Archive for creativity
Update on Innovation in Brazil, with a Highlight on Education
Posted by: | CommentsMy recent visit to three beautiful regions of Brazil included opportunities to learn more about the economic climate and the future of innovation. Entrepreneurial opportunities are tremendous for innovative and bold Brazilians, in spite of the challenges that come with extremely expensive capital, high taxation, and occasional bureaucratic barriers. Brazil continues rising rapidly, on its way to be one of the world’s great superpowers. The spirit of Brazil was contagious!
The opportunities from the agricultural potential of Brazil are mind-boggling. The biodiversity of the few parts I saw was overwhelming, and that was only a minute sampling. By strengthening the airport system in Brazil, there are many opportunities to move away from supplying bulk commodities like fiber and coffee to providing value-added consumer products shipped directly to consumer markets. A nationwide effort to enhance transportation is needed (and is underway). One product area where I eagerly await further progress is in the field of beverages. For example, all over Brazil there are drinks based on the guarana berry from the Amazon, including the wildly popular Antarctica brand carbonated beverage. These are more popular than cola beverages and frankly, they taste much better. This one of many Brazilian flavors waiting to emerge into the US market.
Brazilian businesses have also evolved a variety of interesting business models, including efficient methods for managing buffets where you pay by the kilo. I would welcome that approach here.
The business area that most impressed me for its innovation was in the field of education, and distance education is particular. I had the privilege of meeting with the CEO of POSEAD, a remarkable company offering distance learning service to Spanish and Portuguese speakers. They have drawn upon 40 years of experience in a non-profit educational organization, CETEB, along with many years of commercial experience, to create a rapidly growing business that solves some of the real problems of education and training in emerging nations, where the cost of commuting to a school or training center may exceed monthly incomes. They have developed advanced diagnostics and delivery systems to really understand what a student is doing, what they need, and how to get them to move forward. There are so many mistakes that can be made by newcomers in this area, especially in meeting the needs of Spanish and Portuguese speakers, but they’ve figured out how to avoid them and have created a remarkable efficiency in their systems that results in extremely low cost.
Some of the innovation in education goes back to a remarkable woman, Rosa Pessina, who long ago recognized that the pressure to build more schools to accommodate burgeoning classes in the earlier grades was treating a symptom, not the cause of the problem. Her analysis showed that class sizes were suffering because too many students were failing to advance in school, resulting in low graduation rates and high class sizes as kids went back through the same grade more than once. She then developed programs for accelerated learning to help these kids quickly get back to the right grade for their age, making the students feel better about the class they were in and enhancing motivation. This was the beginning of the non-profit organization CETEB, and those who participate in its accelerated learning programs have a 94% success rate, if I remember correctly–an extremely high percentage that go on to graduate. CETEB’s services include distance learning tools to help Portuguese and Spanish speakers. There is a huge opportunity here for the United States, where we have the children of many Spanish-speaking immigrants doing poorly in the schools. If they do not gain an education, the risk for ongoing poverty and crime is much higher. By accelerating their progress and helping them gain education at low cost, remarkable social good could be achieved here in the U.S. Governors, CETEB awaits your call!
There are layers of innovation in other areas in both CETEB and POSEAD, including how they quality and prepare content, how they form alliances, how they manage the challenges of certification and regulatory burdens, and in general how they identify and meet the needs of students and communities. There are brilliant minds at work here, and I feel that it’s time for US schools, companies, and governments to explore collaborative efforts. I’d be happy to help make a connection.
Swinging at the Innovation Piñata: The Need for Outside Eyes
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Swinging at the Innovation Pinata
Appleton Papers invented carbonless copy paper about 50 years ago. Their chemists found a way to place a clear liquid inside tiny fragile spheres that could be coated onto one side of a paper. When the spheres were broken by the force of a pen or pencil pressing down on the paper, the liquid would be released and could then react with a chemical in an adjacent layer of paper to form a dye. The newly formed dye in a lower layer of paper creates a copy of what was written on a top layer. Over the years Appleton Papers developed many improvements in the microencapsulation process, but remained focused on creating paper products such as many variations of carbonless paper or thermal paper that develops images when exposed to heat. Their encapsulation systems were brilliant but huge potential was being missed. Only when a team of outside consultants came in to review the opportunities of Appleton’s technology did the company begin to realize just how many new product opportunities might be possible. Outside eyes were needed because those inside the company had grown up with blinders in place that governed the assumptions they brought to the innovation table. Opportunities were framed in terms of what improvements could be made to their paper business, not what new products in other industries could be enabled or enriched with microencapsulation technology. The outside eyes helped Appleton know where to swing, and goodies were soon falling from the innovation piñata after swinging in the direction of Procter and Gamble.
Procter, of course, is famous for its laundry products such as Tide® detergent and Downy® fabric softener. There was a need for controlled release of fragrance from fabric softener that Appleton Papers was able to meet for P&G. By encapsulating fragrance and delivering those microcapsules to clothing, the fragrance could be protected and released gradually as capsules are broken while the clothing is being worn. Sustained released of the aroma made clothes smell fresher longer. Now Appleton encapsulated huge tankloads of aroma for the Downy business, showing the power of open innovation as technologies are applied across disciplines and shared between corporations. Steve said that Appleton had that technology for 50 years, but only recently realized its innovation potential in areas outside of paper, thanks to a secret weapon for those swinging at the innovation piñata: outside eyes.
