Mar
08
2008
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 image caught my eye as I have always been a fan of mind-mapping type concepts. This particular image is by Brandy Agerbeck, a Chicago artist and graphic facilitator. Here is the specific link to her gallery of graphic facilitation. The except describing this work is:
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”
If you are interested in mind-mapping or topic-mapping or more information on this, I ran across this link that give some great examples.
Mar
05
2008
I was checking up on one of my grad school friends today (he writes for Nobel Intent over on ArsTechnica) as I like reading his articles. Next to one of his articles was another post on Mount St. Helens and the changes over time in the magma dome there. Quite interesting especially when you take a look at this link that shows a time lapse aerial view of the volcano crater from 2004 to 2007. I started considering how different this looks in time lapse compared to what it would have looked like if one had visited the volcano rim once every month in person for that same time frame. You wouldn’t have even noticed any change from a monthly view, but in the time lapse view you see rock and glacial ice move more like water. What a dramatic difference time scale makes to perception.
While looking at the time lapse movie linked above I starting thinking about how concept is fairly universal and might apply to business and innovation projects. Anyone that has worked on a work project of any length whether related to innovation or not has encountered the situation where program progress takes longer than someone thinks it should. I was thinking about this today especially as it relates to time-scale expectation for a programs with larger impacts and time horizon. Those longer term projects that are expected to pay off in 2 years seem to be an eternity when business performance of your organization is measured on a quarterly type basis.
Then I started thinking about what project timing expectations are associated with where you are in an organization. The sales person whose salary is based on short term sales has a drastically different tolerance to project time than an Executive whose main concern is steering a business to strategic position for long term success. So the theory of relativity says your program or project will be looked upon dramatically different depending on the time horizon of those viewing it.
May
31
2007
I have a couple of interesting links that people may be interested in.
- My friend forwarded this transcript of a pre-commencement lecture given by Narayana Murthy (chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies) at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. The theme of the lecture was the great impact that chance events played in shaping his life. Quite a good lecture. It really got me thinking as to the random events that lead to long friendships, family, professional success, and perception altering moments.
- I got a note in my email today with links to 3 new TED Talks.
- This story from Seth Godin about alignment is concise and to the point.
“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”
May
23
2007
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.
Apr
21
2007
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?
Apr
18
2007
Here a a couple of interesting links.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Inkblot Earth has a post about The first person killed by a robot. Not the science fiction of Asimov, but interesting.
- 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.
- Again with IDEO, The 10 Faces of Innovation changed my outlook on how people work and what drives them.
Mar
22
2007
This is pretty simple but at the same time quite stimulating. I ran across this app that looks to be a front-end for images.google.com. It is called the “Google Image Ripper“.
I am not sure of the original motivation for building it but I find it fabulous for random association generation. For example search for a word that you think you have an idea of what a search would return. Here are some simple exaples.
I don’t know about you, but you see some of what you expect, but ever 4-5 images you get something that doesn’t make sense at first glance. Why is that here? Where is article for the image? What story can I tell about the image? What does the image tell me?
Next time you need a new direction or perspective, give it a try. This also works with Flickr or some of the other photo sites, but I really like this clean interface.
Mar
04
2007
I find myself a regular reader of this particular website Molecule of the Day. Just about everyday the author provides a chemical structure of a chemical molecule and some interesting fact, use, or history about it.
Some notable ones of late are:
- Bitrex - Worlds most bitter substance
- Havitrol - Made up drug
- Isohumulone - Compound causing bitterness in beer
- You can also search up your favorites
