Endless Innovation

Innovative Ways of Seeing: The Art of Social Data

In the current issue of Contagious Magazine (subscription required), Noah Brier and Faris Yakob of Naked Communications have prepared a tour de force article about the new age of social (meta)data. Data is no longer just boring old data -- it is now a wonderfully fluid and shareable construct that is open to a rich number of interpretations (and re-interpretations). Prior to Web 2.0, if you mentioned the word "data" to a colleague, you were likely to receive either a blank stare or one of those "please, don't go there" type of looks.

Now, thanks to pioneers like Jonathan Harris and Hans Rosling, data is a construct that can be celebrated visually through rich infographics and real-time visualization tools. Anyway - if all this is not so clear - the Contagious Magazine article includes a splendid number of visual examples from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Nikon. (And, of course, examples from the great Edward Tufte.)

p.s. Kudos to Noah & Faris for sneaking in an obscure reference to French Deconstructionist thinker Jacques Derrida at the end of the article: "This blending of signifier and signified is peculiarly modern - words have no real connection to the concepts they represent." Ah, the joys of modern literary theory, updated for Web 2.0!

"Not Our Best Work"

Many companies ask their customers to tell them what they're doing right or what they'd like to see more of. This is a classic positive feedback loop, in which positive behavior is rewarded with even more positive behavior. What happens, though, when companies ask their customers to tell them what they've done wrong? TIME Magazine has a fun little feature on its website, asking readers to pick the worst TIME Magazine cover of all time. (After 85 years in business, I guess TIME feels comfortable with a little self-deprecating humor)

Whatever you do, please don't click on this TIME cover from 1981. You'll forever lose any respect for journalistic integrity. (What? You clicked on that cover? Then, please, please, don't click on this cover)

[image: TIME Magazine covers]

The link between doodling and brand innovation

If you're a fan of Hugh Macleod and his blog Gaping Void, you'll want to check out this Business Week article on the use of doodling in Corporate America. Apparently, Hugh's "blue monster" doodle (left) has been adopted by Microsoft as its unofficial mascot:

"Ever since MacLeod sent the cartoon to [Microsoft executive Steve] Clayton and posted it on his blog, gapingvoid, more than a year ago, the "blue monster" character has become an unofficial corporate mascot among many Microsoft employees, posted in cubicles, printed on business cards and T-shirts, and added to e-mail signatures. "I'm told it always leads to an interesting, atypical Microsoft conversation," says MacLeod—the result he had hoped for."

There are a lot of other great examples, too, of doodling being as a marketing and branding tool. The current UPS Whiteboard campaign makes extensive use of doodling, as did a past Johnnie Walker Keep Walking campaign that sketched out business plans on cocktail napkins.

[image:  The Blue Monster]

How to create a culture of innovation

Over at the Architectural Record, there's a fascinating article on how to create an innovative "studio culture" within any firm. The results may surprise you -- to some extent, the very strategies for encouraging innovation within a firm would seem to be the very strategies that could sink the firm: "Hire naive misfits who argue with you; encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and fully commit to risky ventures."

In fact, "failure" seems to be a dominant theme with just about every business guru interviewed for the article. At Palo Alto-based innovation and design firm IDEO, there is a simple mantra: "Fail often in order to succeed sooner." Often, the best employees turn out to be the people who might not have been hired in the first place: "Fresh perspectives derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas, and illuminate the metaphorical darkness..."

[image: IDEO studio]

Donny Deutsch, BUG Labs and The Big Idea

About two weeks ago, I posted about Peter Semmelhack and his amazing new start-up company BUG Labs. For a special client engagement, I had the unique opportunity to hear him speak live in-person in New York City and walked away quite a bit impressed with his vision for the future of open-source hardware and DIY consumer electronics. Well, it turns out the folks at CNBC also are more than a bit impressed with Mr. Semmelhack. On December 20, I happened to be flipping cable channels at night when I ran smack-dab into a special "The Big Idea" show on CNBC featuring Donny Deutsch and none other than Peter Semmelhack and BUG Labs! That's big time!