Smartphones and Agriculture
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the interesting trends in emerging nations is the rapid spread of mobile phones without first moving to landlines. Millions of people who don’t have landlines and may not have the infrastructure for them are able to benefit from cell phones. As cell phones increasingly become smart, offering a variety of apps and services, their smartphones can change the way people work and live. That includes the way they farm, including they way they apply pesticides, apply water, manage the soil, and harvest crops. Look to agriculture and the related fields of water and soil management for added value in coming years.
Lindsay Corporation (no relation, unfortunately, though I did profit as an investor in the past–NYSE:LNN) recently announced a new cell phone application to help farmers track and control their automated irrigation systems such as the Zimmatic® system. Here’s an excerpt:
Lindsay Corporation, maker of Zimmatic® irrigation systems, announces the introduction of FieldNET Mobile—pivot control for smartphones. The new feature allows growers to fully control and monitor their irrigation pivots anywhere through the convenience of smartphones.
“FieldNET Mobile provides a labor-saving innovation with the convenience of web-enabled phones,” says Reece Andrews, GrowSmart™ product manager at Lindsay. “With full control and monitoring from anywhere, growers are more efficient with their time and always know the status of their irrigation systems.”
FieldNET Mobile’s graphical interface supports most industry-leading smartphones, including the iPhone®, Droid® and BlackBerry®, according to Andrews.
FieldNET is an award-winning web-based irrigation management system. With the addition of FieldNET Mobile, growers can view the current status of all their pivots in one list, receive system alerts, arrange pivots by predefined groups, view water usage reports and receive a history of pivot runtimes.
Innovators are already considering many other smartphone-enabled opportunities for improving the way we farm and manage water around the world. It’s too early to discuss some details, but I look forward to seeing what we can do to further improve the quality of life through better agriculture practices enabled by the power of smartphones. Stay tuned!
What do you see as future applications of smartphones in agriculture?
Related reading:
In late 2009, I was invited to speak at Singapore’s Innovation and Enterprise Week 2009, an event held at Biopolis and sponsored by A*STAR, the world-class research organization of the Singaporean government, in collaboration with Exploit Technologies, the tech transfer arm of A*STAR. While I enjoyed the opportunity to discuss our book, the important thing to me was the opportunity to learn more about that amazing country and their bold approach to promoting innovation and technology. In my presentation for the large crowd at Innovation and Enterprise Week, I discussed the fascinating parallels between the Singapore experiment and the evolving experiment in innovation in my state of Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery represent a brilliant approach to combining the best of public and private innovation.
Below are three video segments from my presentation. A couple of friends in Singapore took the video. There are a few gaps in sound and so forth, but I hope you can understand it. Don’t miss my lame magic trick in segment 3. They seemed to like it–proof again of the great courtesy that one finds in Singapore. In all seriousness, I think there are important lessons about innovation that can be gleaned by inspecting both the Singaporean system and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which include the Morgridge Institute for private sector research and the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Madison and Singapore are on opposite sides of the world, but on the same side of the innovation spectrum, at the leading edge.
Update: On April 24, I posted a newly recorded and shortened Pixetell presentation covering the basic information I shared in Singapore, without the magic or other excursions.
I am deeply grateful to the many people who kindly shared their time to help me prepare for the presentation, including Sangtae Kim, John Wiley, Charles Hoslett, Carl Gulbrandsen and Janet Kelly from the Wisconsin side (Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and WARF), plus Boon Swan Foo, Seito Wei Peng, and Sze Tiam Lin at Exploit Technologies in Singapore.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Idea Cancer: The Danger of Good Ideas (Growing Out of Control)
Posted by: | CommentsNussbaum on Design (BusinessWeek) has a though-provoking column that mentions several innovation principles from designer Diego Rodriquez. One of these is “Killing good ideas is a good idea.” That’s the kind of counter-intuitive blasphemy that merits reflection. Of course, developing good ideas is essential, but without the killing phase, good ideas can lead to “idea cancer.” Ideas from late-stage idea cancer strangle many organizations and many minds–when ideas grow without control, unregulated and unchecked by proper objectives and reality. Ideas can metastasize and choke the arteries of business, cloud the mind, and weaken all life support systems in the end, unless they are regulated and killed at the appropriate time. So many great failures begin with good ideas, and lots of them.
Innovation is often more about execution and planning than idea generation. A weak idea, implemented ITERATIVELY with the right talent, can be adjusted based on feedback from the system (e.g., the market) and become successful. Even mediocre ideas can beat good ideas if there are great skills, good leaders, and good execution. But add an occasional great idea to the mix and the success can be remarkable, if the dream isn’t cluttered with lots of distracting good ideas along the way.
Innovation requires discipline. One has to focus and learn iteratively in the process, and not let unrestrained good ideas shut down your innovation engines with “idea cancer.”
