovation, driving it underground or out the door.

The noble search for a so-called “innovation process” can easily become a seduction, addiction, or distraction whereby innovation is marginalized, deferred, over-engineered, and worn like a badge.

True innovation is about allowing room enough for paradox to be a teacher and guide — and to accept, at least for a little longer than usual, ambiguity, dissonance, and discomfort — the age-old precursors to breakthrough.

Remember, there’s a big difference between Six Sigma and Innovation.”

In China We (Don’t) Trust

By Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times   Article

“One of the standard lines about China’s economy is that the Chinese are good at copying, but they could never invent a Hula-Hoop. It’s not in their DNA, we are told, and their rote education system reinforces that tendency. I’m wondering about that: How is it that a people who invented papermaking, gunpowder, fireworks and the magnetic compass suddenly only became capable of assembling iPods? I’m wondering if what’s missing in China today is not a culture of innovation but something more basic: trust.

When there is trust in society, sustainable innovation happens because people feel safe and enabled to take risks and make the long-term commitments needed to innovate. When there is trust, people are willing to share their ideas and collaborate on each other’s inventions without fear of having their creations stolen. The biggest thing preventing modern China from becoming an innovation society, which is imperative if it hopes to keep raising incomes, is that it remains a very low-trust society. …

China is caught in a gap between its old social structure of villages and families, which created its own form of trust, and a new system based on the rule of law and an independent judiciary. The Communist Party destroyed the first but has yet to build the second because it would mean ceding the party’s arbitrary powers. So China has a huge trust deficit.”

Inside Intellectual Ventures, the most hated company in tech

By Jim Kerstetter and Josh Lowensohn  from CNET, News, Politics and Law   Article

“To many in the high-tech business, a troll plots his schemes in a white office building on a hill in this leafy suburb of Seattle. This is the home of Intellectual Ventures, which, depending on whom you ask, is either the biggest, most aggressive patent troll on the planet or a pioneering company that’s helping inventors get their fair share.

The question of “whom you ask” is a big one, of course. Since it was founded in 2000 by Microsoft veterans Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intellectual Ventures has — through $5 billion in investment funds and its own brainstorming efforts — collected nearly 70,000 “intellectual assets” on technologies ranging from nuclear power to camera lenses. It currently controls about 40,000 intellectual assets.

In the process, Intellectual Ventures has become a boogieman for aspiring entrepreneurs and big tech companies alike. (Ironic, since some of its early investors include Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay.) Rolling out a new feature for your Web site? Have a better way to reflect light through a camera lens? Better watch out, Intellectual Ventures might have a patent for that.” …

Nathan Myhrvold is a very, very, very smart man. He may be the wealthiest man on Earth when all is said and done,” said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of the health care startup CareZone and the former chief exec of Sun Microsystems. “Congratulations on arbitraging the patent system.”"

Patent Research Just Got Easier

From Inc.   Article

“Google knows a thing or two about patents and has been the target of plenty of lawsuits involving them over the years. So it makes sense the company trying to “organize the world’s information” would come up with a better way to search for patents. In a blog post on Aug. 14 the company announced two new features for its Patent Search tool: The ability to search the European Patent Office, and a new way to find “prior art.”

The ability to search prior art is key when it comes to proving your idea deserves a patent. ”Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious,” wrote Google engineering manager Jon Orwant. “To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles.” But that process usually involves a laborious search.

In one click, Prior Art Finder searches multiple sources–Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the Web–for related content that existed at the time a patent was filed. To learn more about how start-ups might use this tool, I checked in with Van Lindberg, an IP and open-source attorney with the international corporate law firmHaynes and Boone.

How will the Prior Art Finder tool be userful to patent-holders and patent-seekers?”

“And there it is”

http://dilbert.com/strips/2012-07-06/

When a Best Practice Is a Worst Practice

The Heart of Innovation   Article

“People start becoming satisfied with emulating other people’s lives. Instead of thinking up their own best practices, they imitate. Ouch!

The spirit of innovation gets replaced by the religion of innovation.

Gone is reflection. Gone is the process of discovery. Gone is the ownership that comes with birthing new insights. In it’s place?Simulation. Imitation. And, all too often, the blind following of pre-packaged solutions.

I’m not saying there isn’t value in paying attention to other people’s best practices. There is.

But when when imitation replaces creation, something invariably gets lost — and innovation eventually goes down the drain.”

Is This Really the Golden Age for Inventors?

By Adam Davidson   Article

“These days, the average costs for a patent are about $10,000 — chump change for a corporation, but a considerable amount for many home inventors. And even when they spend that much, they often see their patent applications rejected. Even if an application is approved, larger companies have become adroit at swooping in and copying the product with just enough changes to make it legal. As a result, many give up on the process altogether. Gary Clegg invented the Slanket before Allstar Products Group introduced its near-identical Snuggie. Allstar outmarketed the unpatented Slanket, and the rest is history. …

Since he took over the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2009, David Kappos says, he has thought every day about a man he met from northern Vermont (“He was dressed, literally, in overalls with a red-and-white checkered shirt”) who had invented a brilliant, transformative two-cycle engine for a snow blower. “If you don’t protect your invention with intellectual property,” Kappos says, “it will be copied almost immediately if it’s good.” So Kappos has initiated a host of initiatives to help the small inventor with cheaper patent filing fees, pro bono legal help and a more responsive patent office.

