Endless Innovation

The Miracle of the Commons: How Simplicity Can Save Our Cities

"Creativity begins when you cut a zero from your budget..." - Brazilian architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner

With all the talk out of Washington this week about reduced federal spending, the immediate need for budget cuts, and swelling deficits at both the local and federal level, it's time to think about ways that cities can do more with less. In other words, how can cities of the future use simplicity to solve the most intractable urban problems in innovative, sustainable ways that won't break the bank?

In a recent Flash Interview with The Economist, legendary architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner describes his vision for the "smart cities" of the future:

"Creativity begins when you cut a zero from your budget. Sustainability, when you cut two. When dealing with “smart system” technologies, we must always remember to bind our solutions with a commitment to simplicity. Also, having in mind that sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted. If waste is “zero”, sustainability tends to infinity."

What's interesting about this is that Lerner does not see technology as a panacea for what ails budget-strapped urban planners. Instead, urban planners need to adopt simple, common sense measures that are possible to implement even when a zero has been lopped from the budget. As an elected official in Brazil, Lerner had an opportunity to implement some of his ideas -- with extraordinary results.

For example, how would you solve the problem of trash piling up on the narrow, winding streets of a city's slums? U.S. techno-bureaucrats would probably call for costly studies and lengthy administrative RFPs for high-tech garbage removal machines capable of removing trash from these slums. Lerner, however, proposed a much simpler, more cost-effective solution: offer residents of these slums the opportunity to carry out their own trash in exchange for bags of food and free transit passes. It's a win-win for both sides.

How would you deal with the problem of insufficient budgetary funds to pay for tractors and lawn maintenance crew members to maintain a city's streets? Lerner implemented the idea of "municipal sheep" which would graze on the park areas for free. Later, the wool from these sheep could be used to fund innovative children's programs throughout the city. Forget the Tragedy of the Commons -- this is the Miracle of the Commons.

This is precisely why "developed nations" might be able to learn from "developing nations." That trash-clearing initiative from Brazil? In a winter of discontent across New York City, when major blizzards and snow storms made trash removal dangerous if not impossible for city garbage trucks - and garbage piled up uncontrollably on New York City streets - what if New York City had provided a similar type of incentive structure for residents to ferry out their own garbage -- or reduce the number of bags they placed on city streets for a 48-hour period - in exchange for something of economic value, like heating credits?

[images: New York City trash and Jaime Lerner]

How Live Performances Are Changing the Way We Think About Design

The current issue of Wallpaper* magazine - in addition to its feature on the global Design Awards 2011 Winners - has a wonderfully thought-provoking article about the growing popularity of "live performances" in the design world. In short, design is moving from a mysterious, tightly-guarded secret that happens behind closed doors to something that is performed in full public view:

"Designers used to be people behind the scenes. No longer... Designers are increasingly finding themselves in the business of a different sort of production - one that deserves an audience. While once, the drawing boards, the prototyping, the moulds, the models and the mess were all kept hidden, and the finished product unveiled in a 'ta-da' moment, these days it's the process that everyone wants to see..."

Perhaps the best analogy is the "open kitchen" now found at many of the best restaurants in the world -- instead of hiding their craft from the world, chefs now openly embrace public viewing of how their dishes are made from scratch. With that in mind, Wallpaper* cites a handful of interesting examples of the "live performance" concept being carried out in the design world:

(1) Neville Brody's Anti Design Festival in London, which featured real-time designing and printing in response to events as they unfolded in real-time

(2) Milan's Spazio Rossana Orlandi with James Plumb

(3) Craft Punk, a collaboration between Design Miami and Fendi

(4) Modern Primitives, a collaboration between Fendi and U.S. architects Aranda\Lasch

(4) Belgium's Z33 Gallery: "Design By Performance"

(5) London's design studio Raw-Edges

(6) Studio Glithero

(7) Total Trattoria from Martino Gamper

The obvious question, of course, is: To what extent will the world's elite design firms embrace the "live performance" concept of design? Certainly, opening up the design process will change the way we think about design:

"While a decade ago prestige was associated with closely guarded methodologies and highly developed techniques, design as performance is nothing if not open source. Intellectual property is also worth considering, then, especially as unlike art, craft or cooking, design processes are as much dependent on ideas as they are on skills."

The extent to which a designer should feel threatened, then, depends on how easy it is to imitate each step of the design process. That's where "design as performance" comes in -- any competitor not only has to steal your ideas and approach, he or she must also re-create each stage of the design process. 