Feeding Innovation: Nurturing the Social Component
Posted by: | CommentsMany creative corporate employees trying to innovate fail because they don’t fully grasp the social component of innovation. It is a social beast that must be fed and nurtured in many ways. It requires healthy relationships and many connections within your organization in order to help your peers and others recognize and act on the value you provide. For companies and individual inventors, developing the ties with the right people is again critical for innovation success, even at the earliest stages of your journey. The social component is often far more important that the technical components of innovation.
In this Pixetell video presentation, I briefly discusses the social side of innovation and give a plug for one of my favorite books, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, a resource that can help corporations and individuals better “feed innovation.” Keith’s book, coupled with the insights we provide in Conquering Innovation Fatigue, can help you build the right relationships you need for innovation success.
Overcome Innovation Fatigue with Fun!
Posted by: | CommentsUltimately, innovation in an organization works best when people are intrinsically motivated to innovate. The spread of an innovation–which is what innovation success is all about–also requires that target customers have an incentive to adopt and spread the innovation. FUN can be one of the most exciting incentives. Is your innovation sytem fun? Is your product fun? Have you considered how you can make it fun to drive interest and adoption?
Here’s a little video from The Fun Theory that shows how engineering fun can bring exciting results on the street. (Hat tip to inventor Fung-jou Chen.)
The Leap to Innovation: The Frog Tape Story
Posted by: | CommentsWhen traveling, I feel like I have a gift in meeting cool innovators on airplanes. Almost every time I fly, I meet someone whose story intrigues me. Recently I met a manager from Shurtape, the company that introduced the innovative Frog Tape® product. Frog Tape® is a masking tape for use with latex paint that prevents leakage of paint under the tape. This has been a persistent problem with masking tape of the years. While masking tape provides a barrier against paint, when wet paint hits the edge of the tape, it can often bleed into or under the tape because the tape is creped and has little valleys and ridges of texture. This can result in a less than clean line between the painted and unpainted regions, and extra clean up to remove places where bleeding under the tape occurred.
Frog Tape®
One proposed solution to this problem has been to use superabsorbent material in the tape that can swell when wetted with the moisture in latex paint. Swelling of the superabsorbent can help block off channels and reduce bleeding. The problem has been that mixing superabsorbent with masking tape can greatly increase the cost of the product. One of inventor, George Gruber, found a clever solution (see U.S. Patent No. 6,828,008). Instead of trying a complex and expensive formulation of the substrate or adhesive material combined with superabsorbent, he realized (if I infer or understand correctly) that all that was really needed was just a little superabsorbent powder on the edges of the tape. He found a simple mechanical way to grind the powder into the sides of a roll of tape, resulting in just the right amount of the swellable material in just the right place. Result: tremendous sealing performance right where it is needed at very low cost. Rather than incremental improvements in formulating a mixture across the entire tape, he “leap frogged” to a low-cost, simple, and patentable solution: apply superabsorbent to the edges only in an easy application method to regular tape. Bingo. Shurtape was smart enough to recognize the potential of the invention and acquire it in a great example of open innovation and technology licensing. I’ve read user comments about the product compared to competitive products, and think we’ve got a potential winner here.
Don’t be constrained by the assumptions you began with or those that hold your competitors in place. Look for the surprisingly elegant, low-cost solutions that can help you leap frog your way to innovation success.
Keep Intrinsic Incentives in Mind to Stimulate Creativity
Posted by: | CommentsThanks to Roni Horowitz in Israel for calling my attention to this excellent presentation from Daniel Pink, a leading career analyst who spoke at a TED Conference in 2009. He discusses research showing that traditional “if then” financial incentives are great for encouraging people to rapidly complete simple, straightforward tasks, but when it comes to creative problem solving and similar complex tasks, such incentives can actually decrease performance. For innovation, intrinsic rewards may be especially important. An environment where people feel that their work is relevant and makes a difference can do more to enhance innovation than financial perks. Watch the video and then consider exploring what kind of innovation culture you have. Do you really understand what motivates innovation in your environment?
Turn What You Know Upside Down: Innovation Tip
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A Building with a Ship for a Roof? (Manti Temple in Manti, Utah)
Today I heard a story about Norwegian carpenters who literally turned what they knew upside down to solve a difficult problem through innovation. This occurred in the nineteenth century in the wild Western frontier, where a team of Norwegian carpenters were helping to build a large and complex structure in Manti, Utah. These men were in charge of building the roof. They had built plenty of ships in Norway, but never a roof, and puzzled over what to do. Rather than become discouraged, they decided to draw upon what they knew of shipmaking to build a strong, robust structure like the hull of a ship – and then turn it upside down to make a roof.
In innovation, there are often complex problems to be solved and barriers to be overcome that seem beyond your experience and capabilities. Sometimes, the solution is to draw upon what you already know, but turn it upside down, applying it in a totally new way. The inventions and innovations that change the world often come from the intersections between disciplines, where solid knowledge in one area is applied creatively in a new area. So innovators, take what you know and be ready to turn it upside down or inside out.