Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Helping Inventors, Entrepreneurs and Leaders Find Innovation Success » creativity

Innovation Through Crowdsourcing: Congratulations to “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.”

Jeff Lindsay — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:37:59 +0000

Contests can be one of the most interesting innovation tools. With the right challenge and incentives, creative groups from across the world can help invent and innovate rapidly. The creativity of crowds fueled by a content was just demonstrated in the Shredder Challenge contest that was launched October 2011 by the U.S. government’s DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA wanted to know what could be achieved with computer tools in reassembling shredded documents to recover the originals. Since many different approaches were possible, this was an excellent candidate for crowdsourcing. Rather than hire a huge team for a short while to pursue many different paths, or use a small team pursuing many paths over a long period of time, just throw this one out to the crowds for healthy competition. The objective in this competition was to create a system for reconstructing shredded documents. The system would have to demonstrate success by reassembling the shreds from five documents whose shredded remains were posted on a website. As reported at Gizmag, the “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” team won the $50,000 prize for this contest by assembling all five documents two days before the Dec. 4 deadline. Given the hours that the winning team put into this competition, $50,000 was a very good deal for DARPA (and the American taxpayers) and not such a good deal for the winning team. If you consider all the thousands of additional hours put in by many other teams working on the competition, DARPA got quite a lot for a small investment.

Companies can and do this kind of thing as well, with varying degrees of success. Capturing the imagination of people with the skills needed for the problem is the key. Prizes help, along with fame and bragging rights. Intellectual property issues can get in the way for some companies. I’ll point to Local Motors as one of the leading examples of for-profit crowdsourcing. Their business model is sophisticated and highly refined, something I’ve written about here previously.

As for the hilarious title of the winning group, you might enjoy reviewing the history of the classic phrase, “All your base are belong to us.”

What Will It Take to Restore a Culture of Innovation? Answer to Win a Free Copy of Our Book

Jeff Lindsay — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:58:42 +0000

In the United States and many other nations, a question is being asked by many who struggle with the brutal reality of innovation fatigue. In many sectors, it is taking bigger investments, longer times, and much more pain to deliver innovation, and much of what passes for innovation in some sectors ends up being incremental fluff or mere cost-cutting. Some blame it on employee productivity, some blame it on short-term thinking in pubic companies driven by the unnecessary compulsion to please stockholders above all others, some blame it on the MBA culture instilled by leading business schools, and others blame it on governments that make every entrepreneurial move a slow trudge across the regulatory mire and a possibly fatal descent into quicksand. Some point to numerous factors including the capital crunch, creating a perfect storm in which even cash-rich companies are afraid to invest in real innovation because of uncertainty and fear.

Innovation fatigue, of course, is not uniform. Individuals and individual companies often buck trends and rise above currents of fatigue, and sometimes entire sectors seem energized and vibrant with innovation. For example, innovation in mobile applications and devices seems vigorous, but even then we have former innovation leaders like Nokia and Motorola feeling the burn of fatigue across many parts of their business.

Where are the real pressure points? What are the next steps that America or other nations need to take to restore a vigorous innovation culture across many sectors and help their nations overcome innovation fatigue? What do corporate leaders need to be doing differently to turn their companies in havens of innovation that can deliver growth and success for the long term? What do our political leaders need to do and understand to let the fire of innovation burn more brightly?

Let me know your thoughts. The five answers I like best will be rewarded with a free copy of Conquering Innovation Fatigue mailed to wherever you are. All submissions will implicitly have your permission to share them, though I will withhold your name if you ask me to. Send your comments to jeff at magicinnovation d0t com.

Local Motors: Successful Crowdsourcing as a Design Tool for Innovation

Jeff Lindsay — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:12:56 +0000

During the CoDev 2011 conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, I was impressed with a speech given by a local CEO, John (“Jay”) Rogers of Local Motors in Chandler, Arizona. This small company designs exciting new vehicles using design contests that are open to the public. Their rapidly growing community (12,000 participants so far) contributes designs and feedback to help in the selection of potentially successful concepts that Local Motors will then build locally in a microfactory, with final customization of the appearance being achieved with an environmentally friendly and durable vinyl wrap that eliminates the need for paint and gives the owner freedom to have a unique look. The final assembly is done with hands-on help from the new owner, who becomes intimately familiar with the vehicle and with its maintenance.

I was impressed enough with what I heard that I changed my evening plans to drive down to Chandler and attend an open house at Local Motors hosted by Jay himself. He allowed photography, so below you can see some views of Jay speaking and some shots of his vehicles in various stages of construction. The Rally Fighter that I am standing by sells for $59,000. It’s an incredible rugged, safe, and fun car that is legal on the road but a load of fun off road as well. It’s able to do very nice jumps.

These cars weigh much less than other cars their size, offering a huge bonus in mileage. Great engineering and innovation at many levels makes this possible.

The microfactory concept involves assembly of a small number of vehicles at a time in sustainable, efficient processes.

Jay Rogers demonstrates a $300 crimping tool

Jay shows the wire harness for the Local Motors Rally Fighter

Jeff Lindsay in front of an early Rally Fighter from Local Motors

Inside a Rally Fighter

Initial frame, before welding

A portion of the body, before the custom vinyl wrap is added.