Even if live "design performances" never catch on, they may serve an ancillary role - as a way of identifying the world's up-and-coming design talent: "A live performance is a sure-fire way to spot [raw talent]. Or the lack of it. While you don't want to be under the spotlight unless you know what you are doing, for those whose work might otherwise be an acquired taste, it is surely the best way to demonstrate why they do what they do and the way they do it." 

via: Wallpaper* and PSFK

Evocative Objects: Designing for Emotion and Empathy

Why do we love our digital devices? The answer might surprise you -- it's not because they look good, feel good or are somehow aspirational of where we want to be in life. It's because they are increasingly becoming a "second self" that we carry with ourselves wherever we go. In the New York Times, Damon Darlin recently interviewed a number of leading design thinkers - including Mark Rolston of frog design and Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group - who are coming to the consensus that we love certain objects for what they contain within, rather than their sleek exteriors:

"The devices — whether a flat-screen TV, an EVO Android smartphone, a Toshiba laptop or a Samsung Galaxy tablet — have become frames around a screen that gives us access to the amazing software that is that brain. Designers have begun to refer to that screen, in whatever device it is in, as “the window.” The frame keeps getting smaller and the window gets larger and clearer.

In other words, what we’ve become attached to is not the glass and metal and plastic, regardless of how it is beveled, but to the software running on the device. The love wasn’t there until the software got smart enough. “I doubt that people really loved their cellphones,” says Don Norman, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design firm, and author of “Living With Complexity.” The software inside a smartphone changed that. He thinks people merely like their Amazon Kindle e-readers, but don’t love them because the software doesn’t function as an auxiliary brain."

It's all part of a changing concept of the way that people interact with objects that MIT's Sherry Turkle refers to as "evocative objects" -- everyday gadgets and devices made of glass & plastic that have the power to impact things like memories, relationships, ideas and emotions. These evocative objects are designed to create emotion and empathy.

For any company that sells devices (or appliances or other gadgets) - the mandate is clear: Focus less on designing a sleek, attention-getting exterior and more on the software "brain" that create the inner magic. It will be interesting to see how design firms respond to this mandate - whether or not they will refocus on the "intangibles" rather than the exterior design.

Likewise, it will be interesting to see how the Android operating system -- a worthy rival to the Mac OS X - will force Apple to change its design aesthetic. When the first iPad came out, it had no worthy challengers and was immediately lauded as a design and even fashion object. Now that challengers like the Samsung Galaxy are gaining traction, sophisticated buyers are starting to focus more on the operating system (Android vs. Mac OS X) and less on the "frame."

[image: New York Times]

Saatchi & Saatchi: How to Win Friends and Influence Followers in 7 Minutes or Less

In a format reminiscent of PechaKucha 20 x 20 (20 PowerPoint slides in 20 minutes or less) events, Saatchi & Saatchi asked 7 of the world's leading creative thinkers in 7 very different fields to share their ideas in 7 minutes or less at the first-ever 7x7 event in New York City. The speakers, ranging from the curator of the world-famous TED Conference to an ESPN Chess Grandmaster, took three basic approaches to winning friends and influencing followers in their allotted seven minutes: Going Global, Staging It Live, and Stimulating the Senses.

Going Global: Marc Schiller, CEO of digital marketing agency Electric Artists and co-founder of Wooster Collective, led audience members on a whirlwind tour of street art from New York to Europe to Australia, showing how and why graffiti artists are risking arrest to beautify public spaces and bring meaning to previously meaningless locations. Similarly, Chris Anderson of TED demonstrated the alluring power of innovative ideas by showing how TEDx events are sprouting up on every continent.

Staging It Live: Maurice Ashley, a Chess Grandmaster and an on-air chess commentator for ESPN, was perhaps the most inspiring speaker of the night, turning a routine chess match into a epic narrative more exciting than the running of the Kentucky Derby this past Saturday. He raised the stakes of audience participation by inviting two chess champions -- one in Belize (!) and one in New York City -- to compete in a frenetic, two-minute chess match via Internet. During the match, Maurice gave a live play-by-play, turning a simple castling into the type of drama one typically associates with a world-champion sprinter running the 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds.

Stimulating the Senses: Think beyond the spoken word or the brief video clip. The audience gave a rousing ovation to the St. Joseph's School Band from the South Bronx, who put on a tremendous live performance of Gustav Holst. Liz Arana, head chef at Alexandra restaurant in NYC, gave a live cooking demo of fried calamari that filled the hall with aromatic scents and left people talking excitedly about what they were smelling.

