From several weeks ago -- Business Week celebrates what they call the "Creativity Economy" by describing the new "innovation gurus" who "focus more on micro-innovation -- teaching companies how to connect with their customers' emotions, linking research and development labs to consumer needs, recalibrating employee incentives to emphasize creativity, constructing maps showing opportunities for innovation." The package of articles can be accessed by links to the right of the main article here.
The new innovation mantra is that we're all going to be saved by design, and this Business Week article talks about how you can't just graft design principles into your organization. To better integrate design principles into "traditional" firms, the article specifies the ways in which design organizations differ from traditional firms along "five key dimensions: flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status, and dominant attitude." Business Week also has launched a new Business Innovation Center with articles focused on "Innovation and Design: Strategy, creativity, and research." Well, that pretty much covers it all!
I haven't read this one yet, and if you haven't either you can get a sneak peek at new book The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products by Jonathan Cagan, Craig Vogel and Peter Boatwright from this Knowledge @ Wharton excerpt of the first chapter. The book's premise: "Many successful products today signify a revolution in product design that is driven by customer emotion, self-image and fantasy, not just function."
New companies are far easier and faster to launch today compared to even five years ago because of the improvements to open-source software and the commoditization of hardware, says an MIT Technology Review story, quoting one entrepreneur: "Since you don't have to put out a lot of capital to start, you're going to see a real creative wave of products."
Marketing ideas and inspiration can be had for a price on the PSFK IF blog. It's a paid-sub blog; the free version's entries have teaser info but often don't feature links to sources the way the paid-sub version does (there is a free newsletter available on the site).
Last April at the American Creativity Association conference I was impressed by a talk from futurist Paul Schumann, who will be speaking at a free seminar on "Building An Innovative Enterprise," from 9 a.m. to noon on July 26. Hosted by the Center for Community Based and Nonprofit Organizations at the Austin Community College Highland Business Center in Austin, Texas. Go here for more information and to register for this seminar (then click on "Learning Opportunities").
Corante debuts a new blog today that should be of interest to IdeaFlow readers. It's called Future Tense, and it's on the future of work. Authors include Jim McGee, who's oft-quoted here on IdeaFlow.
Yesterday, Richard Florida was also a guest on Minnesota Public Radio's "Midday" program, and you can hear that show archived here.
Fascinating tidbit from this obituary of microchip inventor Jack Kilby: Kilby failed the college entrance exam for MIT. Proving what most of us already know -- college entrance exams are certainly no test of creativity!
Roadcasting: I want it!! C'mon, developers, let's get those mesh networks meshing!!
Business Week's "The Power of Us: Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business" hauls out the usual suspects -- Skype, Wikipedia, EBay, Amazon, P&G, Eli Lilly --and then some in its fairly in-depth, thoughtful look at the way Internet-fueled collective cooperation is disrupting businesses left and right. Worth a look.
Evelyn Rodriguez calls John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity her favorite book on creativity. You can read an excerpt here. A taste: "The editing process begins with reconnecting with the feeling, the resonance, that was present during the creation of the work of art."
OK, maybe I'm easily amused, but I think this is pretty cool -- the letters "CPSI" on the left came from a site where you specify the word you want to spell and then get a script that renders your word in letters that come from publicly accessible photos on Flickr. The photos used to make the letters change every time the page is refreshed.
Koen van der Wal in the Netherlands has started the first blog I've seen on customer co-creation. Anybody who knows of another blog on this topic, let me know. The mission of the Co-Creation Blog: "Since we only seem to be at the beginning of this development, I would like to share ideas here on how designers, marketeers, market researchers, managers and users can give shape to co-creation. Simply put: How will this work?"
It's not really a car, it's a network: "As automotive electronics become more complex, car manufacturers are borrowing a page from the network industry, relying on shared networks and standard protocols to support internal communications between control systems. They're also turning to industry standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to support links to external systems that provide traffic, weather, entertainment and other information."
Clayton Christensen has made us all aware of bottom-up disruptive innovations that sneak in as underperformers then manage to displace established products in mainstream markets (example: Sony Walkman). But there are also top-down disruptive innovations, writes Nicholas Carr in Strategy + Business, that "actually outperform existing products when they’re introduced, and they sell for a premium price rather than at a discount. They’re initially purchased by the most discriminating and least price-sensitive buyers, and then they move steadily downward, into the mainstream, to recast the entire market in their own image." (examples: FedEx's overnight delivery services, XM satellite radio)
When The Sous-Chef Is An Ink-Jet (NYT): "Chef Homaro Cantu wants to use technology to change the way people perceive (and eat) food, and he uses Moto [his restaurant] as his laboratory. 'Gastronomy has to catch up to the evolution in technology,' he said. 'And we're helping that process happen.'
Managing the Front End of Innovation, one of the best innovation conferences, is offering $400 off the registration price if you register before Jan. 21. This year's conference features Henry Chesbrough, Benjamin Zander, Jack Welch, Steve Wozniak and tracks on Open Innovation and Six Sigma.
Should there be an ethics of innovation? Join the discussion on Joyce Wycoff's blog.
Innovators share the lessons they've learned in 2004, from Chuck Frey.
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