Next Level Innovation Blog

The evolution of intellectual property

Firms endeavor to find the ideal balance between traditional proprietary invention and the new more open collaborative business models. IBM assembled a worldwide community of 50 experts in the fields of law, academia, economics, government, technology and others. These experts collaborated with IBMers to discuss the issues, determine the key characteristics of a properly functioning IP marketplace, and establish a blueprint for meaningful change.

Read the report

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting opinion, as always, on what to say if someone asks you  "what makes your company defensible?" if you are not an employee of a large corporation but a startup.

Synthravels: virtual travel agency

Having 'lived' in the virtual environment of Star Wars Galaxies for 6 months last year I was amazed at the richness of all the different environments that were there waiting to be explored by whomever would enjoy exploring. At the same time it could become a bit frustrating having to ride you dinosaur or fly your speederbike searching for mind boggling mountain sights or wild life.

For the last 2 weeks I joined Second Life. Nice but no way near the graphical explosions of games like Star Wars or World of Warcraft or EON. But then again 2nd Life is rapidly blurring the divide between reality and fantasy with companies like Reuters and IBM opening virtual offices and clothing designers testing their new fashion lines digitally with their test groups before actually producing anything...

But for all of you who are too lazy to explore these environments themselves there is now the first virtual travel agency that does all the work. You just give them your preferences, what are you looking for and in what particular environment and they will take you there...

From their web site:

Tough travelers are always looking further. And now the new frontier of travel is out of our world. It is hidden in the invisible geography of the cyberspace. In a few years, this geography has been expanding, broadening in every direction, configuring new territories, inhabited by new societies. These are the territories of virtual worlds, synthetic places that exists only in cyberspace, but that exist 24 hours a day. In virtual worlds you can find everything, the good and the bad, the poor and the rich, sumptuous castles and futuristic space bases, luscious women and rough warriors. But, most of all, you can find many lands to discover, extraordinary places to visit, that will ravish your imagination. Traveling in these territories will be like dreaming: you will see exotic landscapes where among prehistoric trees break out bizarre surrealistic architectures, strange fantasy regions where the elves built astonishing temples, synthetic deserts covered with post-atomic ruins, seas of pixels where float ghostly vessels, organic architectures that conceal undercover avatars. Discovering these territories is a great deal, but it is not so easy. Many worlds request specific skills to be seen in their integrity, and if you want to discover the best, you must pass many hours in front of your monitor, accomplishing weary tasks. Many problems for people who want just enjoy a trip in a virtual world, just to see how it is made, to try a new experience and tell friends about it. So, we shall continue to enjoy only real life travels? We will not be able to double our experiences, pairing the travels in real worlds with travels in synthetic realities? Synthravels is the answer to all these problems.

Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds.

Survival of the creative – how to get fit for innovation…(Part II)

In Part I we left off at the question "what does it take stay creative"?

I would not be much of a consultant if I did not have some P’s, S’s, C’s, or any other letter for that matter, up my sleeves.

The four P’s of creativity are considered to be Press, Process, Person and Product. And have been introduced by Rhodes in 1961 and taken further by Isaksen in 1987.

First of all press is about the environment someone is in. It is concerned with the climate and culture and all factors influencing them.

In talking to corporate leaders during IBM’s CEO 2006 Study interviews, climate for creativity was one of the topics felt as being highly important and paid very little attention to. They also feel that they would need to take the lead in setting corporate values and act as role models in order to generate a supporting climate and culture.

In order to be a truly innovative company, creativity needs to be embedded in every part of the business, moving beyond the traditional places like R&D departments, business development etc. A nice example is Google’s famous “creative-day”, one day per week when employees spend time working on outside-the-box ideas.

Secondly creativity needs to be guided when it needs to lead to innovation. Of course it is good to sit together with nice and inspiring people and brainstorm until break of dawn. Or to take a brush and come up with yet another brilliant painting – but innovation is about new stuff that generates benefit to the world, occasionally expressed in hard currencies.

A structured process needs to be in place to release this type of benefit from an innovation. It often is a process of divergence and convergence, and follows stages like exploration, illumination, assessment, incubation and launch of a product, process or other type of innovation. Asian high-tech companies have been masters in this, where the standard creation process is strengthened by dedicated creativity centers where people are posted until they complete a certain complex assignment.

So it is not only about a process that a person or company has installed, it is how it is used and augmented by differentiating attributes and methods. A nice example for unleashing creativity is Wikipedia, an idea based on the good old Delphi method

Wikepedia – example of creation

The process of generating encyclopedic knowledge has evolved since Aristotle put pen to paper to record knowledge of his time. Somewhat later the Chinese scholar Tu Yo wrote an encyclopedia in the ninth century. And Diderot wrote a true piece of art in the 18th century, it took him 29 years. This was the so called ‘one bright man’ model. This model evolved in the ‘one best practice’ model where a group of the best experts on certain topics created the Britannica Encyclopedia.

