I was browsing around google images today. I always enjoy seeing what comes up visually with certain search terms. I was looking at “innovation” this time. Actually a word a do a lot of searching about and thinking about. I ran across this image below at loosetech.com .
This is a drawing summarizing 3 speakers talking about Innovation: Craig Sampson of IDEO, David Ormesher of Closerlook and Robin Cook, participant in the Innovation University. I drew this in real time during the talk using black pens in a variety of line widths, a silver pen and two oranges.
One thing I really like about this type of work is how it captures the essence of a subject talks. You can really see the relatedness of the conversation that went on that day. Compared to what I usually use for capturing the contents of a talk/presentation/meeting, this type of real-time graphic captures ten times the data and meaning. Below two other examples of graphic facilitation by the same artist: a talk by Tom Friedman of “The world is Flat“, and a talk by Tim Hurson about “Think Better”
I have visited slideshare quite a few times in the past, but really didn’t capture it’s full potential until today. I was originally linked into this presentation on “Death by Powepoint” by Alexi Kapterev.
I then looked at the associated links ala youtube style. It was interesting to see the wealth of presentations when you search for innovation. This is really a way you can cross-pollinate and get outside what you are used to without leaving you computer. For those of you on LinkedIN check out “leveraging Social Networks for Results below”
Here a link to an article on Roland Piquepaille’s blog conerning some prototype electrochromic sunglasses put together by the University of Washington. What I really liked about this example is not that electrochromic materials are totally unknown as there has been significant work on them for decades. It was that they built a prototype to try it. I also see applications like sunglasses as the perfect enabling application for electrochromic materials. The fact they they are fault tolerant, non-mission critical, and bring a new axis of differentiation, and are adjacent to the “real” or “large” market. Applications like these allow for processors, material suppliers, and designers to become comfortable with a new innovation and accelerate the acceptance in the markets that will ubiquitize electrochromics (Building and Construction).
I found the presentation to be quite refreshing and eye-opening. She specializes in designing solutions for the other 90% of the world. Engineering solutions to common, but life-threatening problems in developing countries. Highlighted in the talk are designs for cleaner burning cooking fuels made from local resources that achieve equivalent performance to wood based charcoal.
For those of us that develop products or design something for a living, it was a kick in the teeth. Many of us work very hard to solve difficult problems (sometimes very niche I must admit) with some of the very latest technology at our disposal. This is a reminder of:
#1 Try to solve those problems that are important.
#2 Get your head up out of “the way” things are done and look at what works.
#3 Look at how to match your resources, methods, and economics with the environment and situation at hand.
Seth Godin has an interesting post called “One, a few, most or all” where he discusses about what he calls the 4 situations in marketing. He makes this distinction based on who you need to influence. As the un-initiated (aka, not a marketing guy) I know that you have to be aware of your audience and potential customer, but after reading this post it makes it completely clear that you have to approach each situation differently in order to succeed. Here are the situations:
One. When you need to fill a job or sell a house you only need to convince one person.
Few. When you want to be the hot local restaurant, or sell many copies of a book, or be a popular TV show you have to convince quite a few people.
All. When you need to convince all of a panel or group in order to win, for example to specific your product as an industry requirement, or you need the support of 51 senators to pass your bill, or you need a town council to approve your building permit.
Thinking more about this specific grouping, it is very evident that you need to know which situation you are in before you develop your strategy. Sometimes this situation will be determined by business model economics, while in other cases this might be determined be product maturity, % market share, or legislative situation. In all cases knowing your situation will help you to develop a strategy that is more aligned with your goal.
C an you identify which of your potential product or service offerings might fall into these categories?
How does your strategy for approaching and intereacting with a customer change with respect to what situation you are in?
Do certain market segments always fall into the same marketing situations?
It was unfortunate that I found this great example of innovation through through a tradegy. Engadet has a post on the unfortunate death of a man while operating this piece of equipment. The piece of equipment is the Spider radio controller slope mower. made by Dvorak Machine Division.
First let me point out that this particular unit is a radio controlled unit and not a robot per se, but a remote controlled machine (more like an RC car).
