innovationguy.com

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.

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”

• Word of Mouth Marketing, WOMM
• Outside Innovation
• Leveraging Social Networks for Results (Interesting)
• CX Innovation Summit 2007, Miami
• Speeding Up Innovation
• BusinessSummaries.com summary of the book Seeds of Innovation
• Finding Innovation in the 500lb Gorilla
• The Art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki
• 10 Lessons of Innovation - Idris Mootee Keynote

I was reading Endless Innovation (I find myself a regular reader lately) and read this post on Nokia’s Brand and Design Priorities.

If you don’t see the embedded slideshow the direct link is Here on Slideshare.net.I thought some of the excerpts were quite succinct and powerful.

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?

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.