by Roger Dennis

Body shaping for technology

From the Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine (theme : The Future) comes this fascinating snippet of how people are modifying their behaviours to use technology.

In an interview, an 18 yeart old student called Altan reveals how:

“…he has begun to experiment with increasing his own efficiency; he reshapes his fingernails to accurate points to better use tiny touch screens.”

This speaks loudly to a couple of interesting trains of thought:

  1. the technology is designed badly in the first place – interfaces that require body modification should not really make it out of the lab (“Hey Mum, I just got my head modified to make my ear closer to my mouth to use this waaay cool tiny phone”)
  2. scanning for weak signals like this can reveal valuable insights into the design of your product

(p.s. I’m catching up on a lot of magazine backlog, so excuse the timeliness of this post.)

by Roger Dennis

Scott Berkum on innovation

In Wellington last week I dropped past Webstock, and caught Scott Berkum presenting on innovation. He talked about the myth of innovation – or how the eureka moment actually takes years of prior effort. What I found most interesting was his linkages between innovation and the early explorers. How are they similar? Here’s a quick list :

  • they head off into the unknown
  • the time scales for their discoveries are largely unpredictable
  • there’s long periods of boredom before the discovery takes place
  • people think they’re a little mad to challenge paradigms (“Of course the world is flat”)
  • when they report their discoveries, eventually people think it was common sense that the discovery should eventually happen (“Of course the world isn’t flat” and “Of course iTunes was the reason the iPod was so successful”)

The other interesting part of Scotts talk was his link to the innovation culture that used to exist at 3M, and how it was driven from the top (my emphasis):

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”

This is company that produced masking tape and Post-It notes – neither of which was on any corporate strategic roadmap, but which was devised by coal-face employees.

by Roger Dennis

NESTA and Fringe benefits

For various reasons  – and connections – I’ve just spent a bit of time reading the work of the NESTA Connect team in the UK.  One of the blog entries had a link to a fascinating event in the USA called the Triple Helix.  The aim of the event is to encourage a model of innovation that looks across sectors to seek the collision points. With a heavy bent on collaboration, both the NESTA blog posting and the  Triple Helix website are fascinating reads.

by Roger Dennis

Early crowd-sourcing (surfing of a different kind)

Over at BusinessWeek there’s a great pointer to a blog posting by John Hagel about innovation and surfing. It seems to me that this is one of the most well documented examples of crowdsourcing, and how lead users can develop new directions for a product. The posting does not stop there, and has lessons to be gleaned about forming user networks and tapping into users on the edges/fringes.

It’s quite a long read, and well worth more than a cursory glance. The one thing that grabbed me was this excerpt:


find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity

And now – off to the beach..

by Roger Dennis

The Un-conference

At the weekend I attended Kiwi Foo Camp. It was damn interesting on several counts:

  1. The people there were all fascinating in their own right
  2. The format meant that people could hold sessions on their passions. Those that were also passionate contributed in such a way that added value
  3. The venue was a standard school, with no fancy trappings or dressing up. It was proof that of that old photography adage I like “the last thing you should add to a great photo is a sunset.” (However the same adage does not always apply to nudist beaches – especially ones frequented by overweight European tourists – where there are definitely some things that need dressing up)
  4. People camped. Literally. I took my tent. People who have bank accounts which require calculators with extra wide screens also camped.
  5. It was casual. Being a New Zealand summer, shorts, t-shirts and bare feet were often the order of the day.
  6. Invite only increases the quality of the event immensely.

There’s pages you could write on the implications for innovation events, but I’ll leave it at that. Next time you are planning an event, consider the above list.

By the way, raving about the weekend seems to be par for the course…

by Roger Dennis

Innovation in a recession

It’s been widely covered in various blogs, but I think the message is worth re-iterating. In a recession, you should not cut back on innovation, but increase it. When your competitors are cost cutting and shedding talent, your company should work doubly hard to make the next best thing in your market.

Why?

When the economy picks up again you’ll be very well placed to slay the market.

Want proof? Look no further than Apple. This was pointed out in the BusinessWeek blog in two postings. The first one mentions that “in the last recession, Apple worked on iTunes and the iPod”

The second post quotes the sceptics who – at the time – bemoaned Apples innovation strategies. One commentator is quoted in 2001 as saying “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently.”

Well worth reading.

by Roger Dennis

Breaking Paradigms

After the holidays, and a long break, here’s one of the more interesting articles I came across while away from the office. It’s about breaking paradigms, and how people who get stuck in their own thought patterns find it astounding when they meet people who do not do the same. It’s from the New York Times.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

How does this relate to innovation and product creation?

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

by Roger Dennis

Idea arbitrage

From Wired comes a fascinating article about an electronic engineer using theories about the flow of electrons to predict the fate of endangered species.

By borrowing some engineers’ insights about how circuits work, ecologists now have a promising new tool for helping conserve mountain lions and other threatened species.Ecologists are now using “circuit theory,” thanks in large part to a scientist named Brad McRae who works at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. McRae designed electronics for printers before completing a Ph.D. in forest science at Northern Arizona University. He realized how striking the parallel was between the circuits he had worked on as an engineer and the species he was now trying to understand.

[…]

As they reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, circuit theory beats popular gene-flow models. It not only works — it works well.

The lesson : look outside your own sector and be open to adopting fresh approaches to challenges.

by Roger Dennis

Looking back to look forward

Even to a technophobe it’s very clear how much computers have changed in the last twenty years. However it’s often difficult to try and translate this change back into real world information. Economists do it really well when they make statements like :
“When adjusted for inflation and [……..] (insert your least favourite bit of technical economist speak here), the price of a McDonalds hamburger in 1980 could today finance an entire award winning documentary about fast food.”

So it was fascinating to read a quote on the BBC site which did the equivalent of the above statement (without, of course, the reference to fast food). When talking about the technical advances in Intels new chip design, one of the people on the project had this to say :


“Had we used the same transistors that we used in our chips 15 to 20 years ago, the chip would be about the size of a two-storey building,” said Bill Kircos of Intel.