Wikipedia brought the ‘one for everybody’ model, in which everybody can contribute to one mega encyclopedia. Instead of hierarchical lines or fixed team structures, extreme decentralization and self-regulation shapes the process of creativity.

The creativity process is triggered by the need to explore the unknown and constantly improve the insights resulting from this exploration, divergence and convergence take turns.

Let's call it a day on part II for now, and talk about Person and Product in part III

Thanks for your attention in this.

Cheers,

Jordan

"MIT" digital drawing board: Innovation is in the eye of the beholder

By Yann Gourvennec

In the following video presentation, you will discover the so-called MIT digital drawing board complete with geometrical recognition and simulation of movements. Everybody on the Internet or so seems to have seen this video, and a lot of bloggers have liked it and commented on it. Taken at face value, I must admit that this video is quite impressive and I even started to imagine what this could do to the world of design and Marketing. I suspected that there would still be a fair amount of development to do if one wanted to design a fully-fledged vehicle for instance with a tool like this, but if it existed, it sounded pretty clear to me that this kind of intelligent recognition technology is offering a lot of new possibilities to designers and engineers alike. Marketeers could have also been interested  in order to test new ideas in front of potential clients. But is this video so impressive and besides, what did it have to do with the MIT altogether? French-speaking blogger Pierre Vandeginste on his site "aïetech" thinks he has the answer to that question and his opinion is quite straightforward. Here is a rough translation of some of Vandeginste's  points:

• First of all, Vandeginste is amazed by the fact that most commenters think that this video shows state-of-the-art interactive boading technology whereas in fact it looks very old. Weird,
• The video is labelled as if the drawing board was an MIT, but there are no traces to be found on MIT's website of a 'digital drawing board' of that kind. Even weirder,
• If this video is 10-15 years old, then the simulation of the chariot that slides down the hill - Vandeginste goes on commenting - is rather impressive. However, it looks like it's a well-prepared, maybe too well prepared demo. Vandeginste believes that some up-to-date games are performing better than that. Weirder and weirder,
• What commenters seem to be most amazed at in this 'digital drawing board' is the screen, but Vandeginste argues that this kind of tools has been available for donkeys' years and he could even trace its usage in remoter country grammar schools in the Auvergne where the proACTIVboard by Promethean is used at the Lycée Blaise Pascal at Ambert (a rural area in the Auvergne) or at the vocational Lycée Professionnel Marie Curie in Nogent sur Oise (in Picardy, an other rural area). Vandeginste could even quote French TV Channels 1 and 2 in the following 2005 link: TF1 & France 2. Even weirder,
• Vandeginste is a freelance journalist who specialises in High Tech and has been working on such subjects for the past 30 years. He saw that kind of contraptions for the first time in 1993 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Mark Weiser (late PARC researcher who died in 1999, and much regretted ever since, inventor of the Ubiquitous Computing concept. A researcher I have admired for decades) and his team had been working on the LiveBoard concept. The marketing of Liveboard had been spun off into the LiveWorks subsidiary since 1992.
• Last but not least, Vandeginste quotes better andmore uptodate examples such as the Mitsubishi DiamondTouch which is available for purchase now. (see MERL video here)

So what is this video telling us on innovation? First, it's telling us that Vandeginste is a very knowledgeable journalist. Yet, many of us weren't in business in 1993 and are not aware that previous attempts at creating interactive drawing-boards had existed. On the contrary, most commenters on the Internet - many of them very technology savvy by the way - were impressed when they saw that video. I suppose that what this story tells us about innovation is that innovation - like beauty - is in the eyes of the beholder. Even though Vandeginste must be right, many of our Internet friends would like to know more about that product/concept. The fact is that - like or not - if you are not working in that obsure little school in rural France you are most likely to find such a concept different and interesting anyway. What this story tells us too is that people never check the sources of the documents they pick up from the Internet, but that we knew already ...

Access the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df8wAla57PI target ="blank"

Innovating the office at Redbull HQ, London

So! This week I was discussing with some people, what it is that makes customers want to come visit your office and I just found the coolest example!

Try this for a different approach: Redbull headquarters wanted an office building that pumped of adrenaline, and so they installed a three-storey slide next to the stair-case, a ping-pong conference table and an office bar/meeting place. The whole office makes you feel excited and want to try new things. I reckon it not only makes employees creative, but it also makes your customers excited to see you.