What caught my eye was the innovative nature of this piece of equipment and how it is an interesting solution to a well-defined niche market in the lawn care world. It is very common to find steep embandments and slopes around roadways, overpasses, dams, reseviors, lakes, or other municipal areas. If you look at what are the alternatives and current incumbents in the area mowing slopes, you will see the uniqueness of this offering by Dvorak.
Although I can’t quote direct prices, the spider looks like it could have a significantly lower cost of ownership than the usual tractor-swing arm or standard ride-on slope mowers. The productivity for the spider versus the hand held trimmer was approximately 6-1 from the spider commercial video at their site. It really changes the user expectation in terms of mode of interface, capital investment, and operator safety (in the long term). It is also interesting in that it might be much more successful than other remote controlled mowers (examplesoffewroboticlawnmowers). The key here is that most people initially think to replace the largest volume of mower on the market which is the home user base. In this setting the concept of a remote controlled mower is a luxury and feature overkill. Where in the specific market of slope mowing The Spider offers a unique value proposition when you compare the Spider Slope Mower to the rest of the market. This is an example of a disruptive technology to this particular sub-segment the lawn care market.
This is about a recent post from Guy Kawasaki about his experiences in starting a new site based on use provided content. The basic premise is the stats on his new site truemors.com. The biggest shock to most people was that the total cost of the site was around $12K to set and get operational (as Guy call this credit card magnitude debt). There is a whole list of 26 stats and an accompanying slide presentation. The last stat caught my eye in that it was the 4 things that Guy learned from this experience:
There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
$12,000 goes a very long way these days.
You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.
I would say Guy’s success is certainly quite a bit different from the average joe that might try the same thing as he has a extremely popular blog from which he could launch this site. So the amount of traffic and the speed to grow a base of users may have been faster than what a less popular person may have been capable of.
On the other hand the low cost of entry was quite eye opening as he was able to implement his concept to a usable and growable state with the funds that are within reach of a large portion of the industrialized world.
So what idea for the web do you have that could be launched or at least prototyped for this kidn of money?
Over the last two days I was pointed to two interesting on-line moneymakers. They were interesting in how they make money. One sells something that is ubiquitous and in most caes considered a nuisance, while the other harnesses the power of a distributed crowd to provide a service at a very low cost.
The first example is http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ where Linda Katz of Garden City, Kansas sells, you guessed it, tumbleweeds on the internet. The original post I ran across is over at Unusual Business Ideas That Work. This excerpt from the linked article pretty much explains the origin of the business.
“It all started as a joke,”says Katz, 49. She asked her son to build her a family Web page so she could communicate with friends and give it the tongue-in-cheek name Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Never mind that she didn’t even live on a farm, but in a subdivision. Nevermind that you can’t cultivate tumbleweed, which spreads its seed as it tumbles in the wind. For authenticity’s sake, Katz added a price list ($35 for a big weed, $25 for a midsize one, $20 for the small economy model)
So tongue-in-cheek or not, Katz created a business when she wasn’t looking for one. It turns out that her buyers range from people looking to decorate their houses, to movie studios, to academic researchers, to people in love with Westerns, and even for tumbleweed Christmas trees (picture at right by erissiva). Seth Godin has a comment on this site on how this site emerged totally from organic search engine traffic.
The second site is www.pickydomains.com where they have an original take on making money off the domain name trade. Most people make money (some say a lot) by speculating on domain names. Some companies can hire consultants for thousands of dollars to come up with a catchy and traffic-driving domain name. Pickydomains takes the “power of the crowds” approach. As a person/entity wanting to use their service, you pay $50 and a list of requirements for your domainname. For example you would provide the basic site type, hyphens/no-hyphens, .com or other, mandatory keywords, etc. Pickydomains would post this to their list of users, a large list. The users would submit possible solutions. If the users’s submission is chosen, pickydomains shares half the $50 fee. PickyDomains also can buy any ones the customers don’t want, but they think are worth something. If they don’t provide something you are interested in, they refund your fee. This is a great example of having a crowd solve a problem that it is difficult to solve as an individual or a small group. Interesting business idea. If you do to the site you can see some exmples of successful wins. The one comment I have is that this service is too inexpensive. Just like the previous post Here, people expectation are linked to evironment and pre-text.
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?