It probably won’t matter, though, says Paul Romer, an economist at N.Y.U. and perhaps the leading thinker of our time on economic growth. It costs around $1 million to defend a patent-infringement lawsuit, Romer says. So even if a lone inventor has a legitimate patent claim, a large company can sue and force the person into bankruptcy.”

Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming

By: Daniel Sobol   Article

“Turns out that brainstorming–that go-to approach to generating new ideas since the 1940s–isn’t the golden ticket to innovation after all. Both Jonah Lehrer, in a recent article in The New Yorker, and Susan Cain, in her new book Quiet, have asserted as much. Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals. Brainstorming can actually be detrimental to good ideas

But the idea behind brainstorming is right. To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones. We need to work both collaboratively and individually. We also need a healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing. We need places where someone can throw out a thought, have it critiqued, and not feel so judged that they become defensive and shut down. Yet this creative process is not necessarily supported by the traditional tenets of brainstorming: group collaboration, all ideas held equal, nothing judged. …

So we argue. And discuss. And argue. A lot. But our process is far from freeform yelling. Here are five key rules of engagement that we’ve found to yield fruitful sessions and ultimately lead to meaningful ideas.”

Creativity rocks opposites

By Michelle James  Article

“Creativity comes to life at intersections. It thrives on opposites. It engages paradox until something new emerges. This transfers to the design of projects, processes, workshops, teams, organizations, etc. If we design for space to accommodate opposites (just like nature does) we have a more creative system. This is part of a presentation I’m giving on the yin/yang of creative process: “

Harness creativity by thinking inside the box

By Jessica Stillman   Article

“Allowing teams to “think outside the box” in this way sounds great (and not punishing failure is still a good idea), but sadly this approach has one drawback, according to Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition. Namely, it doesn’t work.

So what does? Instead of setting your team free of constraints, suggests Shapiro, you should be providing them with better ones, in effect offering them a carefully constructed box to think in. … “If asked to develop a new idea from scratch or with limited constraints, the creativity generated is less than if structure is provided,” says Shapiro. …

You want to define challenges that are ‘just right,’” he says, offering four tips on how to strike that balance:

• Make sure your challenge does not imply a specific solution. For example, when NASA tasked a crowd with creating a “zero-gravity laundry system,” the wording alone precluded other possible cleaning methods—or even self-cleaning clothes.
• Make sure your challenge does not imply a specific “solver.“  For example, it was assumed that only oil experts could solve a specific problem associated with the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the end, a chemist who had solved a similar problem found the solution.
• Make sure your challenge is not overly abstract or fluffy. For example, the United Kingdom wanted to improve its educational system. With a challenge framed this broadly, the type of solutions could be endless, ranging from teachers and their pay, to schools and the curricula.
• Make sure you are solving the right challenge. A mouthwash manufacturer, after receiving feedback from customers, set off to create an alcohol-free version. This proved costly and less effective. As it turns out, customers weren’t concerned about the alcohol content; they were opposed to the burning sensation. Creating a non-burning alcohol-containing mouthwash was a lot easier.”

The crazy ones

Source

Beware the cult of ideas

by Jeffrey Baumgartner   Article

“The Cult of Ideas is a dangerous cult lurking within the field of corporate innovation. It is a disturbing cult in which members worship massive numbers of ideas above all else. On the surface, this seems a good thing. After all, innovations are founded on ideas, are they not? So, if a company wants to innovate, the more ideas it creates the better. Sadly, however, the ugly truth is that the cult of ideas can actually stifle creativity and inhibit innovation. …

Think about it for a moment. Companies – like Gore, Google, Apple and others – that we think of as true innovators never brag about how many ideas they generate in this initiative or that initiative. Rather they demonstrate innovation. Indeed, take a look at Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies. Those on the top ten are recognized for their innovations and not for quantities of ideas. …

In order to innovate, you need an end to end innovation plan that looks not only at idea generation, but also on focusing idea generation on strategy, evaluating ideas efficiently and developing processes to implement the more outlandish ideas that could be breakthrough innovations. …

Instead of simply trying to wring as many ideas as you can out of each employee, allow employees time to develop ideas. Companies like Google and 3M are famous for allowing their employees to use 20% of their time to work on personal projects. … Moreover, think about what you would like employees to be doing during that 20% of their time: generating as many ideas as they can or developing a small number of ideas into experimental projects.”

Under-appreciated engineers and the curse of usability

by Michael Woloszynowicz   Source: Saturday, November 12 

“The life of an engineer is not an easy one. We’re expected to translate ambiguous requirements into a concrete, timely, and scalable solution that satisfies a wide range of stakeholders. We venture into the unchartered territory with an ever growing array of technologies and infrastructures to choose from, never knowing what direction the product will take in the future.

While such challenges plague us on a daily basis, the really depressing part is that only a precious few people will ever appreciate the effort that went into it. Often not your boss, and certainly not the end user.

The superficiality of human nature leads people to appreciate the physical aspects of the product rather than the beauty that lies within it. There’s no better example of this than Apple products. While Apple garners constant adulation for the beauty of its products, few praise the engineering effort that went into every detail of a MacBook Air or iPhone, and bringing the designers vision to life through a physical and functioning unit. …

From a technical product standpoint we suffer from a curse of usability. The simpler the product’s interface the more muted the engineering effort appears, when in fact the opposite is true. The simpler the interface, the less work the user must do, the more work the engineer must do to yield the desired result.”