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I ran across this somewhere in my daily web visits. It is a story of how a small group of UCSC students (10) designed , planned and build a 4 story art pieces honoring the classic computer games Donkey Kong using nothing but some perspiration and a whole slew of post-it notes(~6,400). If you are not familiar with Donkey Kong, here is the Wikipedia link and here is the quick description form the UCSC page to put it’s place in gaming history in perspective.

“Donkey Kong (Miyamoto, et. al.,1981) was the first appearance of the Itallian plumber we now know as Mario. While this game’s early ’80s arcade popularity predates most of today’s engineering students, it represents the amazing results that a small development team can produce. Today Donkey Kong is ranked as the 3rd most popular arcade game of all time, selling over 65,000 units. Currently this work is visible at the E2 building at UCSC, it is scheduled to be removed on or before May 1.”

Check out the above website as it has a nice time-lapsed video and pictures.

So why is this important to innovation, creativity, or new ideas?

There are a couple of things hidden in here:

(1) It is pretty amazing what you can do with something so common as the post-it note, some planning, and an idea.  So they took a piece of colored paper with a self-stick adhesive along one edge designed for leaving reminders for one’s self, and turned into a piece of art.  Did you get the same amount of use of impact out of the last 6,400 post it notes that your organization used?

(2) Most of the students of this age group (I am making some assumptions here) probably didn’t grow up with Donkey Kong, but they still recognize it as a pivotal piece of computer game architecture design.

(3) It is also amazing what you can do with a small team that is dedicated. Let’s do a thought experiment. If you had asked a large corporation to do something like this, what would it have cost and how long would it have taken to implement? How does a small resource-limited groups get something done faster than a resource-rich one?

Some questions to ponder:

• So what operational differences that allow a small resource-limited group to out-perform what a larger resource-rich group?
• What tasks or programs in your organization would be more propertly suited by a small, nimble, and resource limited team?
• How do you approach a problem differently when you have few resources, or an extremely aggressive timeline?

Here a a couple of interesting links.

1. Scientists at NIST show DNA wrapped SWCNT of 200nm or less enter ex-vitro lung cells where longer ones don’t.  Not sure if this is like saying 200nm DNA stands enter lung cells, while longer DNA stands don’t?  Another confusion in the the debate on the safety of “nanomaterials”.  How does your company deal with  EHS and nanotubes?
2. I had a long drive this past weekend and was listening up on Phil McKinney’s Killer Innovations Podcasts from 2006.  This one on “Listening Skills and Rules of Future Forecasting”  was one that I enjoyed.
3. Ditto on the Podcast  “Observation Skills and Contradictions”  deals with a quick exercise for improving observation and the most concise and true-ringing explanation of TRIZ I have seen anywhere.
4. So how do you really test how building behave in an earthquake?  You build one on top of a giant shaker table and deck it out with sensors.  Pretty Amazing.
5. Inkblot Earth has a post about The first person killed by a robot.   Not the science fiction of Asimov, but  interesting.
6. Endless Innovation has a post from Design Sojourn about 7 ways to unleash your creativity  originally from IDEO.   (three level link action).  Those IDEO guys are great,  I got to meet a few through work.
7. Again with IDEO,  The 10 Faces of Innovation changed my outlook on how people work and what drives them.

I just made a post recently about Glowing Bacteria and how it is a good example of “convergence problem solving”. Basically where you are leveraging advances in adjacent fields with your core piece or expertise of technology to really do something beyond the scope of any of the individual pieces you are combing.

I think this advancement is a great example for a creavity excercise I call “List Combination”. This is a great example of convergence for one application. Where else can I use this same solution to make money in another application or field? (Something we all wish we could do more of?)

It basically works like this. In this case I have a new technology which might turn out to have a short list of useful attibutes (lets us use 3, while this technique works well with less 3 or 4, you’ll see why later, any more you can’t get it done).

• It allow you to spread out a liquid or paste
• Detect something you usually can’t see
• Does it quickly in a remote location (with a device you can carry).

S o here is the excercise. Start by making a couple of lists of answers to questions based on your 3 attributes. Be careful and general in your question definition. In my case I would use.

1. What can I spread a paste or liquid onto?
2. What would I like to detect that I can’t see?
3. Where (or in what context) do I need to know something is present?