My takeaway lesson for the night: powerful ideas are made even more powerful by embracing one of the three presentation approaches above. If you're consulting to a Fortune 500 company, you probably won't get the opportunity to cook fried calamari while discussing P&L opportunities, but the idea of Going Global and Staging It Live are two particularly powerful presentation concepts that can help you win friends and influence followers -- all in 7 minutes or less.

Entrepreneurship Exists in the Tiny Space Between Madness and Genius

Ten Ways To Be Your Own Boss

View more presentations from fredwilson.

In his presentation at the Behance 99% Conference in New York, venture capitalist Fred Wilson outlined his views on ten different types of entrepreneurial models for the modern Internet economy. These range the gamut from the single-person Sole Proprietorship (Matt Drudge) to the Project (James Cameron's Avatar) to the Breakout (Foursquare) to the Company (Twitter). Depending on their size and complexity, not all of these entrepreneurial models require VC investment or angel money to get off the ground -- in fact, thanks to the efficiencies created by the Web, it's easier than ever to bootstrap a company without the need for institutional backing.

The Future of Lifestreaming

Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group has put together a brief video clip that explores the future of lifestreaming. There are some unique interactive visualizations in the style of Minority Report, exploring concepts such as "the magnetism of data," "location awareness across time" and the "serendipity of discovery." Very interesting stuff. A big hat tip to Mark Krynsky for finding this.

[video: The Future of Lifestreaming]

Microsoft, Middle Management and Why Some Companies Can't Innovate

This week's op-ed piece (Microsoft's Creative Destruction) in the New York Times from Dick Brass, a former Microsoft VP, was a wake up call for the tech world. In a thoughtful but ultimately scathing piece, Brass describes how and why Microsoft gradually evolved from an innovative company with first-mover advantage to a technological also-ran scrambling behind just about everyone in bringing new products to market:

"As they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter. [...]

Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?

While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple.

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest."

Obviously, something happened to the culture of the company, changing the very direction of what it means to work at Microsoft. One way to conceptualize this is to think about the "impenetrable layer of suck" that tends to grow at just about every company -- especially those already bloated with layer upon layer of middle management. On her Strange Attractor blog, Suw Charman-Anderson has posted a fantastic graphic showing how this "impenetrable layer of suck" works. Creative ideas never quite make their way down through an organization. Note the squiggly red lines that are the "social media fissures" -- these are just about the only way that innovative ideas work can find their way down to the rank-and-file members of an organization.

You can read the New York Times op-ed piece as a bit of grumbling and mumbling from a disaffected former employee -- or as a warning shot fired across the bow to other tech companies like Yahoo, Google and Amazon -- all of which are no longer young, frisky, risk-seeking startups. Apple may no longer be a young start-up, either, but it has thus far avoided the "impenetrable layer of suck." Steve Jobs has almost single-handedly enabled innovative ideas to come to market through charisma and sheer force of will. Which explains to a large degree why Microsoft was never able to realize the full potential of the Tablet PC, while Apple was able to generate a market sensation around the iPad.

[image: The Impenetrable Layer of Suck via Strange Attractor]

Move over McKinsey, here comes IDEO

As one of the premier strategy consulting companies in the world, McKinsey has always been a pipeline of future CEO talent for the nation's leading businesses. The number of Fortune 500 CEOs with a consulting background at McKinsey is truly staggering -- as McKinsey points out on its recruiting website, over 150 McKinsey alumni have become CEOs of companies with more than one billion dollars in annual revenue. (Heck, even Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey - it's the type of place you go to when you're the daughter of a U.S. president and a graduate of Stanford and Oxford).

So it may come as somewhat of a surprise that strategic design company IDEO may be supplanting McKinsey as a source of future CEO talent. As Bruce Nussbaum writes in Bloomberg Business Week, IDEO alumni are starting to make their way into the CEO suite of prominent U.S. organizations:

"I’ve been tracking a few alums from IDEO recently and it’s clear they are starting to lead major institutions around the world. Bill Moggridge, of course, co-founder of IDEO, is about to take over as director of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. And Mat Hunter, a former partner at IDEO, has just been appointed Chief Design Officer for the British Design Council. Jeneanne Rae, founder of Peer Insight, a major services innovation consultancy, is an IDEO alum..."