Over at the BUG Labs blog, there's a behind-the-scenes summary of CNBC's "The Big Idea" show and lots o' links to Flickr photo goodness. A big hat tip to Peter and his team at BUG Labs!

[image: Peter Semmelhack and Donny Deutsch]

Le Meridien: The experiences of the creative class

Richard Florida, author of the business bestsellers The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, has pointed out time and time again that world-class cities need to attract world-class creative talent if they want to remain competitive. Now, it appears that basic idea of the "creative class" is starting to trickle down into the corporate world, with more companies than ever before partnering with world-class designers and creative talent. Hotel brand Le Meridien has taken this a step further -- the hotel has rounded up 100 of the world's greatest cultural innovators and artists and asked them to help make the Le Meridien hotel experience as memorable as possible. The LM 100 includes a mix of painters and photographers, musicians and designers, chefs and architects - including two of my personal favorites: coffee impresario Andrea Illy and visionary chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Anyway, to celebrate the LM 100, my colleagues at electricArtists have created a new Facebook application that enables fans of the Le Meridien experience to connect with fellow innovators: "Guests of Le Méridien are not tourists. They are travelers. They are adventurers in the world of ideas. Le Méridien is to inspire our Guests to discover more than just a new destination. They discover a new way of seeing things."

UPDATE: Last week, luxury blog Luxist posted about the LM 100 here.

[image: Le Meridien 100]

Bug Labs and The Long Tail of Gadgets

Earlier in the week, I had the unique opportunity to hear Peter Semmelhack, CEO of New York-based Bug Labs, describe how his start-up company was radically disrupting the traditional consumer electronics industry. Using a modular, open source approach, Bug Labs is focused on bringing the Long Tail of Gadgets to everyday consumers. Instead of developing a few devices for millions of consumers, the business model is to make millions of devices available for relatively few numbers of consumers. His company has already generated buzz on gadget blogs like Gizmodo, and now Bug Labs is featured in this week's issue of Springwise:

"For a while now, web developers have been mixing and matching web services such as Google Earth and Yahoo Weather to create mash-ups that perform useful new functions. Likewise, programmers have grown adept at tweaking the code used by open-source software programs. The result in both instances has been unique applications the developers of the original technology likely never dreamed of.

US start-up Bug Labs wants to harness some of that same creativity by enabling tech-savvy do-it-yourselfers to create their own mobile devices. The company has designed several basic hardware modules that snap together like building blocks to perform whatever mobile function their owners can think of. “There are so many great gadget ideas that haven't been thought of yet,” the founders note. “We want to unlock and inspire the discovery and creation of as many of these devices as possible.” Besides letting them add whatever they want, the snap-together components also let consumers leave out what they don't want, which is a far cry from many pre-packaged mobile phones and PDAs that come crammed with features their buyers have no use for."

By the end of 2007, at least a few of the modules should be available for sale. According to Semmelhack, the plan is to make the modules available online first, before extending availability to big box retailers like Best Buy sometime in 2008. If you check out the Bug Labs website, you're probably thinking, "Wow, those products doesn't look at all like a phone or camera that I own." That's the whole point. As Springwise points out, "Gadgets built with Bug Lab's block-like components may not satisfy those who lust after branded mobile devices poured into seamlessly sleek designs. It will, however, appeal to people who enjoy making things, and like having control over elements of a product'€™s design."

This is a company to watch. Mad props to Peter and team at Bug Labs!

[image: Peter Semmelhack and The Long Tail of Gadgets]

Slow Innovation

Companies that innovate at a snail's pace may not be in quite the competitive mess that some experts think they're in. Forget rapid prototyping and rushing beta versions of products to markets. Using the Slow Food Movement as a metaphor, creativity and innovation guru Derek Cheshire suggests a slow approach to innovation: "There is immense pressure to innovate quickly or to rush to market, but does this bargain of speed versus quality really benefit a company?" Instead, in a business manifesto for the Change This site, he lauds the goal of creating “an innovative company whose structure and culture are conducive to long-term growth and sustainability.”