The frame. Remarkably strong, protective, and light.

A portion of the frame.

This baby can jump.

Coming together....

A sweet car: the Rally Fighter by Local Motors. This was one of the first vehicles produced.

A Carbonated Toast to Innovation in Packaging

Jeff Lindsay — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:22:08 +0000

Do you recognize how much innovation is behind the simple pleasures of life like a carbonated beverage? A great deal of clever physics and science has gone into the subtle innovations that allow us to enjoy these beverages without, say, risking blindness every time we open a bottle of Sprite. In the early days of soda innovation, there was some risk in opening a screw-top container because the pressure was locked in by the interconnected threads until the screw cap came off: then the high pressure in the container could propel the up and away. Packaging engineers tacked the problem, leading to the first big breakthrough described in a 1961 patent, “Gas Escape Closure Cap” by Leo Garvey, US Patent No. 2,990,079. There were other earlier solutions proposed, including more complex venting caps, but the solution of grooves in the threads is elegant. Part of the patent is shown below, where in the lower right-hand corner you can see a drawing showing grooves in the ridges of the threads of a cap that help allow pressurized gas to escape while the bottle is being opened. A variety of later patents build on that theme, with 21 different patent families citing the Garvey patent. Today grooves in the threads of the bottle are also used, as shown, for example, in US Pat. No. 4392055 of Owens Illinois, providing the same kind of safe venting that Garvey sought. (That also reminds us of the need to consider alternative solutions in pursuing patent coverage.)

Gas venting threads are a tiny tweak of the bottle design that many people overlook, but they play an important role. There are numerous subtle innovations in almost every aspect of the soda bottle, from the design of the flange, the materials use to make it, the shape of the foot of the bottle allowing it to stand without the need for a separate stand or ring, the attachment of labels, the design of the cap, and the basic bottle manufacturing process itself. It’s all worth a toast the next time you have a sip. Innovation adds fizz to our daily lives–and safety.

Trust and Sound IP Systems: An Essential Component for a Nation’s Innovation Success

Jeff Lindsay — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:58:16 +0000

For years, China has been making progress in creating laws and systems that enable protection of intellectual property. Respect for IP rights is essential in creating a culture where innovation and collaborative partnerships can succeed. If individuals and companies lose trust in a government’s ability to respect such rights, the incentives to innovate are reduced (though incentives to copy may be high). Now China threatens to erode some of the trust they have been building with this week’s announcement that they are considering forcing foreign makers of electric cars and hybrids to transfer their technology to China. From today’s Wall Street Journal, we have the story “China Spooks Auto Makers.” Here is an excerpt:

China’s government is considering plans that could force foreign auto makers to hand over cutting-edge electric-vehicle technology to Chinese companies in exchange for access to the nation’s huge market, international auto executives say.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is preparing a 10-year plan aimed at turning China into “the world’s leader” in developing and producing battery-powered cars and hybrids, according to executives at four foreign car companies who are familiar with the ministry’s proposal.

The draft suggests that the government could compel foreign auto makers that want to produce electric vehicles in China to share critical technologies by requiring the companies to enter joint ventures in which they are limited to a minority stake, the executives say.

The plan is “tantamount to China strong-arming foreign auto makers to give up battery, electric-motor, and control technology in exchange for market access,” says a senior executive at one foreign car maker.

I understand the importance that China places on electric vehicles for the future and I can understand the desire to encourage technology transfer instead of exploitation, but when the rules change midstream and companies are forced to turn over intellectual property if they wish to do business in that market, the word “spook” is appropriate. Not only will some automakers be scared away, but it sends a broader signal that IP rights may be disrespected when the economic incentives are strong. This action may result in short term gains for China, but in the long run many prospective business partners will be more reticent to share and collaborate, and innovators within China may consider the threat of lost IP rights and take their best concepts elsewhere.

The unintended consequences of China’s attempt to accelerate its prominence in electric vehicles may be a larger setback in innovation capabilities overall by signaling disrespect for IP rights.

Related problems occur throughout the business world. In many corporations, for example, corporate decisions aimed at achieving a short-term gain can lose the trust of prospective innovators and result in an empty innovation pipeline that could have been full and healthy had a culture of innovation been more carefully nourished.

Update on Innovation in Brazil, with a Highlight on Education

Jeff Lindsay — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:43:38 +0000

My 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

Jeff Lindsay — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:34:50 +0000

Swinging at the Innovation Pinata

Finding a hit in innovation is a lot like swinging at a piñata blindfolded. You know a treasure is there, but success is a matter of random luck because you don’t where where and when to strike. Add a pair of outside eyes, though, and your ability to reap rewards greatly increases. Outside eyes, freed from corporate and cultural blindfolds, are sometimes the key. That was one lesson I learned at the PaperCon 2010 conference when I listened to Steve Wilhelms of Appleton Papers talk about their successful microencapsulation technology that is now being used in many open innovation projects with companies like Procter and Gamble.

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

Jeff Lindsay — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:41:39 +0000

One 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?

World-Class Success in Driving Innovation: Parallels Between Singapore and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery

Jeff Lindsay — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:21:02 +0000

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)

Jeff Lindsay — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:36:25 +0000

Nussbaum 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.”