So what does it all mean? Well, for one thing, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum is not quite Coca-Cola or Exxon, so it may be premature to make the statement that IDEO alumni are pushing aside McKinsey alumni for top spots in the corporate world. But it does highlight an important trend -- the rise of "design thinking" in the corporate world, as highlighted by the emergence of D-Schools to rival B-Schools and a renewed emphasis on right-brain thinking, in contrast to traditional left-brain MBA thinking.

Over the next decade, it does appear that the future belongs to the IDEOs of the world, not the McKinseys.

[image: IDEO via Fast Company's Fast 50 2008]

JWT's 100 Things to Watch in 2010

In business, new opportunities often result from the ability to capitalize on an emerging cultural trend. When it comes to spotting this intersection of culture and commerce, advertising & communications agency JWT is unparalleled. With its slogan of "converting cultural shifts into opportunities," JWT has once again published its annual "100 Things to Watch" feature that points out the people, technologies and cultural trends that will likely impact our lives over the next year. My favorite JWT picks for 2010 include the following:

1. 3D at Home

2. Airline Subscriptions

3. Augmented Reality

4. Buycotting

5. Electric Car Networks

6. Lifestreaming

7. Mobile Money

8. Retail as Third Space

9. Spotify

10. TV/Web Integration

Interestingly, one of the trends cited by JWT is "Contemporary Indian Art." I recently returned from a wonderful trip to India over the winter holidays and I'm convinced that India is ready to transform itself from a left-brain nation (accounting, computing, IT, medicine) into a right-brain nation. Instead of thinking about IT call centers, we'll be thinking about Indian art in London and Hindi comics in Los Angeles.

[image: JWT "100 Things to Watch"]

Just how innovative is 3D entertainment technology?

Over the past 30 days or so, there has been a sudden explosion of interest surrounding 3D entertainment technology -- driven in no small part by the phenomenal success of James Cameron's Avatar. (Apparently, more than 70% of Avatar ticket sales are from 3D or IMAX screenings.) This week in Las Vegas, there has been buzz around 3D television technology from mainstream consumer electronics companies such as Panasonic - which recently revealed itself to be a "pal" of Avatar when it comes to bringing 3D entertainment technology to the masses. On top of that, ESPN recently announced plans to launch a new sports channel for live 3D events.

On the surface, it would appear that "3D TV" is poised to become the first breakout innovation hit of 2010. Dig a little deeper, though, and it's not clear how innovative 3D technology really is. It could turn out to be a "Red Sox" technology - a technology destined to tantalize its fans for decades at a time without achieving its true potential. Take speech recognition software, for example -- sounds great in theory, but frustrating in practice. Or how about e-books or virtual conferencing or any number of other technologies that always seems to be right at the cusp of greatness?

Writing about the potential of ESPN 3D, Justin Peters of Slate.com makes a simple but elegant argument about 3D entertainment technology that's worth keeping in mind. The reason why the 3D effects in Avatar are so impressive (and trust me, it's worth shelling out the extra 5 bucks or so for the full 3D treatment - I was blown away by Avatar) is because nobody has any idea of what a blue Na'vi should look like, let alone in 3D:

"Live-action 3-D differs from the 3-D camerawork made famous in CGI-heavy movies like Avatar. A 3-D representation of the computer-generated Na'vi looks great largely because you've never seen a Na'vi before. Since you have no idea what a blue cat person is supposed to look like (and since the blue cat people are computer-generated), you don't pick up on any visual distortions. But we all know how a real, 3-D human is supposed to look—and, while watching a 3-D football game, you're acutely aware that the guys in helmets and pads don't look exactly right. The difference between JaMarcus Russell and 3-D JaMarcus Russell is like the difference between Elvis and the world's best Elvis impersonator."

In other words, once you know what a 3D effect is supposed to look like, it's immediately less impressive than it should be. Which reminds me of my recent experience buying a new HDTV big enough to blow away any guests I might invite over to enjoy a baseball game in HD... I tuned the TV to the "regular" channel and asked my guests to watch a Yankees game for a few minutes. And then I tuned the TV to the HD channel, where I was highly confident that I would witness a true epiphany. I literally expected my guests to break down in tears at the experience of watching A-Rod and Jeter and Mariano in crisp, detailed HD. But what did I get? "Nice TV. Looks great... but I can't tell the difference between the regular and HD channels."

Which is what, I fear, will be the case with 3D TV. There's clearly something going on with video gaming technology and CGI and augmented reality, but I'm not sure if the final answer is 3D TV.

[image: Blue Na'vi from Avatar]