I'll have to give this Manifesto a closer read over the Thanksgiving holiday, since the topic of "fast" vs. "slow" innovation hints at the whole "revolutionary" vs. "evolutionary" debate. Instead of attempting to rip up a company in a great spasm of Schumpeterian creative destruction every quarter, management executives should be attempting to lay the groundwork for long-term, evolutionary change.

[image: Underground Snails by Greendyker on Flickr]

The Best 25 Inventions of the Year

The cover story in the current issue of TIME focuses on the 25 best inventions of the year. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Apple iPhone was ranked as the #1 gadget of the year as well as the #1 invention of the year. Other notable inventions of 2007 include: a battery from Sony that runs on sugar, a unique water works project developed by MIT, and a new artificial leg prosthesis. As a sidebar to the cover story, TIME includes a list of the Best Inventors of All Time. (Hint: If your name ain't Leonardo or Galileo, you never really had a chance of appearing on this list)

[image: TIME]

Radically re-thinking the automotive business model

The other day, the Wall Street Journal featured one of the most inspiring stories about innovation that I've read in quite some time. Shai Agassi, once a fast-rising senior executive at software giant SAP, left the company in March under mysterious circumstances and dropped off the grid, only to re-surface this week, flush with $200 million in VC funding and a radical idea for disrupting the automotive industry. This, despite the fact that until 2005, he knew little to nothing about automobiles and even less about alternative energy. (At one point, investors were throwing money at Agassi, even though he didn't even have a name for his company). As Jason Hiner of Tech Republic points out, Shai Agassi is now the man of the hour when it comes to thinking about innovation within the automotive industry:

"On Monday when I flew to New York I couldn’t get away from Shai Agassi (right), the former president of enterprise software maker SAP. I first spotted him on an airport TV being interviewed on CNN. Then I read a feature story about him in The Wall Street Journal, which I picked up to read on the plane. Then, when I arrived at my hotel I went online and discovered a blog post about Agassi written by my colleague Dan Farber over on ZDNet.

Agassi was everywhere because he publicly re-emerged from obscurity after resigning from SAP in March. Agassi’s new gig is called Project Better Place and its mission is to create a new platform and ecosystem for electric cars, and Agassi has raised $200 million to get it off the ground.

What Agassi’s Better Place wants to do is to separate the battery from the car, get automakers to standardize on a single battery type, and then set up a network of charging sites (run by Better Place) where cars can drive through and have their batteries changed. Agassi says that current technology allows for batteries that can power cars for 100 miles.

Under the model that Agassi is proposing, cars would be sold without batteries by the car makers (potentially bundled with batteries by the car dealers) and Agassi’s company would sell monthly subscriptions to consumers for swapping out their batteries at charging sites."

This is a radical idea. According to the Wall Street Journal, Shai Agassi basically woke up one day and asked, "Why can't the automotive industry look a lot more like the mobile phone industry?" In other words, Agassi began thinking of auto "re-charging stations" as being part of a large national network, with people owning electric cars having access to this network. Instead of paying cash for gas at gas stations, consumers would now pay a monthly subscription fee to "re-up" their electric batteries:

"In the early years of his company, he expects to distribute cars directly to companies or other large buyers. But he eventually expects consumers to get their cars from conventional dealers, while he operates an infrastructure that includes the batteries and the charging network. He likens his company to a wireless provider, such as AT&T, that provides a subscription service that makes phone calls possible, while auto makers would be like handset makers such as Nokia."

Mad props to Agassi for having the conviction to follow his dreams. Be sure to check out his blog: The Long Tailpipe.

[image: Shai Agassi at SAP]