Now make a list of answers to your questions. Set a target # that you want to work with for each list (example start with 25). It is really important to set a target for the list length, because you have to make it high enough to get out of the context you have already created in your mind. This is really effective if you can get someone to help you that you haven’t told the example technology to yet.

The next step is to build the three possible 2-D matrices where Lists 1-3 are your axis. So cross lists 1/2, 2/3, and 1/3. I do this in Excel . Basically start picking cells at random and decide if the juxtaposition you have created for each X & Y combination makes sense. If so put a X or a green color in the box. For those you don’t like or don’t make sense color them grey or red. Do this for all threee matrices separately. Then take the green squares and list out your combinations or your short lists of only the green cells.

At this point you will have 3 lists of pairs based on your three lists. Now iterate through these combination lists with whatever 3rd axis you didn’t do in teh combination. So these are the three: (If I have 4 attributes, I choose to do only the best 2 combinations I see and combine those, 6 combinations to start with is too many)

1. Intersection of List 1 & 2, with List 3
2. Intersection of List 2 & 3, with List 1
3. Intersection of List 1 & 3, with List 2

Given this activity you should be able to generate 3-5 good adjacent markets or uses for this convergence technology that you can then go and explore in detail. I really like this because of the juxataposition that occurs as you do the list comparisons. Set your lists big enough that you have to get outside your first assumption. And this really works in 2 or 3 man teams. Sometimes those crazy combinations get you very far away from what you were thinking.

Good luck and think about this next time you have to look at the “Where else can I take this Convergence Technology?” type of problem.

If you use this to solve a problem, let me know by dropping me an email or comment.

Disclaimer: I cannot remember seeing an example of this anywhere but can’t be sure that someone else didn’t come up with this method 1st as it seems pretty intuitive.

The original article for this post was actually carried by the BBC News a while back, but I thouht it was worth some

discussion here.

The news announcement in question talks about some work done by Steve Rimmer’s research group at the University of Sheffield. Their research is basically about how to generate lumiscence when a specific biological binding happens. What this would enable is that when one of the customized tags they create comes into contact with the specific pathogen it is specific to, the tag will generate

luminescence. Their work focuses primarily on the tag design coupling the work in flourescent

polymers with the work on biological specific binding agents. I really like that their application is in portable detection of pathogens or bio-threats. To

the right is an image of anthrax (Top:not using this technique) and the second image is one from the Rimmer group website looking at bio-luminescnence detection (specifically: Bottom: Micrograph showing fluorescent particles inside dermal fibroblast cells (blue = particles, red = F-actin)). One specific application the article mentions is the ability to spread a gel of their material into a open wound and quickly determine the presence of bacteria or instance.

I think this is an excellent example of convergence in technology to solve problems. In this case they are combining advances in portable optics and microelectronics, the large biochemistry advancement in target specific binding, and their experise which is the design of highly specialized polymeric units designed for light emission and luminescence. This is a perfect example of “Convergence Problem Solving”, leveraging advances in adjacent fields with your core piece of expertise of technology to really do something beyond the scope of any of the individual pieces of technology you are combining.

Look at this post for how I use this as the basic example for a creativity and ideation examples.

Guy Kawasaki has a good post on TrendHunter Magazine (warning, some content not suitable for work on there). Guy’s post gives some great examples.   Also look at the Science category and the Art and Design Category. This is a mix of the weird and strange mixed with the  insightful and coo .    As with anyone that is a trendsetter they are usually on the fringe which is extremely evident from the links above. You can see the tongue-in-cheek in this publication, but take a look at the about trendhunter page and the associated list of publications at the bottom.

An Example of one trend post is the M3 Heliodisplay from iO2 technology.

So how do you use Trendhunter? Where are the gems there you can develop? Are there some common threads on there that would make the basis of a trend you could ride and tailor your products to? Can you market to a fringe customer base? Should you?

On a related subject Phil McKinney has a great podcast over at Killer Innovations that deals with the “Trend Safari.”  Well work the listen.  The transcipt is also there for the podcast/mp3 challenged.

I saw this video the other day on YouTube and some links from other places. It is pretty profound if you have not seen it.

It really brings into question what kind of expectations we are setting in the media. Check out one of the Dove sites if want to learn more. If you take a different slant on this, what business expectations do some companies strive for and are held to that are unrealistic for a given market segment? Is there a similar complex in business to assume that every industry is capable of supporting X return on investment or Y profit margin?