innovationguy.com

I was looking through some older emails today and I came to the conclusion that I have a bad habit of emailing myself links to interesting articles or newsitems I find, but not getting them out on here. So here’s and effor to catch up.

• This was one of the earlier links I sent to myself pertaining to enzyme based fuel cells.
• An article on Superpaper made from clay platelets. The article claims that is it will revolutionize the composites industry as it can replace high strength carbon fiber or even sheets of nanotubes. Here is the original press release for you to decide what you make of it. Considering the final material is succeptible to water it will take this plus another advancement to make it revolutionary. Here is another link from NetComposites.
• Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron have developed a process for making polymer surfaces covered with carbon nanotube hairs, imitating the thousands of microscopic hairs on a gecko’s footpad.
• Other researchershave new data from studying the compressive fatigue properties of carbon nanotubes and report that they are surprisingly resiliant.

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?

Seems like everywhere you look people are getting funding for web-based apps. Like most people I have tried some of Google’s offerings like docs.google.com but have not been impressed. (gmail is my default webmail so I’m not anti-google or anything) I tried opening some excel sheets and even simple ones totally tanked. My impression overall was “pretty nice AJAX is making great strides, but I couldn’t replace any of my desktop apps.” My opinion was that they are basically swinging the pendulum back to a centralized server model like before wintel box on every desk period. Basically copying desktop application and their functionality while providing web-based, always accessible copies. My opinion changed today as I ran across Kiko Calendar. It looks to provide a lot of the functionality of Outlook but with a footprint and interface that is tailored the the web. I then stubbled across 37signals which has a couple different products all based on a web-based app with a pay as you go pricing model. Their offerings include:

• Basecamp™ Project management and collaboration
• Highrise^™ Track leads, clients, vendors, and more
• Campfire™ Real-time group chat
• Backpack^™ Information organizer and calendar

This is a nice little roundup of apps. I plan on giving them a try going forward. It really changes the ability of small and medium size companies to digitize some processes that previously would have been prohibitively expensive. The backpack application is also very interestin in how they are pitching it. Here are some examples of how people have been using it. It is really amazing the many uses and polymorphic nature of this offering. Just copying a desktop based app isn’t the best strategy. What do you have to change about the interface to make it work.

Another real possibility here is the ability to change the dynamic between customers and suppliers. Now you can pop up an impromptu project management site to deal with a product evalution or some other joint work. It is not as easy as it should be to share digital data when you cna’t get access to your partners network.

• How could you use something like Basecamp or Backpack in your group at work?
• How much better would your interactions with customers and partners be if you had neutral ground for project goals, actions, and project data?
• What applications that are still on the desktop could be switched to AJAX based?

Addition:  After I wrote this I saw Seth’s post on the topic also.

I just noticed that the comments had stopped working. Looks like they are working now.

I would really love feedback either on the post or through email as to:

• What Posts you like?
• I agree with that? but……
• You are totally wrong? and this is why…….
• What are your opinions on?
• Yeah I like more posts in that catagory.
• This or that doesn’t work, or the site would be better if.