Check out more pictures on designverb

Survival of the creative – how to get fit for innovation…(Part I)

While stuck in traffic on my way to a client today, I was thinking about why we have not come up with a personal air transportation system. Like George Jetson I would find myself in my own jet-propelled, carbon-fiber, glass-bubbled cocoon to get to work.

Probably there are all kinds of reasons why this is not possible today. One thing is sure; it is not because we lack drive for innovation.

“Innovation”, there it is, the word that keeps us busy these days. Actually, it has been a concept long before the word itself was even invented. For instance around the year 8.000 bC when someone – in what is now Asia – created something that I used this morning to get to this client……the wheel. Since then this invention has been improved on a continuous basis, up to the year 2005 aD when a major tyre manufacturer launched the “Tweel”, a tyre and a wheel in-one. Compared to the current wheel and airpressure tyre system the new construction is easier to maintain, process, more resistant and better applicable on vehicles with smaller wheels, like wheelchairs.

So, since man set foot on this beautiful planet he has been driven by creating better circumstances for himself and winning competition against others. In doing so we come up with new stuff and ways of working every day. So what is keeping us on our feet in this journey called innovation?

Actually, it is the thing we lose the older we get if we do nothing to keep it….creativity. Hence, in order to innovate we need to be creative. Just like we go to the gym to get fit, we need to train our ability to create on a continuous basis.

But what does it take to stay creative? Let’s discuss this in part II...

In the meantime I’m curious for any reactions

Thanks & cheers,

Jordan

Right-brainers and left-brainers

Here's an interesting book to read: a whole new mind by Daniel Pink. And here's a good summary of the book from one of my favorite blogs on presenting.

Philips Design is one of those power houses of creativity and apparently they made quite an impression with "the Simplicity Event". You get a feeling for what the future might have in store for all of us as consumers and the right-brain, the conceptual and design part leading, seems the trend.

In that same article there's a reference to a typical left-brain spreadsheet  approach to innovation:

• Percentage of Philips's total 2005 revenues from products introduced in the previous 12 months: 49% Percentage in 2003: 25%

I've been trying to find any information on what % is a 'good' number (if it actually exists). 0% definitely isn't nor is 100%. Anybody any thoughts or information...?

From fireworks to paint

I just came across this new advert from Sony.

I have a deep respect for whoever had the original idea, very original. But of course it doesn't end there, I stand in awe for those who actually proposed it and drove it through to completion. Just think about it: 2800 people working on a 70 sec add...

But does it really contribute to the image of Sony, do people associate it with them?

Workshop results

Live blogging at Diversity & Innovation workshop, part 4

For the last hour, the group has been broken up in several smaller groups, to do some active thinking in a workshop. Theme is "What can improve the feeling of safetyness in the everyday surrounding?"

A bit difficult to bring this across on a blog, but the teamspirit has certainly been activated here... The results in short:

Group 1. Safetyness is a feeling, everyone needs to be connected. Listen to the people and act together to improve it.

Group 2. Give the local government officials a responsibility as accountmanager for one specific area.

Group 3. Use mobile phone to be connected to the neighbourhood, create more community spirit.

Group 4. 7 b's (in dutch): Buurtfeest (community party), buurtwaarschuwingen (neighbourhood warningsystem), beloon & bescherm de held (reward and protect the hero), begin bij jezelf (start yourself), behandel elk incident op zichzelf (treat every incident as a seperate one), benoem behang (call a watch), boeven vangen (catch the thieves).

Group 5. Fear is in the mind... So think positive and start communicating with each other. Neighbourhood bulletin board, move communication more to internet (create internetspot next to rubbishbins).

Group 6. Lighting, driving speed, neighbourhood buddy-project, getting to know each other...

Feel free to ask questions and proceed with the discussion by commenting.

The role of diversity in innovation

- already the third presentation, by Annemieke Roobeek.

Live blogging at Diversity & Innovation workshop, part 3

The most people in the current work environment are 'knowledge workers'. Today, our companies still haven't apapted to fit their needs...

Already upcoming is a new new, younger generation of talents (between 16-25 years old), who think totally different than the 'knowledge' people. They're real multitaskers, the creative generation, but in companies they're not really integrated. All the ages should be better mixed, younger people should be more integrated in teams to bring their creativity.

Annemieke tells us she thinks women are too modest when it comes to work and career opportunities. "Show people what you can do, what you think, don't be afraid to share your ideas..."

She talks about new leadership, which should be more enterpreneur-like, showing emotions, charisma, etc. Networking is key to be innovative, teams need to collaborate. To create a really diverse, new team people should apply to the job/project. If you ask managers to recommend people, you always come to the same lists. New talent needs to find it's way up more quickly, this is a risk, but also necessary to create real innovation.